Death

My boss' father died on Thanksgiving morning, after a long miserable 6 weeks of going downhill, and inevitably, it's made me think a lot about my own father's death in June 2000.

My boss' mother came by the museum to pick some things up a couple weeks ago, when they were first beginning to acknowledge that he was going to die, that the fight was coming to an end, that it was time to take away the machines. I spoke with her briefly and she said that it was harder on P (my boss) than it was on her; that it's different to lose a father than a husband, and also that P and her brothers had not been around their father 24/7 and thus hadn't realized how weak he had become. Emphysema . . . *she types, sighs, considers another cigarette*

It is true, it is different, obviously, to lose a parent rather than a partner. And when you do lose one, you join a club, the orphan's club, or the half orphan's club, and nothing is ever really the same again. You cross a line. And this is true whether, like P, you have a great relationship with your father, or, like me, you have a not so great and in fact sometimes downright shitty relationship with said parent. But all this I think is missing the point: the point has to do with age, and our differing perceptions of death and loss at different ages.

I think that when you are in your 60s and 70s you begin to accept death. He goes from being a stranger, a terrorist, someone to be feared and avoided to being a neighbor, someone you know. Death starts coming over once in a while for snacks. He plays croquet with you, he hangs out for a beer. You get to know him. Your friends get to know him. And you begin, for the first time in your life, to really grasp the inevitability of this death thing, that one day he will come and take your hand and you will walk away with him forever. You recognize that fighting him is not valiant anymore and that sometimes it's downright stupid. All you can hope for is a good death, a dignified exit: you don't want to draw out the curtain call. Dylan Thomas ceases to reverberate for you: forget raging against the dying of the light, you want to go gently.

I've watched this process with my mother, now 77, and it has scared and astounded me, because, you see, I'm not there yet. I'm 40 and I still want to rage, I still want to fight, I still refuse to acknowledge that inevitably Death will be my partner too. My father died of liver cancer; he refused treatment after the diagnosis, and he stayed home, and at last he slipped into a coma and died. There were things that could have been done: feeding tubes, respirators, more chemo and radiation (he had a bout a year before with throat cancer) - it would have availed nothing, we could have dragged the whole thing out longer, but we didn't. It was awful, it seemed so incredibly wrong to at the end not even offer water, just listen to his harsh breathing which finally, finally stopped. It flies against all your instincts, everything that you believe in your 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s. But it isn't wrong, it is right, it is a basic and inalienable right, to die with dignity, on your own terms; to let yourself go.

I don't know, of course, if any of this is really true. My mother thinks it is, but I won't know it, can't know it, can't feel it in that deep down way that you recognize things on an instinctual level, for a while. And yes, we're the lucky ones, the ones who get to find this out, who get to go through all these stages, reach that age where Death comes for tea, to hang out and watch a movie, becomes a companion before he is a consort. I hope I'm right, that age and time will prove me right, and that I'll get that chance to find out. You do find that about other things: that gray hairs aren't the end of the world, that the beginnings of menopause, while not wonderful by any means, aren't unthinkable, that not having any more children is okay. We move through these stages as surely as anything on the planet, chrysalis, reproduction, rebirth: rings on a tree.

So my heart is sad for P, and for me, for one more irrevocable step into another world, the orphan world, where you begin to recognize that life ends for all of us.