The Bright Side of Death

It's the end of another year and I'm still around, although sadly, my husband did not make it to his 77th birthday which would have happened on December 31.  Since my mother died at age 63 in 1982, this is the first time I have had to face the death of a loved one.  Trying to make sense of his dying makes no sense.  A year and a half ago he was walking three miles a day, healthy and happy, and then the kind of back pain that at 76 one assumes is just that turned out to be cancer, and the cancer turned out to be bigger than all the powers that medicine could bring to him.  And that, my friends, is life. 

I have learned over the past year and a half that I am not alone in my obsession with death.  The evidence is everywhere.  For example, the weather forecast for today's Onion reads:  "75 -- Sunny -- still one day closer to death, though."

I'm currently reading Smoke Gets In Your Eyes : And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty.  She is a young woman who has decided to tackle her lifelong fear of death by going to work at a crematory.  She is expecting that facing the death of others -- and actually participating in the postmortem ritual -- will allow death to become just another part of her life.

That's a bit of what I have been doing lately, but without the ashes.  Here is some of what I have come up with:

A quick death -- a massive heart attack, a fall from a tall building, a fatal crash -- happens so quickly that a person cannot possibly register enough pain to think, "This is unbearable."  That would be a good thing.

A long, painful death, as with the evil beast cancer, I believe is a game of "Let's Make a Deal" that doesn't end until, well, it ends.  We weigh the amount of pain caused by both the cancer and the treatments with the amount of hope we have for the time we have left.  Those of us who are so inclined pray and try to look forward to a pain-free afterlife.

I find the whole idea of afterlife fraught with confusion and contradictions.  Like, I'm assuming that most who believe in life after death think in terms of being reunited with those they love.  How about those they don't love?  How about those they love who don't love them?  Maybe when you leave your body behind your soul also sheds all those petty aggravations.  But then what happens?  Are you and all your wives and exes just friends?  Do you hang out with the boss you couldn't stand?  And does he (or she) treat you well, or just the same as everybody else up there?

What about the things you loved here on earth?  Good food, football, the beach, spy novels:  if these are the things that define you, when you get to heaven do you get to have them all, or do you no longer need them, and in that case, then, who the heck are you?  That would pretty much make us all one spiritual blob, or maybe millions of singular blobs, indistinguishable one from another, wouldn't it?

Lots of authors have tried to visualize heaven, some of them narcissistic enough to publish their work as non-fiction.  Some talk to a voice they claim is God, and who basically tells them everything they want to hear about life after death.  Hard to find someone who says, "You know, God contacted me the other day and said I was totally wrong about the afterlife."  The exception to that is all those people who weren't worried about dying until they were, and then they suddenly "found" God, who astonishingly did not tell them shame on you, you are going to hell, but instead was so happy they had stumbled upon Him that he gave him a pass into heaven.

I realize I am ruminating here, but, hey, that's what this blog is supposed to be about, okay?  I had hoped to write a funny piece about death and dying, because humor has helped me with all kinds of trauma and tragedy in my life.  But it's not easy.  Maybe because death is THE irrational thing about life.  I could be sitting here writing this thing on death and then....  nothing.

Seems to me Terry Pratchett has nailed the concept of Death.  Death, the character in Discworld who is responsible for collecting us when it's time, speaks in all capital letters.  Death wears the traditional garb, and at the time where you may or may not be dying, you just might have a conversation with Death.  In The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Maurice bargains away one of his lives so that a rat can live.  That is probably about as believable about any entering heaven story you might come up with.

Because living and dying are such baffling concepts, and we are persistent in our attempts to find meaning in our being here, we continue to make up stories that allow us to go on as though our existence makes sense.  But the fact is: we are here and then we are not, except for the compostable material.  Neil DeGrasse Tyson is just delighted by how huge is space and how infinitesimal and insignificant are we.  I suppose that is the quintessence of the defense mechanism of reaction formation, converting your terror into delight at an inevitable horror.  I have to admit, I like it.  It matters not that Neil DeGrasse Tyson is brilliant and will be remembered in history as long as people exist and think and that I have, well, this blog.  It is still a perspective that makes more sense than we are all going up to this place where nobody will have any negative feelings about anybody and for that matter will no longer have positive feelings about earthly stuff.

This is what I think about death.  Death is sleep at the end of a continuum.  When we go to sleep, we don't consciously fall asleep.  And we all think the best sleep is the dreamless sleep.  So when I go I like to think that it will be just like falling asleep.  And then there will be nothing left of me except all the stuff I have that my family will be stuck getting rid of.  And I won't be around to feel bad about it.

What could be wrong with that?

Cigar Memories

Stephan was a cigar smoker, after his dad.  From a young age, and unapologetically.

Shortly after we met, on our first actual date, we were in Baltimore.  We had dinner at Fell's Point, and I remember an old building, like a courthouse, with stairs, and Stephan doing a Gene Kelly-esque dance down the stairs.  With cigar in hand.  That may have been the night that he told me that if he had to choose between cigars and me, well, he liked me, but....

A couple of years later, we were visiting a very dear friend of Stephan's in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.  At the time Herman was a confirmed bachelor, living with his father, who was into his 80's.  Two single men enjoying the good life, Herman a great cook who could do gourmet meals but was happiest making sauerbraten and spatzle, and both dedicated to good cigars.  Stephan brought dozens of fancy cigars and Herman had cigars he had selected to share, and that's what they did the entire weekend.  By Sunday evening I was craving air that was not laden with cigar smoke, but as we drove away, Stephan could think of nothing to prolong the weekend better than lighting up.  I opened the car window and hung my head out, much as a dog enjoying the fresh air.

There was the time I was visiting my best friend in New York.  I had gotten off the train and was walking uptown on 8th Avenue.  I suddenly got a strong, urgent sense of missing Stephan.  It was a warm and loving feeling.  Then I realized there was a dirty old guy walking alongside me, smoking an old stogie.

His sister drew a sketch of Stephan that ended up on the wall in his townhouse.  At some point, I came upon a picture of a cigar and realized what the portrait lacked:

And that was how it remained, until we moved from Columbia to Long Island.

When I left Maryland to begin graduate school on Long Island, Stephan came up with me to help me get settled.  He had happened upon a great smoke shop in a neighboring town and wanted to stop there on the way home, which meant he had to leave early.  We fought and he left to get his cigars.  Three weeks later, our letters apologizing to each other crossed in the mail.

Stephan's speech, cigar firmly planted, was a variant on the English language.  Friends and family mimicked him; my sisters and I once had a Stephan look-alike/sound-alike contest.  We borrowed a cigar and passed it around, each taking a turn to propound on some topic in those melodious but incomprehensible tones.  He was good-natured about it, but he didn't seem to get what all the hilarity was about.

I think most of us have left pots on the stove and forgotten about them.  We know that smoking in bed is dangerous.  But Stephan with a cigar was always an exciting experience.  Of course, all his shirts and coats had cigar burns.  And there was the time when he was visiting for Easter and went to Ambrose Farm to pick some asparagus.  I wasn't there for the occasion, but my son reports that he lit a cigar, tossed the match and a minute later, there was a small fire developing in the field.  Fortunately, my son yelled out in time and the fire was stomped out.

Another time, as he walked into the house in his heavy white winter coat, I noticed smoke coming out of a pocket.  He didn't seem unduly upset; apparently this was just one of those things that happen when you are Stephan. 

When he had surgery for pancreatic cancer a year and a half ago, Stephan stopped smoking.  He was worried that he would be unable to quit, but he went cold turkey.  The first few times he called me I didn't recognize his voice, and once I even asked if it was him.  Stephan without the cigar was truly new and different.

When he visited us in Charleston, Stephan had always spent hours upon hours sitting on my porch, reading and smoking.  He would come inside from time to time, for a meal or a movie, but would have to take a break to go out for a smoke throughout.  When I wanted to go sit outside with him for awhile I would say, "Let's go have a smoke."  Because regardless of where we sat, the smoke always blew my way.  There were times when it was too much and I would get annoyed.  It wasn't till he stopped smoking that I realized he had also been keeping away the mosquitoes.

He seemed not to have cravings after he stopped smoking, but when he visited me that November, a year ago, Stephan was worried.  He was afraid that if he went out on the porch and sat and read, the craving would return and he would give in to his old habit.  And of course, insanely, or because he just wouldn't have felt right not carrying them here, he had brought a few cigars.  But that never happened.  He had been having a hard time reading since the surgery, which was a far greater tragedy than not smoking, as he was a voracious reader.  But during that visit, he sat on the porch and read a book or two.  Happily, a Terry Pratchett Discworld book that I was about to read, that he had somehow, amazingly missed got him back on the road to reading.  And he did it sans cigar.

It was the cruelest gift, then, when his doctor told him he could smoke again.  It was a few weeks before his death, after a year and a half of prodding and poisoning, that his comfort took precedence over finding a cure.

We talked about the smoking and the cancer.  He knew the correlation.  But we never talked about whether he wished he had never smoked.  Smoking was his identity; it was what identified him with his father, who he loved and lost when he was in his thirties.  Maybe it isn't relevant that his father died of cancer, because the quality of Stephan's life so much involved the culture of cigars and smoking.  Some medical researchers say that we are genetically predisposed to when we are going to die, and some say that if that evil cancer lurks in us there may be little we can do to thwart it.

I know the pleasure Stephan got from his cigars, from the ritual of pursuing the best smokes to that of actually lighting up.  I don't think he regretted his life of smoking, and I don't begrudge him that choice.  And I know that anytime I ever smell the smoke of a cigar, I will imagine Stephan close by.