On Death and Living

I've always been afraid of death, since I was a kid.  As I have gotten older, and then "old," I have recently tried to adapt in the least painful way possible to the fact that, hey, we all gotta go.  Albert Ellis, who had to go as well, would have been proud that I am thinking rationally about the fact that people die, and life goes on, and it's okay.  I especially like the way Richard Dawkins copes -- you weren't here before you were born and it was fine not to exist; when you die and no longer exist it will be the same thing.  And here is Dr. Dawkins, saying it far better himself:

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?” 
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Since my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April, there has been a new urgency to my need to accept the fact of dying.  In the wonderful movie Cloudburst, Olympia Dukakis' character says, "I'm 80, nothing lasts forever."  And according to Walter Isaacson, in Albert Einstein's last days at age 76, he consoled others, at one point saying, "I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn't really matter when."  He wrote formulas and bemoaned his lack of adequate mathematics to his last day.

I tackled with some dread Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and have basically come away from it thinking, "Well, all right then."  A bit impatient with her that she was so blind to the fact that her husband would die, where I have lived knowing loved ones would die and leave me, and that I would die and leave others, who would inevitably get along fine without me.  And yet, who am I who have not had to deal with the death of a loved one since my mother's death just thirty years ago to offer a critique her experience?

So where does this leave me?  It is a process, and one we go through like it or not.  As I write that I am aware of its triteness, and yet the fact that it is 100 percent true.

For right now, each of these has helped place me in the context of the world in which we all die.  I am trying to allow myself to feel sadness at the inevitable ending, and also to appreciate each day that I and my loved ones are here.

Do Not Call -- Really

I am retired, live by myself, home all day, with a landline.

No, I don't feel victimized by burglars.  The con artists and crooks that concern me are the telemarketers.

Lately, like for the past couple of years, the fearmongerers have been vying with the banking industry for the coveted prize of "Most Annoying Telemarketing Group."

For example, I just now got a call.  Expecting an actual call from a family member, me and my bad knees got up from the chair and made it to the phone when after four rings it stopped ringing.

Four, you see, is the magic number.  That's not only the number of rings it takes before my sister starts to worry that she is bothering you and hangs up; it is the number of rings robocalls are set to disconnect at so that they don't encounter your annoying answering machine, which would take up way too much of their valuable time.

Yesterday, I answered the phone to a robocall that began, "The FBI...."  It was, obviously, a security service.  These are the folks that if you call them will then dial 911 for you.

This morning the call I got was for a company doing a "Bathtub Safety Survey" -- honest.

In my ever futile attempts to stop the calls, and my frustration at having to wait through the robo message, I started punching buttons.  "0" just restarted the message.  "1" however got me an actual human, who thanked me for taking their survey.

I understand that, while I would rather live in my car and eat out of dumpsters than be a telemarketer, some people are just trying to make an honest living.  So over the years I have aimed for an assertive, not rude, message.  I stated that I am on the Do Not Call Registry, and to please take my number off their list, and then I hung up.

By the time I got back to where I had been when I was interrupted, the phone rang again.  This time, the caller left a message.  The message was that if I wanted to be taken off their call list I could have just hit "2", which she was trying to explain to me when I rudely hung up on her.

So let me recap:  in spite of the Federal Do Not Call Registry, I get a telemarketing call, to which I am supposed to listen in order to find out how to be removed from the call list.  And because I hung up on the telemarketer, I have been accused of being rude.

Well, just so I've got that straight.