On Death

My younger son is 23. He knows abstractly that he will die, but in his core, his inmost being, his heart and his bones, he doesn’t really believe this. I know how he feels because I can remember feeling like this. Oh, yes, young people die but that is a regrettable accident, a car pile-up on the interstate road, a train wreck — nothing that would happen to me.

When I was between forty and fifty, I began to feel some faint intimations of my mortality. My body began to let me down in small ways. I got bursitis in my left hip and shoulder. Sure, it was manageable, but it was there. In my whole life up to this time no one I cared about except for my father had died. I got the news of his {unexpected to me} death when I was off teaching in another part of the country and I went through the funeral and burial in a daze and when it was all over, I quickly put it behind me and never thought of it again.

In my late fifties, I began a relationship with Jim. We were more or less the same age but he had a few more aches and pains {as we both referred to it} than I did. It was a long-distance relationship. He lived in Tennessee and I lived in Mississippi. He spent a lot of his time in Florida and I used to drive there to be with him as often as I could. Then, his mother called me with the news that he had been admitted to hospital suddenly. He and I talked on the phone a lot but decided that there was no need for me to take time away from school. He would soon be out. And then, one day I came in to a frantic message from his mother on my answering machine that he had died unexpectedly.

This was the first time anyone I cared about had died. I remember now that when I heard that message I felt a sharp pain in my stomach as if I had been shot and I fell to the floor with cries that sounded like howls. And I dropped into a deep depression. I was fortunate to have another friend who persuaded me to go to a grief therapist, and on her advice I read On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Dying is a part of living. This, of course, is a cliche, but what makes cliches is that they are true. I am 67. I have had bouts with two different cancers in the last four years. I am living and I am also dying.

It is not easy to accept this thought. I was brought up as a Catholic but over the years I have rejected formal religion. I believe in the power of prayer; I pray myself. I can hope there is a better happier world to come, but as I am being honest here, I can say I don’t believe that there is. I think that this is all we have. And I am approaching my own extinction.

When Jim died, I was very comforted by deliberately and on a regular basis making my own rituals to remember him, to mourn for him, and to console myself. Now I am thinking about my own death and the rituals that will surround it. I hope my death will be quick. I am not good with dealing with long-drawn-out pain. I would like my family to have time to say goodbye to me, but, realistically, I understand that since I have chosen to be here in Vermont and my two sons are back in the South, it will probably not be like that.

But I have been writing about my life for a year or so now and I am realizing that is my way of saying goodbye to them and leaving them with some memories of me, the unique person who is their mother.