Day #59: Kris Waxes Rhapsodic on Death
Cheery title, no? It's still early as I write this but it's a rainy day where everyone is for the moment occupied so I thought I would write now while I have the time. Rest assured, by the time you get to the end of this it will be late.
We are now more or less two months into this thing. March 1 was our last truly normal day. March 2 was a day off school while the district planned what was then supposed to be a temporary closure and then March 3 was Wednesday, which is an early release day so they did that and celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday. March 4 was our first day without school and the day we transitioned my husband to working from home. So we are about two months into abnormal and will mark our more or less official two month mark on Monday.
The death toll continues to rise. I feel lucky that it has not hit close to home yet. I know people who have lost people but I and my family have not directly lost anyone. Yet.
We don't like to talk about death so much in this culture, but it's been on my mind. I have some experience with people, ahem, leaving us before their time. More experience than some, not as much as others, that is how this goes. But it rankles me when people who are hard and fast that we must stay locked down if we are going to lose anyone say that anyone who suggests any form of reopening (again, not talking about the crazy let's open everything up nuts, you just can't fix stupid) wants people to die. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about losing people. Because we haven't...this is not a conversation I'm seeing. In all the conversations about to open or to close or who stays open or who wears a mask or all of that, I'm not hearing anyone talk about what it's really like to lose someone to something that isn't old age (old age being hard enough.) So I'm going to.
Let me start with a quick background. Everyone has their own story of loss in their life and family, I have mine. Like I say, mine is not the worst ever, it's just mine.
My parents lost three of their four parents in their first five years of marriage. All three were gone before I turned two. My mother's father died suddenly of an aneurysm just before their first anniversary. He was 59. He would eventually have nine grandchildren, but he didn't live long enough to meet any of us. His own father had died, probably of an aneurysm, at 58 and never met my grandfather's wife or children.
The story of his mother was a sad one. She was in need of cataract surgery but he didn't want her to have it, was worried about her reaction to surgery. So his sisters encouraged her to get the surgery and not tell him. She never woke up from anesthesia. She was 79. My dad had cataract surgery in February, also at 79. I'm so grateful it's a much easier procedure now.
My mother's mother died of liver cancer the week Mt. St. Helens exploded. I was younger than Max is now. She was perfectly healthy in a letter my mom wrote to a friend at the New Year and was gone in May. It was fast. She was 62.
My father's mother went shopping the day I was born for a baby present for me and one for my cousin, who would be born 7 months later and whose impending arrival had just been announced. She shopped for those presents and was admitted to the hospital the following day. After a long struggle with blood clots in her legs, she developed pulmonary embolism. After two days in the hospital, there was cardiac arrest and she passed away. It's hereditary. We very nearly lost my dad to pulmonary embolism in 2017 when he was 76.
Her mother had died at 29 of the Spanish flu. Her father, who she didn't spend too much of her childhood with and my father never knew very well, died at 69.
So I spent my childhood with one surviving grandparent, my dad's dad for whom James was named and who I adored. He died in 2002 at age 95. It's reassuring to know there are some people in this family who do die of old age.
Does it matter? Do you feel the loss of people you don't remember or never met? I don't know. I think so. I think about this sometimes...if we lose my dad before Max is old enough to remember him, will it impact him? I feel like it impacted me. I remember very much wanting to know my grandmothers, especially. I would refer to them as grandma, which felt weird because I hadn't known them. I do know, because I've seen it, that grandmothers tend to be who keeps families attached and once that generation goes the reunions and get togethers slow down quite a bit. And since I don't remember either of my grandmothers, I didn't spend my childhood with a whole lot of family get togethers. We didn't have big tables of relatives at Thanksgiving or Christmas. My parents worked hard to keep connections with the family we had left and there were a slew of adopted grandmothers and great aunts. But the family is shaped by those losses. It's hard not to be.
Those also weren't the last losses we knew. My father, after losing his mother four days after his youngest child was born, went on to be widowed twice, once at 55 when my mom died of a heart attack (at 48,) and again at 75 when my stepmother died of cancer (at 73.)
So there's been a lot of loss and I think I do know a little bit about what it's like to lose people who should still be here. My mom, if she were alive today, would be 73. That feels like someone who should still be with us and yet she's been gone nearly 25 years. So what do I think about loss and death, having been through that?
I think of something my mother said a year before she died, when we lost a man at church suddenly in his 50s, far too young, with a child still in high school. "They don't know it yet," she told me, "but they are lucky in one way. He got to live right up until he died. That's a blessing."
Her words stayed with me in the years after she herself died. I came to realize that thought came from watching her parents die. Her father died far too young, but he didn't have a slow decline. He went suddenly and they all got to mourn him. Five years later, watching her mother die of cancer, although it was quicker than cancer can sometimes be, was agonizing for her. Life is short. Really short, in the case of my mother's family. So the more living you can do during it the better.
When you learn early that life doesn't come with a guarantee and sometimes people leave you when you don't expect it, I think it makes you want to live more life. Take more trips. Take more chances. Has it given me a death wish? Absolutely not. Has it made me want to do more things, have more experiences, not leave my bucket list to linger? For sure. Life is full of risk and has zero guarantees. Literally the only minute you are promised is this one.
I know that all sounds like a cliche and a Hallmark card, but it also happens to be true. Hallmark cards and fortune cookies are true, as it turns out.
So how does this relate to how I feel about the current world situation? Well, first of all, loss is real and let's not minimize that. Let's stop calling this a bad flu and saying people are making this up. People are dying and they are leaving behind families who love them and miss them and that's horrifying.
It's also a sign of what a privileged time we live in. Those a couple of generations before us were much more used to death. They lost their kids in epidemics, a bout of fever could devastate a community. Our infant and child mortality rates are infinitesimally small by historical standards. Does that mean we shouldn't get mad that kids still die and people get cancer in their 40s? Of course not. It just means our grief is not new and the world can be an incredibly awful place.
Do I worry about my dad getting coronavirus? Of course I do! He's been our biggest worry from the beginning with his health history. But I also worry about him getting sick and dying...of coronavirus or anything else...and having spent his final months alone. When it was a few weeks, a few months, it was understandable but the longer the time stretches the harder that balance is. Again, I'm incredibly glad I'm not the decision maker. How many lives is it worth for the rest of us to get ours back? That's an impossible question to answer. But I'm not sure the answer is it's worth it to save one person. Because that underestimates the sacrifice.
In the real world, some people are going to die this year. And next year. Of coronavirus, of cancer, of heart attacks, of many things. Ask anyone who has lost someone, especially lost someone younger and you know what they will talk about? The time spent. The adventures had. The moments they had with that person before they were gone forever. If we really are going to lock down society for a year or more in pursuit of a vaccine that may or may not happen, that's a lot of moments lost. I have a friend who died of cancer a year ago at 52. You know what her mom remembers? The trip to Europe they took...she was gifted with a window of health long enough to take that trip with her mom.
I'm not advocating for anything in particular, in fact with the exception of here on the blog I don't advocate for much of anything, but here's what I will say: I think to that some people are ready and wanting things to open for the sake of their families and businesses. To say that those people don't care about people dying is disingenuous and minimizes the difficulties in going on with life like this. To want to spend time with your family and friends and enjoy them in a hard time, especially knowing that we are losing people, is a real desire and it deserves to be respected.
Life is a gift. It's hard sometimes and annoying and painful and imperfect, but it is also full of love and beauty and adventures and laughter...if you let it be. These are the things I want to remember in this time. I want a little less fear and a little more reminder of what we are living for. And since I'm not in the business of telling other people how to feel, I'm going to try to make that the focus for me and mine.
For media today, I didn't do a lot of reading of my book but I did finish my Anne of Green Gables audiobook and started Anne of Avonlea as I cleaned out my office. My home office is a functional space again after a LONG time of it not being and it feels absolutely amazing.
Today I'm thankful for a space of my own, my husband even when things are HARD, my kids even when they are clingy, my health, good friends, genealogy research, and another day of this life. This life is a gift.
We are now more or less two months into this thing. March 1 was our last truly normal day. March 2 was a day off school while the district planned what was then supposed to be a temporary closure and then March 3 was Wednesday, which is an early release day so they did that and celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday. March 4 was our first day without school and the day we transitioned my husband to working from home. So we are about two months into abnormal and will mark our more or less official two month mark on Monday.
The death toll continues to rise. I feel lucky that it has not hit close to home yet. I know people who have lost people but I and my family have not directly lost anyone. Yet.
We don't like to talk about death so much in this culture, but it's been on my mind. I have some experience with people, ahem, leaving us before their time. More experience than some, not as much as others, that is how this goes. But it rankles me when people who are hard and fast that we must stay locked down if we are going to lose anyone say that anyone who suggests any form of reopening (again, not talking about the crazy let's open everything up nuts, you just can't fix stupid) wants people to die. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's talk about losing people. Because we haven't...this is not a conversation I'm seeing. In all the conversations about to open or to close or who stays open or who wears a mask or all of that, I'm not hearing anyone talk about what it's really like to lose someone to something that isn't old age (old age being hard enough.) So I'm going to.
Let me start with a quick background. Everyone has their own story of loss in their life and family, I have mine. Like I say, mine is not the worst ever, it's just mine.
My parents lost three of their four parents in their first five years of marriage. All three were gone before I turned two. My mother's father died suddenly of an aneurysm just before their first anniversary. He was 59. He would eventually have nine grandchildren, but he didn't live long enough to meet any of us. His own father had died, probably of an aneurysm, at 58 and never met my grandfather's wife or children.
The story of his mother was a sad one. She was in need of cataract surgery but he didn't want her to have it, was worried about her reaction to surgery. So his sisters encouraged her to get the surgery and not tell him. She never woke up from anesthesia. She was 79. My dad had cataract surgery in February, also at 79. I'm so grateful it's a much easier procedure now.
My mother's mother died of liver cancer the week Mt. St. Helens exploded. I was younger than Max is now. She was perfectly healthy in a letter my mom wrote to a friend at the New Year and was gone in May. It was fast. She was 62.
My father's mother went shopping the day I was born for a baby present for me and one for my cousin, who would be born 7 months later and whose impending arrival had just been announced. She shopped for those presents and was admitted to the hospital the following day. After a long struggle with blood clots in her legs, she developed pulmonary embolism. After two days in the hospital, there was cardiac arrest and she passed away. It's hereditary. We very nearly lost my dad to pulmonary embolism in 2017 when he was 76.
Her mother had died at 29 of the Spanish flu. Her father, who she didn't spend too much of her childhood with and my father never knew very well, died at 69.
So I spent my childhood with one surviving grandparent, my dad's dad for whom James was named and who I adored. He died in 2002 at age 95. It's reassuring to know there are some people in this family who do die of old age.
Does it matter? Do you feel the loss of people you don't remember or never met? I don't know. I think so. I think about this sometimes...if we lose my dad before Max is old enough to remember him, will it impact him? I feel like it impacted me. I remember very much wanting to know my grandmothers, especially. I would refer to them as grandma, which felt weird because I hadn't known them. I do know, because I've seen it, that grandmothers tend to be who keeps families attached and once that generation goes the reunions and get togethers slow down quite a bit. And since I don't remember either of my grandmothers, I didn't spend my childhood with a whole lot of family get togethers. We didn't have big tables of relatives at Thanksgiving or Christmas. My parents worked hard to keep connections with the family we had left and there were a slew of adopted grandmothers and great aunts. But the family is shaped by those losses. It's hard not to be.
Those also weren't the last losses we knew. My father, after losing his mother four days after his youngest child was born, went on to be widowed twice, once at 55 when my mom died of a heart attack (at 48,) and again at 75 when my stepmother died of cancer (at 73.)
So there's been a lot of loss and I think I do know a little bit about what it's like to lose people who should still be here. My mom, if she were alive today, would be 73. That feels like someone who should still be with us and yet she's been gone nearly 25 years. So what do I think about loss and death, having been through that?
I think of something my mother said a year before she died, when we lost a man at church suddenly in his 50s, far too young, with a child still in high school. "They don't know it yet," she told me, "but they are lucky in one way. He got to live right up until he died. That's a blessing."
Her words stayed with me in the years after she herself died. I came to realize that thought came from watching her parents die. Her father died far too young, but he didn't have a slow decline. He went suddenly and they all got to mourn him. Five years later, watching her mother die of cancer, although it was quicker than cancer can sometimes be, was agonizing for her. Life is short. Really short, in the case of my mother's family. So the more living you can do during it the better.
When you learn early that life doesn't come with a guarantee and sometimes people leave you when you don't expect it, I think it makes you want to live more life. Take more trips. Take more chances. Has it given me a death wish? Absolutely not. Has it made me want to do more things, have more experiences, not leave my bucket list to linger? For sure. Life is full of risk and has zero guarantees. Literally the only minute you are promised is this one.
I know that all sounds like a cliche and a Hallmark card, but it also happens to be true. Hallmark cards and fortune cookies are true, as it turns out.
So how does this relate to how I feel about the current world situation? Well, first of all, loss is real and let's not minimize that. Let's stop calling this a bad flu and saying people are making this up. People are dying and they are leaving behind families who love them and miss them and that's horrifying.
It's also a sign of what a privileged time we live in. Those a couple of generations before us were much more used to death. They lost their kids in epidemics, a bout of fever could devastate a community. Our infant and child mortality rates are infinitesimally small by historical standards. Does that mean we shouldn't get mad that kids still die and people get cancer in their 40s? Of course not. It just means our grief is not new and the world can be an incredibly awful place.
Do I worry about my dad getting coronavirus? Of course I do! He's been our biggest worry from the beginning with his health history. But I also worry about him getting sick and dying...of coronavirus or anything else...and having spent his final months alone. When it was a few weeks, a few months, it was understandable but the longer the time stretches the harder that balance is. Again, I'm incredibly glad I'm not the decision maker. How many lives is it worth for the rest of us to get ours back? That's an impossible question to answer. But I'm not sure the answer is it's worth it to save one person. Because that underestimates the sacrifice.
In the real world, some people are going to die this year. And next year. Of coronavirus, of cancer, of heart attacks, of many things. Ask anyone who has lost someone, especially lost someone younger and you know what they will talk about? The time spent. The adventures had. The moments they had with that person before they were gone forever. If we really are going to lock down society for a year or more in pursuit of a vaccine that may or may not happen, that's a lot of moments lost. I have a friend who died of cancer a year ago at 52. You know what her mom remembers? The trip to Europe they took...she was gifted with a window of health long enough to take that trip with her mom.
I'm not advocating for anything in particular, in fact with the exception of here on the blog I don't advocate for much of anything, but here's what I will say: I think to that some people are ready and wanting things to open for the sake of their families and businesses. To say that those people don't care about people dying is disingenuous and minimizes the difficulties in going on with life like this. To want to spend time with your family and friends and enjoy them in a hard time, especially knowing that we are losing people, is a real desire and it deserves to be respected.
Life is a gift. It's hard sometimes and annoying and painful and imperfect, but it is also full of love and beauty and adventures and laughter...if you let it be. These are the things I want to remember in this time. I want a little less fear and a little more reminder of what we are living for. And since I'm not in the business of telling other people how to feel, I'm going to try to make that the focus for me and mine.
For media today, I didn't do a lot of reading of my book but I did finish my Anne of Green Gables audiobook and started Anne of Avonlea as I cleaned out my office. My home office is a functional space again after a LONG time of it not being and it feels absolutely amazing.
Today I'm thankful for a space of my own, my husband even when things are HARD, my kids even when they are clingy, my health, good friends, genealogy research, and another day of this life. This life is a gift.
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