...death means little

After I wrote about an encounter with a corpse last month, I wanted to write about suicide, but found it was too tender, too close. I sure thought about it, though.  The words rattled, turned, unravelled, cohered in my little head during nearly every waking and sleeping moment.  I also thought about the time when I was a very small child and I fell into a pool and nearly drowned.  I wanted to tell that story, too, but, again, the gap between the story and the words and the meaning — I was not in a place to bridge that chasm.  

Then two weeks ago I learned that one of my college classmates had died.  The news coverage was vague, suspicious, and we felt it was probable that he'd taken his life.  I was not close to him, but I am close to his friends, a part of that circle.  I remember seeing him just a year ago, sitting down at the end of a row of folding chairs at a choir concert, he with his little boys in his lap, and I with my big boy next to me.  We smiled.

I learned this week that he had, in fact, taken his life.  My step-mother kindly offered: "It's hard to lose a contemporary."  Yes.  




And.  I work at our alma mater.  That place is my workplace now; it is not filled with college memories but with the current students making their own stories, playing out their own dramas.  Then when we heard about Scott's death, the place changed, I changed, and my colleagues were again my professors; our relationships shifted, and the past rushed up into the present like the ground when you fall.

I have a morose friend, like Eeyore but more energetic, who is forever saying we need to be prepared for death.  But unmitigated tragedy — how do we prepare for that?

Years and years ago, on a homeschool messaging board, a woman named Kay posted the story of sitting with her mother when she died.  Kay, a doctor, told her story with a mixture of bravery and love and clinical, stalwart practicality.  I felt absolutely privileged to read that post, and knew that she was an extraordinary woman. Over the years I got to "know" her, virtually, as the voice of reason and maturity and intelligence in the often batshit crazy world of homeschoolers.  And then I learned that Kay and I are neighbors.  

I have had three long talks with her: at my dining table a year ago, at her dining table last summer, and in my favorite coffee shop, again, last summer.




At that point I was in crisis, grasping for meaning and a new life, an actual career.  Kay works at a hospital for the mentally ill, and loves her job — every day, every patient, brings mysteries to be solved, because, as she said, she is working with people who lie, hide, are belligerent, and don't want help. She likes playing the detective, "Who is coughing in the bathroom! Sounds like pneumonia!" She loves that she works with a team, that they know each other's strengths and weaknesses, pick up where the other leaves off. I've never had that kind of positive, deeply satisfying work experience, and she gave me hope, real hope, and helped me to shift my thinking. 

Last month I heard that Kay was ill.  This week she is in hospice. 

Her message to us on the homeschool discussion boards was so very her, concerned about us, assuring us that she was cared for and loved.  Once someone on the boards had asked, "What's the happiest thing you've learned?"  Kay wrote, "That when you truly love and are loved, death means little. That person is still very much a part of your life.  No one important to me died until I was 48, and I spent years fearing what I shouldn't have feared at all." 




I don't fear death.  I think the pool incident as a toddler inoculated me against that terror.  And I have lost very dear people in my life, and understand, deeply understand, this idea that they remain a part of our lives, remain present.  Twenty years after her death I can hear my grandmother's voice, her laughter, sense her presence.  Fear, no.  But I hate that children are growing up without their parents, Scott's — and now Kay's son, too, will have to say goodbye to her.  

And, I suppose I am entering that chapter of our lives when we begin saying goodbye to each other. I don't like it, and, no, was not prepared.

I know that if anyone can navigate this transition with grace and care, Kay can.  The last I had heard from her was in October, thanking me for the "orgasmic" plum preserves I'd given her. I would like to bring her my last jar.  But if that cannot happen, if she needs to narrow her focus, I will respect that, and remember her laughter, her voice, and carry her memory forward.