Are You Sick of Me Writing About Death?

Well, I am sick of me writing about death...but here we are. 

It is pretty much occupying my whole being and existence.  I have very little bandwidth for anything else.  Death doesn’t really care whatever else you have going on, it commands you and your attention completely. Turns your face towards and assaults you in a very provocative way and manner.  You can attempt to evade, but resistance is futile.  Really.

My dad had a better day, and by better I mean less agitated.  Which also means death draws nearer.  Each breath and moment is accounted for in this process because we do not know how many more he will get...scarcity does pave the way for preciousness after all.

I have been reading poetry, feels some how right to read words that are formulated together talking about things without exactly talking about things.  Like poetry becomes a euphemism for death and dying.  Words that call to it, but not so boldly as to name it outright.  Lest, death turn its fatal gaze towards us, our loved ones...

I wish to know more of death, but in a distantly personal way.  I still see it as friend, still do not fear its errand and pity it the task at hand.  Death has been busy at my father’s memory care, death requiring several souls this week alone.  And yet, I do not feel a creeping blackness.  I do not feel its cold hand on my shoulder.  Instead there is a lightness.  A warmth in the humans that walk around deaths fixed position at the foot of my father’s bed.  Mostly we pretend not to see death standing there.  Mostly.  I refuse to see him as rapacious.  I refuse.  Instead to see death’s errand as being one that is hard for death, met so often with misunderstanding, fear and anger.  I wish to bring none of that to death’s fatal errand.  I wish instead, to make space and bring death a chair.  Perhaps a cup of tea, some solace on this most solemn and thankless task.

I see all the ways death is like a cancer, carving out and away tissue and sinew no longer required for this mortal way.  However, instead of great holes of despair and longing, I see light and vapor filling up the carnage of the body’s breakdown.  I see the body leaving, but the spirit rising to a swell.  So much spirit now.  So very much, it almost takes my own breath away.

I am doing my best to stay in the moment.  I’m doing my best to remain when I want to leave.  I am working on patience to not demand death follow my selfish trajectory, and grateful for death’s employees who assure my dad comfort and peace as he lays dying.  How strange to select a profession that makes you death’s taskmaster.  But perhaps, these hospice people, do not chose it so much as they are chosen by death to do the work that death cannot do.

I feel tranquil, mostly.  I feel peaceful, mostly.  I am tired.  And the stress, that I do not acutely feel, makes itself evident in my neck and shoulders, hurting, tensing and gnarling.  An ever present reminder that while I do not feel the stress directly, my body is still the scorekeeper, regardless.

Things feel heavy, but I feel strong.  I lift heavy shit at the gym most days.  And somehow all that heavy lifting has given me a strength I did not know I had.  A way to carry that which is heavy and burdensome.  It really is all in the way you carry the load.  And for me, I must set it down at times, knowing I must always pick it back up once more...

Mary Oliver offered us this, and it has helped me greatly.  I pray it can help you too...

May we all find peace and a way to carry all the heavy burdens of living...and dying.

Again, still...

Heavy

Mary Oliver

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had his hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel,

(brave even among lions),

“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it–

books, bricks, grief–

it’s all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down.”

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled –

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love

to which there is no reply?