Momento Mori

I am going to take this blog out of retirement for a brief moment because, damn, what a summer it's been, and it has to be documented as part of the aging process: and that's how we handle it when death comes calling.

Obviously, I'm not dead, but this summer, I've had two first cousins pass (twins, they died within a couple of weeks of one another), a second cousin, my mother-in-law, and now, in the most shocking event of all, my 59-year-old brother-in-law passed away from a heart attack. Never thought the most-attended event of the summer was going to be funerals. I didn't even make my second cousin's: my mother-in-law was entering hospice care, and the blog post I wrote during that time (but you didn't get to read because I was trying hard to stay "retired") was about how the process of "dying at home, peacefully in your bed" is anything but peaceful as caregivers, and bluntly - I'm not sure it was for her either.  Another story...

My MIL as she lives in my memory

But anyway, as an adult, when you lose a parent, it's definitely hard and a time for mourning, but ultimately, we all know that's the cycle of life playing out as intended: our parents will precede us in death. It hasn't been easy for my husband, as evidenced by the absolute wreck he's made of the dining room, where all her memories are laid out, waiting for him to crawl through them and decide who gets what. He can't bring himself to go in there and get to it. Still, she lived a long life, and in many ways, if her faith is right, she's in a better place. Free of the pain her body put her through for the last two decades and reunited with loved ones who went before her. 

My cousin Judy

One could say much the same about my two cousins if one can look at it objectively. (I did not. My cousin Judy was a Mensch, and it hurt to know she was gone.) But, they were older than the rest of us, born when the OG Hitler was still in power, and they both made it to see him rise from the grave seemingly in the guise of a rich American.  (Oh, how my cousin Judy hated Donald Trump, so there is some comfort in knowing she's been saved from watching him lay waste to the Constitution.) So, one cannot say they died young. But, there was still a pall over their joint service that my daughter commented on as we left. She, like me, is used to the family's tried and true way of sending off loved ones with a celebration of their life, not a somber mourning of their death. Yet, she remarked that everyone was more sedate this time around. I pondered it and theorized that it was because these are our first cousins, albeit older, they belong to our generation, and it just hits differently. 

None of us who get to this stage in life are strangers to tragedy, and I'm more aware than many that long life is not guaranteed to anyone: I went to my oldest daughter's funeral at the point in her life I should have been watching her college graduation or maybe planning her wedding with her.  Yet, even then, my own death, on an emotional level, seemed remote.

My brother-in-law's sudden passing hit everyone hard, not only for all the reasons that losing a brother, life partner, cousin, or friend does, and not only because he was the baby of this generation, and not only because the sting of losing their matriarch had not yet worn off, but because we could almost feel Death's cold hands on our shoulders when we heard the news. He is at our doorstep. I've lost all my aunts, all my uncles, my parents, the cousins who were old enough to have practically been aunts or uncles, and now he's turned his attention to us. Everyone, from the time we're very young, knows on an intellectual level that we will age and die. I used to ponder it more than was likely healthy. I felt that if I faced the fact of it, it would make it easier to age gracefully. I was scared, I told myself, not of death, but of infirmity. Part of that is quite true: watching my mother's Alzheimer's made me realize there is one thing that frightens me almost as much as my life-long fear of fire, and it's that disease.  It is the ultimate betrayal.

Yet, it's utter bullshit that I'm not also afraid to die. Even if you have faith, and it's steadfast, death is the great unknown. And every faith teaches a different version of the attributes you need to get to a good eternal place, whatever each religion calls it. Have I done enough simply because I am not an axe murderer, or is it like my Baptist neighbors in Texas always said: very, very few of us will ever get to Heaven? Will they have Star Wars there? Will my dogs be there?  Will I see my daughter there? And will she love me or hate me? Or do we even have those emotions wherever "there" is? The unknown is frightening. Sure, life sucks a lot of the time, particularly now, but it's a known quantity. 

And, like many of us, I'm sure, I don't want to leave my living daughter and her kids. That's terrifying. What if I don't live long enough to see them graduate, to see them fall in love, maybe have kids of their own.  I feel my chest tightening as I write this; I'm just so scared of missing out on any of that.  I want to experience all of that. Yet, at some point, no matter what I'm afraid of, death will come for me. And that became very, very real at 4:30 two Saturday mornings ago when my husband woke me to tearfully tell me the news that he is no longer a big brother.

My mother would become so maudlin after every funeral she attended over the years. It was one of many things that would cause me to just roll my eyes, not-so-silently judging her for being a Drama Queen.  But like many of those things I formerly had no patience for, I get it now. She went to funeral after funeral as her generation gradually wore away like sand on a beach, and she felt Death's cold hand on her shoulder each and every time. Mom, if you're there somewhere, knowing the answers to all the questions I ponder, yeah, sorry. Yep, definitely getting it now.

Randy, doing what Randy did best: being the best uncle