On Easter Eve, if you aren't thinking about where to hide the Easter Eggs, you might be thinking about what to wear to church tomorrow. If you believe in the resurrection of Christ, you are rejoicing that all the gloom and doom of Good Friday is over.
Death and dying are gloomy topics. My husband brought them up the other day. He is 81, has various ailments and is Irish. Some Irish men can be maudlin. He would call it realistic.
"I think this might be the beginning of the end," he said, as he began to list his ills.
That line would give most wives pause to consider where the life insurance policies were, along with durable powers of attorney and all the other legal documents one might need.
However, being unlike most wives, and given to a quirky nature, I said,
You know, if you had been able to talk when you popped out of your mommy's womb, that was the time to say that line.
After all, that was the beginning of the end. Right? I mean it was all down hill from there, no turning back. We are all in that countdown to our final days.
Getting no satisfaction from this quarter, he went off to pet the cats, cooing loving words into their hairy ears.
Meanwhile, I pondered the ways people we have known over the years approach the fine art of dying.
Our friend, Sheb Wooley, of Rawhide and Purple People Eater notoriety, was dying from Leukemia a while back. I talked with him on the phone, and he said, "Shadow, dying is a pain in the ass."
Shadow is what Des calls me, a subject for a future blog.You can hardly wait, I know.
Then Sheb went on to crack me up with several one liners. His wife Linda told me later, that he kept his humor and bemused way of looking at life right up to the end. He even managed to drag himself to a memorial service for Johnny Cash before he died himself.
If you want to get a real laugh about dying, read Art Buchwald's book on his last two years in a hospice program. I've mentioned it before.
Recently, when frustrations were mounting, I emailed my friend Jan Curran, that I was off to put my head in the oven. She told me she laughed all day at that line and said I should put it in a blog. Maybe I will.
Still, putting one's head in the oven is exactly what my Aunt Jennie did many years ago. She was depressed, obviously. The oven gig didn't work. The famiy thought she needed a vacation. After all, her father, (my grandfather) had committed suicide not too long before this. I was elected to go along with her on this trip to California to visit her daughter and family. I was 17 and took time off from my first big job. We went from Chicago by train. My job was to keep her from jumping off the train, I think.
The problem was that I was young and it was the late forties and the train was teeming with sailors. Aunt Jennie spent most of the trip in the restroom, nauseus, and I spent my time in the club car being flirty. People kept dragging me off to go find my aunt who was throwing up. It was a great time for both of us, once we got to Monrovia. Truly. Plus, she never went near ovens again, except to make the best raviolis this side of Sicily.
But I digress. Back to dying.. My mother's approach to her diagnosis of cancer was to go out and buy three pair of shoes, the same style in different colors. Don't ask.
On the other hand, she kep predicting my father's death for years. Many a holiday dinner would have her pointing at him and say, enjoy your grandfather, kids, you never know how much longer we'll have him with us. My father's face seemed suddenly more ashen to us. Of course, it might have been from the cigarette ashes, dangling from his fingers. Then, my father didn't seem to mind the attention, come to think of it.
When my mother was near the end of her life, bedridden and unable to talk, she would write on a slate. Once, she wrote, "can you believe I am still here?" I shook my head, smoothed her brow and tried to smile.
On her last night on earth, with my husband on one side of the bed and her African American priest from Zimbawbe on the other side, she was in a coma and the two men talked theology. My husband later gave, Father Hebron some of his books to take back to Africa.
I told Father Hebron, if there were priests like him when I was growing up, I might still be a Catholic. He just smiled. He would miss my mother, I knew. Whenever he came to visit her, she would dig in her purse and give him a few dollars for the ninety nine cent store in the Valley. He loved that store. It was one more thing he and my husband had in common.
Again, with the digressions. Okay, I'll tell you about a poem I wrote, "Dancing to My Grave." my friend Ruth Robertson, who has her doctorate in opera or music or some lofty title, put the words to music and performed it years ago at an all day Women's conference at Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks. She even recorded it for me on a cassette that I still have. If I find it somewhere among my writings I'll put it in a blog the next this cheerful subject comes up.
In the meantime, I am reminded of a comment by one of Des's cousins we visited in a New York hospital where he was dying. As we were leaving, he gave us a wink and said, "Catch you on the rebound."
I expect to do just that, along with our dear friend, Bob Gibbs, who just died yesterday and loved my blogs. Catch you on the rebound, too, Bob.
So says Sassy
