Category: The Reality of Death

On December 17, 2004, I learned from a message on my cell phone that my mother had died. I was in an “all HR” meeting at work in SF, and we were taking a fifteen-minute break. I headed to the quietest part of the crowded auditorium, right next to the stage, and played my messages. There was only one.

“Jan,” Dad said in my ear, “I wanted to let you know that Joan died this morning. Call me if you want to.” He often called my mom Joan when talking to me about her.

I played the message, played it again, replayed it. Perhaps each time I hoped he’d say something different, like, “Jan, Mom and I are going to be in Oakland on Saturday and would love stop by your house and to see you and Birte.” This was something I rarely heard; both he and my mom were most often “disappointed” in me. (Mom’s common phrase of disappointment, throughout my life, was, “Ohhhhhh, Janette. How could you?” or, “This is going to kill your grandmother.”) My parents were disappointed when I bought a house with Birte in April 2004, although, in fairness, they did come to our house warming party. They’d been disappointed when Birte and I started dating three years earlier; Mom refused to shake Birte’s outstretched hand. Before that, they were disappointed in me for refusing to let them have my daughter, Neysa, stay overnight at their house: I did not want them to hurt or try to “save” her the way they had me; my family had been evangelicals since I was thirteen. And then there was their disappointment when I divorced my husband of twelve years. When I was 23, and moved in with the man who would become my husband, they’d disowned me for a year, saying I was no longer their daughter. As a teenager, I disappointed them when I questioned the evangelical church’s stance on women’s roles. In fact I’d been disappointing them as long as I could remember.

After playing Dad’s message a fifth time, a song flitted through my head: Ding dong, the witch is dead…. Immediately I chastised myself: What kind of daughter am I to have that particular song in my thoughts? Later, Birte, who is a chaplain at John Muir, would reassure me that my feelings of both relief and grief were real, not shameful. Still later, I would meet others for whom that same song came to mind when their parent or sister or brother-in-law died.

My mother, like her father, had had heart disease for years. Early in 2004, she had narrowly survived open heart surgery. But she was getting stronger every day. She’d even gone with my dad to their reunion at Stanford, and walked quite a bit without assistance. We were all hopeful. Or so I thought.

When I spoke to my father about her death, he told me he hadn’t tried to revive her when she collapsed that morning as they were getting ready to go to breakfast at the senior community where they lived. “Her cardiac surgeon told me after the open heart surgery, when he almost lost her, that she wouldn’t live long. So I figured it was coming.” He smiled, as if he were telling a story about one of the many trips my parents took.

“But she was getting better! You yourself said so!” I countered.

“Actually, she wasn’t.”

“Did her doctor also tell her that she wouldn’t live long?” I was furious. What about HIPAA? “Don’t you think she deserved to know? It was her body!”

He said nothing. Had he let her die by not acting? If he’d been a Black man, there with his dead wife, wouldn’t the authorities have questioned him more about him his refusal to even try saving her? She was only 71.

A week after her funeral, Dad shipped all her belongings (minus her clothes, which he took to Goodwill) to me. “It’s just a few things,” he told me over the phone. “I think you should have them.” But when the movers arrived, they unloaded box after box after box of her papers, letters, photos, genealogical work (which I would come to appreciate), and a box labeled, “Joan’s Life”, as if all of who she’d been could be contained there. I cried when the movers left, and almost ran after them to beg them to take it all back. In sending me all her things, my father got rid of every trace of my mother. He didn’t keep even one photograph of her, or of them together.

In August, 2004, my parents had celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Birte wasn’t invited. Our friends would feel uncomfortable with her there, Mom had said. I doubted she was correct about that; Birte tends to win people over quickly, with her jokes and compassion and genuineness. But loving my parents, as I did, I attended their party with Neysa. For a gift I drew a picture of Mom and Dad as they looked at their wedding. I spent hours on that picture, drawing, shading, trying to get the light and their expressions right. It was not a masterpiece by any means, but my young parents were recognizable, and a number of people at the party complimented me on it. Neysa and I also put together and narrated a light-hearted slide show of our memories of Mom and Dad.

I thought my drawing might be among her things that Dad sent me after Mom’s death, but it was not to be found. When I asked him later, he told me he’d “gotten rid” of it, along with other “clutter” in Mom’s closet. “You did what?” I asked, wondering if I’d heard him wrong. But no, he’d tossed it into the trash, just as he’d effectively done with my mother.

Mom was not an easy person to be around. If she’d been born later, we probably would have said she was on the spectrum, or suffered from mental illness. Dad was exceedingly patient with her, which could not have been easy. I appreciate him for that, and wonder if, when she died, he was, like me, partially relieved.

When my older siblings and I were kids, Dad had two sayings that he’d repeat in response to the problems we took to him. One, directed at my huge emotions and the tears of my siblings, was to pound his one fist into the other and say, “Hammer it down, Jan, hammer it down.” The other was to wipe his hands on each other and then to throw them over his shoulders. “Let bygones be bygones,” he’d intone. “The past is gone. The sun will come up tomorrow.” I’m not sure about my siblings, but I found none of his advice helpful. If anything, it only made me feel more alone and sad.

When Mom died, he quickly hammered down the pain of her death by getting rid of every trace of her; and thereby threw his fifty year relationship with her over his shoulders and into the past, to remain there unexamined. Dad remarried in 2006, and we all immediately loved (and still do love) his new wife. Being with her, he was much more easy going than he had been with Mom: he changed his tastes and habits to match his new wife’s. I think that, perhaps, because of his own childhood trauma, he learned to be who people wanted him to be. As his child, and my mother’s, this is something I learned as well; I am unlearning it very slowly through years of therapy.

Dad died fourteen years and ten days after Mom, on December 27, 2018, of vascular dementia. I’m thankful that we all saw him on Christmas that year, and that we got to tell him how much we loved him.

This month, especially, I miss them both. In spite of everything, they did the best they were capable of when they parented my sister, brother, and me. Unfortunately, their best wasn’t enough for me. Still, I’m grateful they tried.

I haven’t written recently, because I’ve been flummoxed, not only about what to write, but also about how this past year seemed to race by as if it were just a few minutes. I’m about to turn 61, and I’ve realized that I don’t have that many “minutes” left if I live an average lifespan (78.8 years for women). I think it’s important we talk about death, including our own; it’s something every living being will experience. I would like to face mine, when it comes, with curiosity and open arms.

I’ve thought often about death since I was 11, when my grandfather died. At the funeral, my grandfather’s body was in an open casket. I was nervous about seeing him, but I noticed when I did how pale and waxy he looked, how unlike himself. My grandmother, in her grief, lifted his torso and tried to pull his body out of the coffin, while screaming, “No, John, no!” Her behavior terrified me more than death did. Once we’re dead, we don’t suffer; but those who are left to grieve suffer greatly.

I thought deeply about death at age 17 when, severely depressed, I often considered ending my life. With no support from my parents, and no professional support, I relied in part on a pact I made with a close friend who also suffered from mental illness: we would tell each other before we acted if we were planning to die. As agonizing as my depression was, I did not slit my wrists in the bathtub primarily because I knew that someone, most likely my mother, would have to clean up the bloody mess I left. In college, still depressed, I wrote in my journal, “Fuck you, Mr. Death, Sir,” after a friend of mine died suddenly and horribly. Since then, I often think about death, my own and the deaths of those I love. We have such a brief stay here in which to make an impact upon the Earth and upon each other; it’s easy to get caught up in consuming and doing and busyness and forget that our days are ticking away.

I love visiting cemeteries, particularly old ones. There, I can imagine the lives of people who once walked and breathed and hoped and despaired like me. How did this child die? He was only six. Or this girl? She was just seventeen. Who was this couple who died within days of one another? Imagine their families’ grief.

Here in Benicia, we have an old cemetery with gravestones dating back to the early 1800s. One marker bears the name Blake, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. Are we related to these Blakes? On the east coast, or in Europe, cemeteries are much older, which I find fascinating. Some have wizened wooden grave markers that are no longer legible. I wish here in the US, we could see individual gravestones for all the Native Americans who violently died in the “making” of this country.

(FYI, through the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an intertribal women-run organization here in the Bay Area, we of European descent who live on stolen land can donate a “Shuumi Land Tax.” Based on the size of one’s house, this tax “directly supports Sogorea Te’s work of rematriation, returning Indigenous land to Indigenous people, establishing a cemetery to reinter stolen Ohlone ancestral remains, and building urban gardens, community centers, and ceremonial spaces so current and future generations of Indigenous people can thrive in the Bay Area. Shuumi means gift in the Ohlone language Chochenyo.” I have long nursed bone-deep guilt for the violence enacted upon Native Americans by my own ancestors, and the stolen land that they homesteaded; and this donation is a way for me to annually atone.)

I also read obituaries regularly, I think for the same reasons I love to walk among tombstones: to understand and imagine stories. Some strike me deeply. In a recent Chronicle obit, a kind and compassionate-looking woman died at age 94. She was born in Berlin and died of cancer in San Francisco. (Here I make a connection: Birte attended seminary in Berlin, and came to Berkeley for her Masters Degree.) The woman in the obituary was of Russian descent and emigrated to New York escaped Nazi Germany when she was eleven. Her parents must have been people of means in order to do this, as so many were unable to afford passage. And, unlike later ships that arrived at Ellis Island with refugee Jews from Europe, her ship was not turned back. She later became an artist, a feminist, and a supporter of social justice. She loved to travel, visit museums, and listen to classical music. And, she enjoyed “an occasional ice cold vodka.” I wish I could have known her; I think we could have been friends.

Another, younger Black man who recently died also has a kind face. He’s was a registered nurse at Kaiser for many years, managing the pediatric ward. He later got a Bachelor of Science in computer science, and enjoyed building and working on computers. His hobbies were sports (Giants, Warriors, 49ers), motorcycles, jazz concerts, traveling, and dogs. His obit calls him, “loving, caring, gentle, and kind-hearted.” He’s another person I wish I’d known.

I’m fortunate and grateful to have the most amazing friends, spanning generations, every one of them kind, compassionate, and devoted to environmental and social justice. They are not many, but I love each one for what they bring to this world. And I dread the time when they die, if I am still here. Emily Dickinson, a distant cousin of mine, said:

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed us – 
The Dews drew quivering and chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –