This was an assignment for a class in death and dying.
Original Submission date: September 4, 2019
Dearest Raine,
As stereotypical as it might sound, I’m staring death in the face but choosing to turn around and look back over my life and one of the things that stands out is how much key events in my life like Cam’s walk to Navy Pier and Luke’s death really made me aware of my own mortality and the mortality of those around me and made me realize how important it was to truly be present for those we love. I’m chuckling as I realize, that my master’s work at WMU foretold this looking back as I can clearly remember Dr. V. saying in her lecture that the elderly took time to reconcile their lives to determine if they’ve had a good life. I think I’ve had a good life, but thinking about that class has also made me think about how my viewpoints of death have changed over the years.
As a child, it was not death that scared me, but the rapture as every summer we would go to church and see a movie about the rapture and I would end up in tears because I was terrified that Jesus would swoop down and take away everyone I loved and I would be left alone. My first real memory of death was when I was nine and my Grandpa Tony died. He wasn’t my real grandfather, but his wife (Grandma Elda) had babysat me from when I was six months old so he had been a constant in my life. I didn’t truly understand what death was, but I was sad that my Grandma Elda was so sad and I remember hugging her and telling her I loved her.
When I was ten, my cousin Randy tried to kiss me in the hayloft and I never told anyone. I honestly don’t think it went any further than that, but it made me so uncomfortable that I never wanted to see him again. When I was twelve, my parents were talking about taking Randy in to live with us because his father was abusive. I remember being terrified of what would happen if he lived in our tiny house with us, but I still never said anything to my parents. A few weeks after that conversation, on my mother’s birthday, Randy was killed when he fell into a silo full of corn and suffocated. I remember being relieved that he wasn’t going to live with us, but feeling so guilty and feeling as if I had caused his death because I was selfish and didn’t want him to live in my house. Looking back to that long-ago lecture on death attitudes, I remember Dr. V. saying that it is normal for children to think a death is their fault. Please don’t feel guilty about his death as we had a legitimate reason to not want him to live with us and we had nothing to do with his death.
The next two significant deaths I experienced were separated by twenty years and both had profound effects on me as they made me think about love and loss. Our grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s and she was in a home for the aged for a few years prior to her death. Several times over the course of those few years, we would get a call from my uncle saying she was near death and that we needed to rush to Poplar Bluff to say our goodbyes. I remember spending our 20th birthday visiting my grandmother and watching as my father, with tears in his eyes, told her he loved her and told me to never be ashamed to tell people that you loved them. Watching my father cry was heartbreaking and a reminder that love hurts. My father died in 2010 after bravely battling lung cancer for a year or so. I was working on a project in Georgia at the time and I’d visit as often as I could and every time I visited him, I made sure to tell him how much I loved him. He died the day after Thanksgiving and I drove out there to be with my mother and when I arrived I found she hadn’t had his body moved from the nursing home as she wanted to give my brother and me a chance to say good bye. It was difficult to see my father’s lifeless body laying there and I was too afraid to touch him to say goodbye. The next few days were spent helping my mother deal with funeral arrangements and her new status as a widow. The hardest moment of that period was watching her throw her body over my father’s during her last goodbye before he was cremated and realizing the finality of death.
I never truly mourned my father when he died because I was busy being strong for everyone else. I had to be strong for my kids, I had to be strong for my mother, and I had to be strong for my husband. It felt like I could never mourn because I was too busy taking care of everyone else. Oddly, that’s something else that Dr. V. touched on in her lecture when she said that middle age was about thinking about responsibilities toward others and whether they would be able to carry on. A year after my daddy died, my husband had a heart attack and I spent hours by his bedside being strong and more hours walking the streets of Chicago crying and praying. Three months after his heart attack, he decided he wanted to leave and start a new life and I fell apart. I was mourning the death of my father, the death of my marriage, and worrying about what was next in my life. It was then that I realized that the death of relationships and ideals were just as painful as the deaths of people. I also realized that not taking time to grieve, doesn’t mean the grief evaporates, it is still there and it will eventually come out.
The death of elders makes you realize that you are one step closer to your own mortality, but the death of someone your age smacks you upside the head and makes you realize that you’re not invincible. The first time someone my age died was right after high school when a classmate of mine died in a military training accident. To see someone my age laid out in a box was disconcerting, but the mind is a great rationalizer and the fact that he died in a military barracks in a world far removed from my safe rural upbringing had me convinced his death was an anomaly and that I was still invincible. When my favorite cousin died in 2014, death came into my inner circle as someone I had spent my childhood laughing with first became a specter of his former self, then passed away leaving his young children behind. We had lost touch and I didn’t hear about his passing immediately, but when I did it was as if I could no longer hear the laughter of my younger self as if those memories weren’t real and as if death had intruded where it had no right to be.
It’s odd how life and memory is not a linear thing as Mark’s death was in a way the death of my childhood, but our daughter’s childhood had been marred by death many years before Mark died. Her best friend died when the girls were six and I remember Mackenzie’s wake and funeral like it was yesterday. Cam gave Mackenzie’s father a little butterfly and he put it in the casket with her and I remember crying as that butterfly was on her shoulder and her father kept stroking her body as he talked to mourners. My heart broke even more at the site of all those children dressed in their best sitting at the altar mourning their friend. I knew then that death could take even children, but I still felt mine were immune as we had asked Anubis to stay by them and protect them. It wasn’t until Cam was 20 that I realized that she could also be taken from me way too young. She had a psychotic break from reality and decided to walk the three miles from our house to Navy Pier in the middle of the night on the coldest day of the year. She called me and told me she was at Navy Pier, but I didn’t realize at the time how sick she was until she got home. It was then that all the things that could have gone wrong hit me: she could have frozen to death as she was wearing a light coat, she could have been harmed by someone, she could have fallen off the pier into the viciously cold water. However, none of those things happened and she encountered a kind security guard who let her into the pier at the risk of his own job and stayed with her until he could help her to safety. I cried in gratitude when she got home and thanked Anubis for once again doing his job.
Children and animals are innocents and I’ve had many pets die over the course of my life, but it was the death of my dog Luke that taught me the spirituality of death. I was never present when other pets died as my parents shielded me from death when I was younger and when I was older one pet was hit by a car and another died at the vet’s of an epileptic seizure. Luke was different though as he had been my reason for living after I was divorced. It was just him and I in an apartment and while I didn’t so much care about taking care of myself, I did want to make sure he was well cared for. He nursed me through the divorce and moved with me multiple times. The final move being a move to Cleveland, OH with my young adult children as we decided we wanted to escape the high costs and crime in Chicago. Luke had two years in Cleveland, two years with a big back yard, two years of a big house to run through, and a final two years of love. Our son was going back to Chicago the last weekend of July and Luke insisted on going with me to take him to the train station on Friday night. And he insisted on going upstairs to sleep in my room on Saturday night, even though he hadn’t climbed those stairs in a few months. Our daughter and I awoke to a dog in distress. He was weak and woozy and couldn’t climb down the stairs. We carried him down and as he got sicker and sicker, we started calling around to find a vet. We finally found one and we took him in and after tests she came back and told us that he had cancer and was bleeding out internally. Surgery could give him another few months, but the quality of life would be limited. We made the difficult decision to say goodbye. In one last act of agency, Luke moved off the rug and into the one spot of sunlight in the room. We called Sean so that he could say goodbye to his buddy and hearing my adult son in tears on the phone broke my heart even more. Then it was time and we positioned Luke so his head was on my leg and my daughter was facing him and we stroked him and told him what a good boy he was and that it was okay to go. We held him as his life slipped away and that was when I viscerally knew how easy it was to slip into death. One moment he was looking at us with loving eyes, then he was gone. That was the moment I truly knew the frailty of life.
While life is fragile and death can come in a heartbeat, memories and love are more resilient. Cemeteries are full of both as they are places where the living visit their dead. It should come as no surprise to me that I find peace in cemeteries as my mother plucked my birthname, Lorraine, from a gravestone. When I am agitated and feeling restless and that the latest minor disaster is the end of the world, I visit a cemetery because as I walk between the stones and read the names and dates, I feel a sense of peace wash over me as I realize that whatever I’m going through is temporary and that the people who are in the cemetery lived, they loved, and they died. Everything is transitory and that’s okay. Cemeteries are also places of love as people remember those they’ve come before with sturdy gravestones and ephemeral flowers. Cemeteries surround me with peace as I remember that I am but one link in a chain and that what truly matters is what I do during my life on earth. I need to focus on what matters and let go of that over which I have no control. While cemeteries are places of love and peace, mausoleums are places of overwhelming grief as it feels the pain and grief is trapped within their very stones. Rosehill Mausoleum is a beautiful building full of stained glass and tributes to the dead, but when I’ve walked through the two floors of death, I’ve felt a heaviness as if the pain of the living and the dead is too much to be contained.
Death is upon me now and while I don’t know if death will come in one year or six, I’ve reached the point where I’m not afraid. I know I’ve lived many lives before and that I will live many more lives, this is just one stop. I do hope that the lessons I’ve learned in this life will carry into the next.
You don’t know it yet, my dearest self, but the next 30 years or so will be filled with love, with laughter, and with joy. Be responsible and take care of all of the legal aspects of death (a will, funeral plans, etc.) so that Dr. V. will be proud of you and enjoy life. Take time to smell the flowers and don’t forget what Daddy said and make sure the people you love, know you live them.
Blessings,
Your Older Self