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.

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.