A FUNERAL, A BIRTHDAY AND A DOG

I had one of those days yesterday where I bumped up against the goal posts of life.  One announcement of the sudden death of a little boy, another old friend’s funeral and then I capped it off with a friend’s 50^th birthday party. 

The vicissitudes of life.  I like that particular word, not only because it is chock full of consonants and sibilant sounds, but it captures exactly what it means to be in this middle place in life.   The dictionary defines it this way -- “of constant change or alternation, as a natural process, unpredictable changes or variations that keep occurring in life.”

I didn’t know the little boy.  I only know his grandparents and I know that kind of pain has no words attached to it.  There are no dictionary definitions that can accurately describe the loss of a child.  It’s not the natural progression of life.  No parent should ever outlive his or her children.

As I watched the elderly mother of my friend Jeff, whose funeral was yesterday, I saw the pain etched there too.  He was 52, had made it through the better part of his life presumably, the parts where he’d filled in most of the blanks.  He had wonderful friends, a successful career, had married a great gal and been the father to three beautiful and generous daughters.  But there was so much he wouldn’t get to do now.  And that pain was just as fresh and as real for that mother as it was for the mother of the 11 year old.  A child is a child.  And a mother’s job is to protect, even though none of us can fashion armor against the randomness of cancer or a drunk driver, a blood clot or an accidental fall.

As we all remembered Jeff yesterday, some of us who had not seen one another in too many years, it was really what all good funerals are supposed to be – that clichéd celebration of life.  And so it was. He touched many lives.  He seized it by the neck and left his mark.

Later that night at the birthday of my friend David, we raised a glass to his life.  A birthday is less about looking back than it is about looking forward.  Yes, we celebrated his three beautiful sons, his wise choice in a wife, his accomplishments.  We roasted and jabbed, poked at self-confessed weaknesses.  But a birthday says, “I made it this far and I’m still going strong.”   It was hard not to see the juxtaposition as I thought of Jeff’s family, sitting, I imagined, with the left-over’s from the funeral reception.

There is no takeaway from a day like yesterday other than the old chestnut about living life in the moment.  It’s a lot harder to do it than to say it.   But those of us who’ve made it this far have to give it the old college try.  Loss is something we get more comfortable with over time.  We respect it.  And if we’re good and wise, we let it remind us to live a little lighter, worry a little less about the silly things and tell the ones we cherish how much we love them.  Whenever we get the chance.

Today will be another day with both a birthday and a funeral.  I'm about to head out to the disco bowling alley for my twin's 11th birthday party.  As they move into "tween-hood," this might be our last goodie bag gathering.  Next year they will be in middle school and they are already needing me in different ways than they did eight months ago.

Our little dog Tucker was hit by a car three weeks ago.  It was very traumatic for everyone and it happened in front of my eyes.  I had to wake my girls that morning and tell them.  At 10, they haven’t really experienced much loss.  They have all four grandparents and all of their aunts and uncles.  They were too young to remember the scary parts of their Dad’s injury.  They only see the recovery.  Today we will plant a bush in the yard to remember Tucker and his absolute zest for life and unconditional love.  My girls will each read things they’ve written about how much they loved him.

Today will be a lesson in celebration, like all rites and passages are.  They are one year older.  And they have also lost their puppy.  Today will be an opportunity to remind them that they, too, can survive the vicissitudes of life.

DEATH IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

A friend died the other day.  Breast cancer that spread too far, too fast.  But she had her dukes up the whole way; fought a damned good fight.  She stood tall, battled elegantly, thrusting and parrying at the disease like the most elegant of fencers.  I know there must have been ugly days, days of railing at the fates and wondering “why me?”  But she chose not to show most of us those days.  She moved through the world with giant grace; with her chin up, a twinkle in her eye and a sense of good humor.

I stumbled across the email entry for her in my computer the other day and my fingers froze.  My heart constricted.  There she was, I thought.  Living proof.  Was she really gone?  No more replies to my emails or Face book messages?  For just a millisecond I moved to delete the entry and then stopped.  I wasn’t ready to press that button and say “yes” when my computer asked me if I really wanted to do this.  I wasn’t there yet.

How does one “delete” a friend in this age of technology? What about Face book?  Do you “un-friend” someone after they die?  It seemed so final.  So I chose to do nothing.  I declared a period of memoriam in cyberspace.  She would live on there, until I was ready to let her go.

In the old days, back when people like me walked barefoot to school and got wooden teeth, you had physical address books. You could hold them in your hand and flip the pages alphabetically, long before computers organized that information for you.  When someone moved or died or just no longer really featured themselves in your life, you would erase them, cross them out.  And in this simple act you could still see the traces of them there—the ghost of the person.  Like a reflection or a shadow.  This was the final step before obsolete.  Sort of an “un-dead.”

But now everything is instant, electronic, immediate.  It’s so simple to add or delete.  Things happen inadvertently.  The first time I faced this issue was when our friend David Bloom died in Iraq in 2003 while covering the invasion of Baghdad.  I remember stumbling across his contact information at NBC, his work number and cell.  It was a hard slap to see the computer scrolling past his name in the “B” s.  What to do?  David was gone.  The silence was deafening.

I didn’t dwell.  I decided (by not taking action) that death in the technology age required a period of mourning.  I would keep David’s entry there until I had processed the death, lived with it, grieved it and accepted it, as much as one can accept death.  Just having him alive in my laptop and cell phone somehow kept David present.  The David Bloom entry was my proof that he had existed at all.

I haven’t had to deal with more than my fair share of death yet.  I don’t know what one’s fair share is.  But I know there are families and towns for whom death and loss has been more of a frequent companion.

For an old gal, I’ve been relatively unscathed.  My first was a fatal car accident involving my high school friend -- a boy--- who was a prince among men.  I didn’t go to that funeral in Buffalo, New York and I will always kick myself.  I was in college at the time, couldn’t figure out the transportation, didn’t understand quite the weight of ceremony.  No one talked about “closure” the way they do now, but I suppose all these years later my lack of attendance haunts me for that reason.  I needed to be there to lay him to rest too.   

I missed both of my grandmothers’ funerals as well.  During one I was out of the country, the other, across the country with a newborn.   The trip and leaving a baby seemed impossible back then; we’d just made a move to a new town.  I was overwhelmed and I’d said my goodbyes to her not long before.   I look back now and wish I’d made more effort.  Those passages are important.  They don’t seem so when you are younger and lives stretch out like red carpets. 

Looking now through the rear view mirror, I understand that ceremonies offer a sense of completion and celebration of living.  They are a tender act; the way women lovingly wash the feet and bodies of the dead. There was a time in America where you kept the body at home for the wake, dressed your loved one, held them as they died.  In the parts of the world where people are not as removed from the cycles of birth and death, they speak of the comfort brought by this proximity to the departed.

We don’t get up close to death like that anymore. That’s mostly handled by others; professionals in hospitals and hospice.  It’s a job, a career.  It’s not dissimilar to the way we buy our meat in the supermarket, already slaughtered, butchered and wrapped in plastic.  We sub-contract out the messy parts.

Looking at a dead friend’s contact information in my computer is a little bit like that.  It’s an industrial, sanitized entry, no pen marks or wine stains on the page.  It’s too easy to hit the button and move on.  A bunch of keystrokes cannot, certainly, constitute the essence of  the person who lived, laughed and loved.  And so, in defiance of all that is so efficient and easy and destructive in this age of technology, I will stage a sit-in for her in cyberspace.  I will keep her alive in my hard drive for as long as I choose.  There will come a day, when I’m cleaning out my address list, adding and deleting, that I will finally let her go.  But right now, I’m still content to catalogue her as a “friend.”  

Notes From The Road - Veterans Day

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