Death Be Not Proud

I used to love Thanksgiving.  This year-- with the threat of war everywhere-- my own friends unable to agree, people divided by religion and politics arguing-- the migrants everywhere in the city confused about their fate... the prospect of a holiday wears on me. The older I get, the less resistant I am to infection by societal ills. My son and I went to see Oppenheimer Sunday.  I was very affected and wanted to talk about things... but like most of the theatre, we just went to have a coffee and life moved on for him.  Not so for me; I am haunted. 

And I'm no longer sure about things.  When I was younger my beliefs seemed airtight-- had conviction.  I had faith-- some kind of support system. Maybe it was watching my mother disintegrate, slowly... her generational beauty slipping from her like old skin.  She saw devils and flocks of birds.  Some days she sang it out in a midnight howl; other days she barely croaked a weak 'no'. She saw things-- she felt things.  I backed her up, swearing I, too, could smell the black snakes coiled among the mattress springs; she slept in a chair.  My architecture began to creak as her crooked future unraveled.

Every time I read in some news article that so-and-so died a peaceful death, surrounded by family, I think of my Lucia, standing in the stairwell like a skeleton, a thin sweater clinging to her ribcage like a clothes hanger.  Until the last weeks she'd been too proud to ask for help, hid her illness from daylight, slipped out of her apartment in late evening to pick up some yoghurt or tea which would barely sustain her.  

But the last weeks, for which I was conscripted, were beyond nightmarish.  To comfort myself I wrote poems-- a living, rolling eulogy so her suffering might not be in vain, and so the unwilling witness I was could have some higher purpose.  I had known birth-- the protracted minutes of agony, the endless crescendo of contractions until you were outside of your own body.  But death, in these rooms, was a hideous slow drama of one... a whole-body soliloquy with no particular point.  

I prayed; I left the room for some hours to visit various churches.  I begged for her suffering to end. But it was the longest week, the last one, and death came not on cat feet but hovered like a hideous vulture stealing breaths and yet keeping her awake.  Lyrics circled like songbirds, but anything above silence seemed more painful.  I listened to the last groans of life, heard and smelled things for which I was totally unprepared... all because I could not bear to say no to this formerly beautiful woman who had completely run out of options.

In the end, it was like a coming of age, or the worst dream I'd ever had... not to mention the EMT workers who appeared to collect the body and screamed at me for executing the last wish of a dying woman I barely knew.  I wasn't even sure if her assumed name was real. I only know we shared an intimacy few people will ever experience.  And my life was never the same.  

So I've grown to mistrust death-- to mistrust pain and diagnoses and illness... to respect the final authority of Time, with his companion Death, who will outlive us all-- each and every. And as these anniversaries present themselves, growing in number until (as my Mom warned me) the death dates far exceed the births in one's calendar, I am no less bothered by these statistics.  In fact, today, it occurred to me that the toll exacted by these absences is what really ages one... we wear loss like an old face.  

We do our best to comfort friends and family who have cruel diagnoses and accidents-- who lie in sickbeds and depend on us like children.  Those of us who have watched death, who have sat bedside in  final hours-- with or without medicines and drugs, we know.  But most of us have not seen war.  And yet, around the globe, there are wars-- there is artillery and explosives that are virtual death machines.  Not even in beds, children and soldiers are lying now-- suffering, untended... victims, the prematurely violated, tortured... for principles of life and territory which can only be determined by negotiation, in the end.   

Even Oppenheimer has died-- whatever his legacy-- both brilliant and terrible... he surely suffered the agony of death by cancer, and his words, via Hollywood, now resonate once again.  We, the audience-- the successors of his generation, have access to great knowledge and opportunity.  Yes, the science of life is such that Death will always author our final page, but we do not have to become his handmaidens.