The Closeness of Death

My sweet grandparents, Mimi and Papa, had five children.  Bob, born in 1922; Carlene, 1925; Richard three years later, then Dot, three years after Richard.  David came along five years later.

The oldest, Bob, died at the age of ten with a brain tumor--devastating to his seven-year-old sister, my mother, and their young parents.

Carlene and Dot, at 83 and 89, are in great health--active and vivacious as ever.  The two remaining brothers, Richard and David, are near death.

Richard has been ill for a long time and is in hospice. When he heard his younger brother was rapidly declining, he said,  "I wish it was me.  I'm tired and ready to go!"

Today, Carlene and Dot are on their way to see David.  Yesterday he was lucid enough to say to Carlene, "That's my beautiful sister," but he decided tonight to go into hospice.

When we were children, David was everyone's favorite uncle.  He was a lifelong bachelor, played the piano, and loved playing outside with all us nieces and nephews.  He had a coin bank shaped like Abraham Lincoln and teenaged David let us dump all his pennies out on his bedspread.

David was always thin and fragile compared to the rest of the family.  He admired Abe Lincoln so much that he literally came to look like him, and he did Lincoln shows all over Georgia.  With his black coat and top hat, he looked uncannily like the man he admired.

I didn't see Richard as much--but he's a spunky man, much loved by his daughters and sisters. A high school athlete and a farmer, he was married four times.  Back in those days, "divorce" was a word you spelled out, like in the song: d-i-v-o-r-c-e.

As I think about my two uncles, a line of an e.e. cummings poem comes to mind: "Dying is fine, but death--oh baby I wouldn't like death if death were good."

The older we get, the closer death walks beside us.  People we love have died and death's footsteps are all around us.  Each birthday is a reminder of how many years we've lived--though we can't count ahead and know how many years we have left.

Some days, I feel forty, energetic and optimistic and healthy.  But not a day passes without some awareness of the passing of time and the changes that come with aging--some good, some not so much.

Some of my friends and I are paring down our "stuff" already, knowing at sixty and seventy that there are things we don't need anymore.  May Sarton, the poet, said at sixty, "I used to be acquisitive, but I'm not any more."  (When I first read that, I was in my thirties or forties, and couldn't imagine "things" losing their luster.)

We spend our thirties and forties acquiring things and setting the stage for the lives we want to live; by sixty, we start letting go and simplifying. With a more realistic eye now,  I look at all my drawers of crafts supplies, and I know that there is no way I'm going to live long enough to use them all up.

 I met a man in Lowe's yesterday who, when I asked him how he was, said, "Wonderful as always!"

"You don't hear that very often," I said.

"I was electrocuted fifteen years ago," he said.  "I shouldn't be here.  Every day since I pushed that button with the faulty wiring on the ferry I was operating and knocked down by the voltage, I wake up thinking, 'I'm alive today and it's going to be a wonderful day!'  I hate to see people getting mad at other drivers or being miserable.  Life is too short not to enjoy every minute of it."

In the movie, Last Love,  Michael Caine plays an aging professor whose wife has died three years before.  He admits to his young French friend that he has "stopped loving life."

"You don't love life itself," he said to her.  "You love places, animals, people, memories, food, literature and music. And sometimes you meet someone who requires all the love you have to give. And if you lose that someone, you think everything else is gonna stop too."

After gut-wrenching, heart-breaking grief, some people (after losing the ones they love most) return in full force to the world of the living. Carlene did that.  She feels that it's a tribute to Lloyd to live her life with good health and enthusiasm, knowing there's nothing on the planet he'd have wanted more than that.

Death's footsteps are always close and devastating when they land.  Maybe the fact that we get to wake up every day and engage with life makes it all the more precious.  When it's over, we will know that we've fully lived, not just stayed alive. Every day we get to breathe, we get to find more people and places and music and memories to love.