See Ya in the Obits!

I’ve reached that plateau in life when the daily death notices are featuring my generation. It was easier when the deceased were all old people, tragic when they were young people, and a warning when they were my contemporaries, but it’s a reality check when they are somewhat suddenly all my own age! There are more women than men on the list, which means that I may be at greater risk, but my doctor has often praised my general state of good health, so there may be other women moving toward the front of the line faster than I. But I am still in the line, waiting my turn to be called, a fact that can no longer be put back in the closet for next season.

The coverage of the Governor’s wife’s conference discussion about death with Susan St. James, Mrs. Edwards, and Patrick Swayze’s widow was interesting as all of them commented on their faith that they will be reunited with their loved ones who have gone before them. Mrs. Swayze’s husband’s death was an on-going public affair; Susan St. James’ teenage son died in a plane crash; Mrs. Edwards’ son also died; and Maria Shriver recently had to handle both the death of her uncle Ted Kennedy and her mother, Eunice Shriver, which she defined as devastating. Each of these women focused on the death process, their personal devastation at losing people close to them, but did not seem to acknowledge death as part of the life process in the clips I’ve seen in the media. We are born, we live, and we die: there is no way around that natural process. A century ago, people accepted that death is part of life; today, however, the death almost becomes more important than the living as society focuses on what has been forever lost, rather than what existed during the life.

Robert Frost is my favorite poet on many levels, but perhaps more because he simply wrote the words that make sense to me. In “The Death of the Hired Man,” Frost captures the feeling of an elderly man at the end of his life journey:

“And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope”

Each of us knows when it is our time, when we reach the front of the line, and our hope at that moment is that someone will remember us, someone will grieve for us, but I doubt that many of us actually believe that more time will be spent mourning our death than was spent sharing our lives with us. I don’t want the page-long obit notice to take the place of a phone call when I was alive. I don’t want a glowing synopsis of my career to eclipse the personal qualities that make me unique. I don’t want anyone to spend more time standing over my grave than they did sitting at my table.

When the grief consumes our lives, it warps how we respond to the death. Frost addressed that issue in “Home Burial,” a poem that captures the dichotomy between the husband, who has to bury his infant son, “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,” and his wife, who realizes that “Friends make pretence of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand.” The practical aspect of death is that someone has to dig the grave, someone has to bury the body, and the body rots, fulfilling the natural cycle of one's life. The wife, however, is focused on the loss of the life, a loss she cannot accept. She wails that “The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.” She cannot find comfort within herself and she refuses to find comfort from without, blaming her husband for the death because he dug the grave. Until she is able to let go of what cannot be changed, she will continue to live the death.

I hope that the expectations of each of the four women who participated in the conference are fulfilled when they die, that they are reunited with their loved ones, that they experience after death that which was denied them during life, but my pragmatic side assumes that death is simply the absence of life, that it is going to sleep, being “dead to the world,” for eternity. I don’t see the heavens filled with ancient souls waiting to be reunited with my soul, but perhaps I will be greeted at the Pearly Gates when the time comes with a huge shout of “Surprise!”

Unfortunately, I won’t be here to blog about that … .