On Death and Avoidance

I was visiting my mother a year or so before she died, after she had had the triple-bypass that brought me back into the fold.  She asked me if she could wear a dress of mine that I had left at home when she died.


Of course, I was appalled.  Now that I am approaching 61, and I have a daughter of my own who is happily living her own life, I think back on that question, and my reaction.  There I was, a damned psychology graduate student, and I didn't know enough to just listen.  My mother knew she was dying, and instead of being scared, or maybe a realistic way of dealing with being scared, she was trying to plan for it.  And maybe, just maybe, she wanted to let me know she knew it was going to happen.


And I couldn't deal with it.


I am two years younger now than my mother when she died.  I am so lucky to be in so much better health than she was.  I had the good fortune of a better life, with more options, and more education, so I knew a little bit about how to live healthy, and I could make choices that allowed me that better life.  Yet I too am afraid of dying, always have been.  And now that I am at that point, I deal with it by talking about it with the loved ones who will listen:  my husband and my sister.  It helps, because we are really all in this together, and we all leave at some undetermined point.


I wish I could talk to my daughter about the fact that I am going to die.  Not to inspire guilt, or denial, but just to get it out there.  It helps when I talk to Stephan or Jennie about it because, hey, that's the reality.  And I think it would mean a lot -- to both of us, me now and her later -- if we could just talk about death and leaving and loss.


But we are destined, aren't we, to continue to repeat the mistakes of those who came before us.  No one who is young and trying to make sense of their own lives is ready to deal with the fact of parents dying.


And then, years later, we all wish we had done it differently.