Death Becomes Her

Death has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Not in the reverting-back-to-my-teenage- angst sort of way, but in that lately I’ve been faced with the painful task of looking it square in the eye; from the entirely live mouse I found on my glue trap that I had to destroy, through the dead bird whose head I hadn’t noticed until some sadistic teenager was kind enough to point out that I was in fact standing on it, and straight through to today when I found myself in a cemetery surrounded by macabre adolescents decked out in skull sweatshirts and black nail polish, photographers with no sympathy for a gravestone if its in their way, and the late, great, and notorious likes of Boss Tweed, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a woman who was found petrified and drowned at the bottom of a lake in the 19th century. Ok well, the last one was my doing, having gone on a cemetery tour for Halloween, but nonetheless I’m starting to get a sense of a creepy little pattern.

I have a co-worker who likes to tell me about superstitions his parents passed down to him from their Jamaican ancestry and most recently when I informed him of a relative of a friend who had died, he graciously put on his most superstitious voice when he informed me that apparently death comes in threes. Great.

Its not that I necessarily fear death in some enormous way, it’s simply that since I’ve been young I’ve had this anxiety about it that has manifested itself in fear of losing my parents, and losing my father in particular. Now understand, my parents are wonderful examples of how to grow old gracefully and allow nature to take its proper course- my mother never tried to dye her hair when it went gray and my dad- though holding on the last bastions of his youth by hair-spraying his nearly non-existent locks into permanence- has always laughed at himself for it and known that ultimately he will get old and lose his hair and it will be ok. But see the thing of it is that my parents are getting older and my mother as of late has expressed a fear of how many years she and my father have left given that 3 of their 4 parents died before hitting their late seventies. So two years ago when she asked me to be the one to determine when to pull the plug if either of them should be on life support I got a little nervous. I don’t like thinking about them going and while I know that death happens inevitably to everyone I can’t imagine what it would be like to have one parent without the other or have neither of them around at all. They are too much in need of one another and have maintained our family traditions throughout so much that I just don’t know who could ever take their place when their gone- if anyone really could or should.

Anyway, I’ve always been a believer that as you move through life, things come up that hit you over the head and serve as a lesson. So then: why death? Why now? I don’t know if I have an answer and maybe there is no answer that I should be looking for, but the thing of it is that I know I’m afraid of death, and I don’t like to think about it, but it happens and inevitably I have to deal with it. And I know that- I just don’t like to. Maybe that’s why it’s coming up.

It’s certainly not as if I’ve never had to deal with death. When I was younger I attended the funerals of great aunts and uncles, cousins, family friends, and friend’s family members- it’s just that death, no matter whose, always makes me feel so completely saddened and utterly lost. Not necessarily saddened at the loss of the person who has died, but sad for their loved ones who are still alive, if that makes sense. When I see the grief on someone else’s face I want to be able to tell them its going to be ok, but I feel like that’s just not going to do anything for them and beyond that it’s just a false comfort. And I guess the thing that scares me is that one day I will know that loss on a far more personal level than I ever have before and I’m just not sure what I would do about it.

Maybe reminders of death aren’t such a bad thing then. I’m not saying we should become numb to it, because I don’t want to believe that that could ever be possible and I don’t think it could truly happen anyway. But I think that it’s a necessity because it’s something that we all get faced with sooner or later in our lives.

There’s more I have to say on death. Since it’s been invading my life for the last two months I’ve done a bit of thinking on it, like I mentioned. But perhaps the rest, which relates to death penalties, war, and far more political things, can be saved for another time. After all, a person can only take so much death for one day.

So with that I’ll end here, and simply say, apropos of the subject matter and time of year: Happy Halloween.