Normally I fall asleep fast. It might register on the conscious meter that I’m still awake several minutes after going horizontal but that is the exception. It’s as if I were human sacrifice, offered up to the Slumber God on a cushioned alter. Last night was different. When watching a ball game or a good documentary, commercials are rude interruptions. That’s how restless sleep affects me, rude interruptions reminding me that I’m still self aware.
It was early fall, a year after graduating from high school. I was 19 as was my girlfriend. Joining the army was the last straw. I had failed at every job since high school with no indication I would ever succeed at anything. Those three years on a leash were good for me. I grew up, learned how to work and to some extent, how to read people and pick my friends. With my return, by chance, P.J. and I worked at the same large manufacturing company. It was my second job as a new civilian while she was navigating her second divorce. We were friends but certainly, on different trajectories. Over the years we kept in touch with Christmas cards and at class reunions. Last count she was on her 3rd or 4th husband with no looking back.
She died yesterday after 3 weeks on a ventilator from Covid related complications. If someone had asked me, “Should a former classmate/girlfriend die of Covid would you lose sleep?” I would have thought, “No, I don’t think so.” But last night my sleep was troubled.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead noted that in every recorded culture, end of life rituals have been about mourning one’s own impending demise as much as any loss associated with the departed. I remember that from an assigned reading in college over fifty years ago. When someone who has been important in your own experience crosses that threshold, even if their part was only for a short time and has long since moved on, it serves as unsolicited notice that we all share the same fate.
By now nearly everything I do reminds me that my days are numbered. I just don’t know the number and that’s alright, I’d rather not know. I remember when people died at home, my grandmother, my mother. My dad observed when he moved to a senior citizen community at 87, “When you check in here it’s a walk through the front door. When you check out it’s on a gurney out the back loading dock.” We warehouse our elders, out of sight, so a culture in ‘death denial’ doesn’t have to deal with death and dying. It is much more comfortable, watching commercials for lotions and vitamins to look and act young forever. Unlike feeding operations where livestock get fattened up before slaughter, old people are allowed to wither away and succumb at their own convenience. Certainly there are those who like that arrangement but my dad was not one of them. He was too proud to raise the issue but I am not.
So we’ll see how tonight unwinds. I doubt I’ll lose sleep again. That anxiety diminishes quickly. Even though my pagan/heresy is no secret I am comfortable with talk of mythical afterlife and the scope of what is still unknown. That threshold is the boundary between this life and its aftermath. It truly is a fearful inevitability but never the less, even on the best of days, we all have to jump through that hoop alone. R.I.P. my friend. Her passing changes neither her story nor mine. We all get to live out our stories. “And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone, There’ll be one child born, In our world to carry on.”
It was early fall, a year after graduating from high school. I was 19 as was my girlfriend. Joining the army was the last straw. I had failed at every job since high school with no indication I would ever succeed at anything. Those three years on a leash were good for me. I grew up, learned how to work and to some extent, how to read people and pick my friends. With my return, by chance, P.J. and I worked at the same large manufacturing company. It was my second job as a new civilian while she was navigating her second divorce. We were friends but certainly, on different trajectories. Over the years we kept in touch with Christmas cards and at class reunions. Last count she was on her 3rd or 4th husband with no looking back.
She died yesterday after 3 weeks on a ventilator from Covid related complications. If someone had asked me, “Should a former classmate/girlfriend die of Covid would you lose sleep?” I would have thought, “No, I don’t think so.” But last night my sleep was troubled.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead noted that in every recorded culture, end of life rituals have been about mourning one’s own impending demise as much as any loss associated with the departed. I remember that from an assigned reading in college over fifty years ago. When someone who has been important in your own experience crosses that threshold, even if their part was only for a short time and has long since moved on, it serves as unsolicited notice that we all share the same fate.
By now nearly everything I do reminds me that my days are numbered. I just don’t know the number and that’s alright, I’d rather not know. I remember when people died at home, my grandmother, my mother. My dad observed when he moved to a senior citizen community at 87, “When you check in here it’s a walk through the front door. When you check out it’s on a gurney out the back loading dock.” We warehouse our elders, out of sight, so a culture in ‘death denial’ doesn’t have to deal with death and dying. It is much more comfortable, watching commercials for lotions and vitamins to look and act young forever. Unlike feeding operations where livestock get fattened up before slaughter, old people are allowed to wither away and succumb at their own convenience. Certainly there are those who like that arrangement but my dad was not one of them. He was too proud to raise the issue but I am not.
So we’ll see how tonight unwinds. I doubt I’ll lose sleep again. That anxiety diminishes quickly. Even though my pagan/heresy is no secret I am comfortable with talk of mythical afterlife and the scope of what is still unknown. That threshold is the boundary between this life and its aftermath. It truly is a fearful inevitability but never the less, even on the best of days, we all have to jump through that hoop alone. R.I.P. my friend. Her passing changes neither her story nor mine. We all get to live out our stories. “And when I die, and when I’m dead, dead and gone, There’ll be one child born, In our world to carry on.”
No comments:
Post a Comment