I rarely cry, and I don't cry at funerals.
Perhaps that not crying thing comes from my grandmother's funeral, the first funeral I clearly remember attending. Grandma lived with us, a vague and addled ghost of a woman. When I was 9 she had a series of strokes and died.
I so vividly remember going shopping with my sisters for new shoes, traveling to Iowa for the burial and, finally, being at the cemetery on a gloomy, early-March day as they lowered Grandma's casket into the ground.
It was then the finality of death became real: I would never see Grandma again. She would never again harangue me and my sisters about the Bible in her broken, German-accented English. They were putting her into the ground. She would be in the ground. She would always be in the ground, to rot away and stink and foam with maggots like the cat that had crawled under the house and died.
I cried, knowing that Grandma was gone, gone, gone. And because the thought of being in the ground for ever and ever, as they say in the prayer, scared the shit out of me.
And then I heard my mother cackle to one of her cronies "Pat sees everyone else crying, so she has to jump in and cry too".
For decades after Grandma's death, I was terrified of dying. Terrified of even thinking of dying. I often had trouble sleeping because, as I lay there waiting for sleep to come, I'd think of that final waiting to sleep, dark pressing down and be terrified, oh, so horrified, at the thought of being buried under ground for ever and ever, amen.
I did not confide in my mother.
Grandma's death was not, however, the first death which had an impact on me. That death occurred 11 years before I was born, when my parents' first child died as a result of a farm accident. Snooky (her real name was Darlene, but Snooky is what is on her gravestone) was 3 and "helping" her Daddy fix a pick up while Mommy, pregnant with Child #3 tended to the infant Child #2. Somehow Snooky spilled gas on her clothing and a spark ignited it. She lived for three days before dying from the burns.
Dad never forgave himself. Even if Dad had wanted to forgive himself, Mom never would have let him forgive himself. They actually separated and filed for divorce... but then Mom discovered that she had caught pregnant again with Child #4. They "reconciled" -- at least to the point of cohabitating and conceiving more children -- shortly after
Until Mom died in 2003 she was throwing Snooky's death at Dad whenever she was angry -- and she was almost always angry.
The rest of us grew up in Snooky's shadow. I still find it odd just how large a shadow a dead toddler can have. Mom slotted each of into her predetermined view of the family: Shirley (#2) was the responsible one; Darrell (#3) was "the boy"; Nancy (#5) was the pretty one; I (#7) was the smart one (it was not a compliment); Sue (#4) was largely overlooked, and Bonnie (#6) -- poor Bonnie -- was the spittin' image of Snooky.
And Snooky was the perfect one. She died before she could disappoint Mom. It is really, really hard to have a perfect sister, especially one wielded as a weapon.
Back in 2008 I wrote about why I hate Mother's Day. Short version: in 1996 I went into labor on Mother's Day, and our twin sons were born 10 weeks premature two days later on May 14. Three days after that, on May 17, Rhys William died of rapidly advancing NEC.
But fifteen years ago today, I was a satisfied woman. I was looking forward to getting out of the hospital the next day, our babies were doing well in the NICU, my in-laws were coming up from Pueblo to see the twins, and our elder son -- whom I had missed horribly -- was to be allowed to meet his new baby brothers.
And then disaster struck the next morning, and by early afternoon Rhys was dead. When my in-laws arrived at our house they were greeted with the bad news.
I cried more in the months following Rhys's death than I had cried in all the other years of my adult life. I never quite knew when it would hit me -- seeing twin babies at the shopping mall; hearing Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven; just about anything could trigger a bout of tears in the early months.
And then there was the letter from my Mother (from whom I had long been estranged), berating me for our having had Rhys cremated; I had to know just how much it would upset her to have her grandson burned and I must have done that just to spite her.
Uhm, yeah. That was truly a major consideration in those days when our surviving son was still in the hospital, I was recovering from a c-section, and our toddler didn't quite understand why he was only getting one, rather than the promised two, baby brothers and Mama and Daddy were so sad.
But... I still had a living baby to care for, and a toddler son, and I certainly, surely, did not want them to grow up under a dead baby's shadow, as I had grown up under my dead sister's shadow. I would not, as my mother seemed to do, work at keeping my grief actively on the top of my emotional palette.
So, while these five days in May -- from May 12 to May 17 -- are fraught with competing emotions for me, I work very, very hard to make sure Younger Son's birthday is about him -- not about his brother, not about our loss. Yes, I think about what is was like 15 years ago, and imagine how it could have been different with yet another boy in our house and wonder what kind of person Rhys would have grown to become.
When I juxtapose my feelings about Rhys against the other deaths with which I have dealt in the ensuing years, it becomes more clear to me just why having one's child die is so difficult.
On April 2, 2003 one of my dearest friends died of liver cancer. She was only 39 -- and I did not cry at her funeral. I had done all my crying for MJ earlier, the night when I learned that her cancer was terminal.
I cried because yes, I would miss her. But mostly I cried because I didn't know how MJ could bear it. MJ was a single mother, and her daughter was only 9. Whereas I was missing Rhys's life because he died, MJ would be missing out on her daughter's life, of assisting her into adulthood, because MJ's own life was being cut short.
Parent or child dying too early the result is the same: a parent the losing the opportunity to participate in their child's life, shepherding that child from infancy to maturity, the joys and disappointments. It is a lifetime of dreams and aspirations taken away.
But in the years since Grandma's funeral, I had come -- somewhat -- to terms about the inevitability of death for all of us and no long feared or wondered what comes "afterwards". My assumption is that what happens after we die is the same as what happens before we are born. As I remember nothing happening before I was born, I assume nothing is also what happens after we die.
But still, I regretted that the world would be going on without me -- like a novel whose ambiguous ending leaves one unsatisfied as if the story was cut off half way through.
When my father died on June 2, 2007, I did not cry at his funeral. I did not cry at the thought of his dying when he became sick beyond healing.
The Dadster's death was the story ending as it should: a life well lived, but ended before dementia finished erasing the man he had been. In the year 2000, Dad said he was ready to go anytime -- he'd always wanted to live to see the new century and anything else was icing on the cake as far as he was concerned.
Yes, I miss him -- every Spring I think of him sitting happily on my front porch -- the porch he helped the Mister rebuild the year our twins were born -- chatting up the passers by who admired my flower beds. I think of the toys he fixed when I was a child, and how he taught me to change tires when I was 16 and first got my driver's license (he supervised while I changed the winter tires to the summer tires on the pick-up truck which was my usual vehicle).
But with my father's death has come yet another evolution in my thoughts about my own inevitable demise. While I do not wish for my life to end, I no longer fear death. Should I become ill I will not cling to a semblance of life just to avoid death for a few more hours or days or months, nor drag those I love through the horrifying limbo of waiting for my death.
My death will not be the end of my story, just the end of my active participation. How I have lived my life will echo on and I try to live so that echo will be a joyous one.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
We're born, we live, we die; we celebrate the lives of those around us, and grieve when they leave us, and miss them as we carry on. But I've learned that grief can also heal us, and teach us to live fully while we live, and to accept, without fear, the inevitability of our dying.
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