Passage

In the drowsy stillness of a Monday afternoon, as a few of us sat around Her hospital bed, as Her pulse grew fainter and fainter according to the two who were holding Her hands, one on each side, She raised up and She breathed Her last, gasping breath.

And She left us.

And She began whatever new phase of life awaits beyond this mortal moment.

Never have I been there, at such a time, in such a place. Never will I be the same again.

The reaper is indeed grim

The movies never get death right.

They make it sudden and dramatic. Or as if one simply went to sleep one day.

In truth, death is more often a tortuous, slow decline. Good days and bad days. Hopes raised, then dashed.

Reminds me of the very words used to describe war, by those who truly knew war: A mingling of terror and tedium and numbness. No glamour. Nothing to write home about.

Death is paper-thin skin splotched with purple bruises from the IV needles. It is itching from the morphine drip. It is night after night keeping vigil, never knowing when the moment will finally come. It is frustration, exhaustion. It is laundry piled up at home and Christmas lights still on the roof and knowing the routes through the hospital hallways virtually blindfolded. It is a parade of relatives that ebbs and flows, day in and day out, withering by nightfall to only the closest of loved ones.

Dealing with it for the first time

Up until now, I have led the wandering life. When older relatives passed away, I was either too young or too far away to be greatly affected. When two of my siblings lost children in infancy, again, though older this time, I was too far away, out of the regular loop, to do much or to feel much – I never laid eyes on that nephew or that Niece.

Today, my Wife called me at work to tell me that Her Grandmother’s kidneys are failing, on top of the congestive heart failure that She is already experiencing. She’s in the hospital, going down.

We all know what is coming. And for the first time, death is calling on someone I know well and love well. And I will be right here in the middle of it all. And I don’t quite know what to do other than to be a shoulder to cry on.

The Curtain Call

"All I do is to go about and try to persuade you, both young and old, not to care for your bodies or your moneys first, and to care more exceedingly for the soul, to make it as good as possible ... either let me go free or do not let me go free, but I will never do anything else, even if I am to die many deaths ... And now it is time to go, I to die and you to live; but which of us goes to a better thing is unknown to all but God." -- Socrates

"Do not despise death but be well content with it, since this too is one of the things that nature wills ... Consider your life, your childhood, youth, manhood and old age -- for here also every change was a death. Is this anything to fear? In like manner, then, neither are the end and surcease from life itself anything to fear." -- Marcus Aurelius

"I hope, indeed, by your prayers to have the good fortune to fight with wild beasts at Rome, so that by doing this I can be a real disciple ... I am giving my life for the Cross." -- Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians.

Socrates of Athens faced his death calmly and without tears. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, well-steeped in Stoic virtue, also looked to his end without fear.

But a new script seems to have been written with the rise of Christianity, which, after all, was born in the salvatory death of its founder. Its earliest faithful not only accepted death, some of them positively longed for it. They were not as the modern kamikaze fighters or suicide bombers, sacrificing their bodies to take out the enemy -- they were as sheep to the slaughter but seeming to rejoice at the opportunity to die meekly as had their Master.

Thus Ignatius, bishop of Smyrna, who for the crime of being a Christian was marched a thousand miles across what is today Turkey, to the Coliseum in Rome to be torn by beasts. Along the way, he wrote seven letters which have been preserved for us, and which are the subject of my reading tonight.

Has there been anything else like this ever, in the history of the world?

Dread

The day will come, when I make my every-other-year flight home to see Mom and Dad, when the silver streaks now in their hair will have become monochrome.

The day will come when their strength will be gone.

The day will come when I have to say goodbye.

Yes, it's a very depressing thought, but I believe it is normal for someone my age, first as an unpleasant whisper of possibility when I was a child, then more and more insistent with each passing year, today almost unbearably loud within my soul.

We all feel a little wistful sadness when a little one outgrows babyhood, and when the cute preteen becomes a gangly and independence-seeking adolescent, and when the adolescent moves away from home. But we also feel joy in each of those moments, for it represents maturation, progress, not decline.

I feel no joy in reminders of mortality writ upon the faces of the parents that I love.

A day of death

My aunt-in-law called this afternoon, asked if I would dig the grave for her cat tonight. It died at a good old age, 18.

So I carved out a hole in the cold clay of her backyard and gently lowered the little box into it.

I drove home through the darkness, thinking about the old saying that nothing is sure in life except death.

In my front yard lay the body of a raccoon.

I don't know what happened to it. Nobody could have hit it with a car way back here and no cat would survive a fight with a beast like that. At least it will not have to face the cold winter that is blowing into Virginia.

I carried it into the woods and, for the second time this day, dug a hole in the ground and lowered a small body into it, into the earth that accepts all things that have come from Her, at the end of their brief lives.

This is just bizzare:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18603646/

Is there an actual term for buzzard-a-phobia? Or for the fear of being buried in order to assist forensic scientists, rather than merely nourishing the daisies above? Does my consent to being an organ donor (and yes, I have given such consent -- I'm not some fear-wracked, conspiracy theory idiot) translate to consent for my placement at such a site?