NOTES ON DYING
“This is what one does, what one becomes
Because one is afraid to be alone,
Each with his own death in this lonely room.”
Delmore Schwartz
Our lives are bound by birth and death. Since birth is past and unremembered, we dwell on death that lies inevitably in the future, many of its aspects unknown. We absorb stories of death from vicarious events as well as from our personal experience. Death is as natural as birth, decay as important to life as growth; fall as necessary as spring; sleep as much as waking.
I read once that John O’Hara, upon hearing of the death of George Gershwin, “George Gershwin died today, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
When death comes to those we care about, reality and its pain are momentary and then are altered by distance and time.
Watching the Oscars many years ago, I saw Deborah Kerr walk to the front of the stage to receive her honorary Oscar. She moved slowly, I thought for effect, until the camera zoomed in and I realized this was an old woman. She had been so long away I still had an image of that beautiful, genteel, lovely woman I had seen for years in movies. She humbly thanked those who had awarded her the Oscar, and as she finished, the camera swung to focus on a few members of the audience of celebrities who sat stunned seeing this star grown old and frail, their own mortality rushing into their minds—an instant piercing of their gowns and tuxedos of infallibility.
Nearly two decades ago The New York Times Magazine ran short articles on some famous people who had died that year. What struck me was the difference between Carolyn Heilbrun who committed suicide at age 78 in apparent good health, still creating, and others, like Katherine Hepburn who faced their lives from birth to death with both grace and annoyance. It takes courage and character to deal with the challenges of finishing our lives. How the tail of life can whip us round. How do we measure ourselves if we only deal with the better and not the bitter parts?
There comes a point at which we no longer have rewards from our challenges and we can depart life. But that is long after Ms. Heilbrun ducked out of the final jousting.
Many people have written about people, often themselves, with terminal illnesses. The victims surely are thinking that they had always directed, managed, controlled their lives and here was something they could not stop. They could exercise, eat carrots, broccoli, take vitamins, pray, meditate, visualize and this cancer, this virus, this decay marched right through their bodies, their minds, without so much as a “May I” or “If you please.” They had never succumbed to anything before, but now they knew they had no moat, no gun, no wall, no defense whatsoever. They had been captured from the inside—a Trojan horse of the microscopic set.
We experience various encounters with death in our personal lives, each adding puzzle pieces to our picture of death.
I remember Mother telling me on the phone of my father’s dying. He rose from his chair in the living room and collapsed on the floor. He reached out for my mother’s hand and squeezed it. He died later in the hospital, and my mother went to say goodbye. She kept his picture on the dining table so she felt he was still there sitting across from her at breakfast.
My mother, whether because she worked at a funeral home or because of her realistic, not really stoic, view of life, met death with a matter of fact inevitability. She lay in her nursing home bed unable to do anything but lie there. Without enough strength to talk above a whisper, she said, “This is difficult.” She had lost interest in living. Waiting for what she thought should have arrived already was irritating and wore her down.
When my mother was dying in a nursing home, my sister, Carol, and I went to visit that December to say goodbye. My mother had never said, “I love you” to either one of us. When my sister left the room, I leaned over Mother’s bed and said, “I love you.” My mother said, “I know.” Then she said, “I love you,” and I said, “Thank you.”
My sister returned. I have never told her that conversation.
In her remarks at my mother’s funeral, Carol said that Mother never said she loved her, but she knew. It was a sense that each of us knew that love was both given and received even though it was not said aloud. We knew it in other ways—in shared dinners, in ironed blouses, of gifts of freedom and trust, promises kept, earnest efforts to provide. Dying can present us with last chances to amend regrets and omissions.
I remember that call from my brother near Christmas to say Mother had died. Tears start even now years later from that finality. In the year following I would sink into ever-opening black holes that had been the spaces of my mother.
Linda, my college roommate, wrote to me of her sister’s death. They were saying goodbye. I wrote back that many goodbyes like hers were really hello’s, saying so many things that had never been said. It was like opening up of a present of yourself to the other.
And now Linda, after losing her sisters, has lost herself, dead inside a beating, breathing body. We have not learned to deal with death. It comes in so many forms—too soon, too late, too sudden, too violent, too painful, too cruel, too unjust, but rarely just right.
Some goodbyes are confessions, or reflections. Don’s mother lay dying in a hospital. At 77, her husband dead many years, she was not educated or profound, but she had had expectations for her life and they had fallen far short. She said to her granddaughter at her bedside, “It wasn’t what I thought.”
Autumn has come to Wisconsin again and we are about to leave. I feel a melancholy when I have to go. If I could choose my day for eternity, it would be a fall day, a bit crisp, but not too chilly, at the lake in northern Wisconsin with the lake calm, only a slight breeze, the maples and birches across the lake in full reds and yellows and the loon crying for whatever he longs for.
I feel a great accommodation to death as I grow older. It is especially helpful to think that death is the end. My ashes will mix with the earth and the waters, the gatherers of all. There will be no judgement, no putting up with those in some afterlife I was too weary of on earth, just nothing. Some believe there is an afterlife, but as a golfer I may just wish I had hit a provisional just in case the first become unplayable.
I will miss this place where my remains will stay, but most of all I will miss this person I have spent my life with—sometimes loving, sometimes hating, whose every thought good or bad was mine. I will miss me.
CLOSING DOWN
My yellow kayak silently slices
the surface of the morning lake.
Autumn shoulders into the northwoods
smelling of rotting compost, wet leaves,
fallen needles from the white pine,
musty bonfire smoke.
Piers are pulled on shore,
cabins shut and shuttered,
shotguns crack, ducks fly off in fear.
Deer grow dark, flee through dark woods.
Birches along the shore
lean out over the water,
and I head south for the winter
with the hummingbirds and herons.
Some autumn
when maples blaze up
in red and gold
their warmth lures me near,
their fire flicks at my flesh,
that will be the last I recall.
the lake will freeze,
the skeleton of the birch
will shiver on the silvered surface,
the house will be closed and curtained,
and I will rise and fall
in particles of ash
left from that fiery final autumn
drifting slowly through lake waters,
mixing with brown needles and leaves.
Some talk of moving on
to other places, other worlds,
but I am tired.
Earth’s bed, where ended life
settles down in layers, beckons.
I’ll rest where my ashes fall.
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