Just go with me on this one....

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s all the churches and crypts and tombs and memorials. Maybe it’s the transatlantic flight home with airports and terrorists and the unknown. Maybe it’s the fact that I watched, Italian-style out my living room window, the delicate dance of an ambulance team as they carried a very elderly man across the backs of parked Vespas and around double parked cars just to load him into the waiting gurney. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m turning 30 this week, and my grandfather always said he was going to die at thirty, then forty, then fifty… well, you get the point. Maybe it runs in the family to ruminate upon the idea.

I was really thinking about the process of death, the journey. I have been very close to death my whole life, the specter of it and the reality. My grandmother lived with us while she was dying of ovarian cancer, and those short years were some of the most informative years of my cognitive life. I watched my family rally around her, watched my grandfather tend to her devotedly, and watched her slow and sometimes holy undoing. Death is never pretty, and hers was no exception, but I often think that I learned to live by watching her attempt to gracefully die.

Some twelve years later I watched my grandfather die of lung cancer in that same house. Just as my mom had done before, she opened her doors to her parents to give them a safe haven to rest a while before taking that last journey. Again, my family drew in together, tending to him, keeping vigil, washing, bathing, feeding, and sometimes just poking bad-taste fun at him to keep up with his wicked sense of humor. The process was no less disturbing, and it was amplified hundredfold by the fact that both my older sister and I were very pregnant at the time, and could not endure too much of the physical toll that his dying exacted.

In the past few years there have been many deaths around me; friends, family, and acquaintances have disappeared, and I mourn their loss. It puzzles me the way some people deal with death, and it puzzles me that I get so angry when I am excluded from the process. Just recently we have lost people to breast cancer (2), leukemia, heart attacks (2), lung cancer, ovarian cancer, old age, and other circumstances. In one case we were gone for a short weekend and missed the sudden funeral due to Jewish time observances. I felt so helpless and adrift after that, bereft that I had not had the chance to celebrate her life and pay respects after her death. In another case I was excluded from properly grieving and paying of respects by a sudden inexplicable chasm in a longtime friendship. I was caught up in a double sorrow: grieving for the friendship, and grieving for the lost friend.

Other deaths we were excluded from not by tangible reasons, but by the intangible boundaries of social order. We were not proper family by blood, but probably shared more time with the deceased than the actual extended family. And the most disturbing event is the most bewildering: being the last person to visit with someone before they died. There is such weight in that anomaly, such a sense of human responsibility.
What did I say? What did he think? Did he feel loved and happy when I left? In that case I know he did: I had just taken a very elderly, beloved neighbor a dozen chocolate chip cookies. They found him in his chair with the cookies in his lap, a bottle of water by his side, and the ball game on TV. May I die with the same comforts and peace.

Perhaps Italy makes me appreciate life wholly because you live on the razor’s edge here. You are always moments away from getting creamed by a Vespa, falling off a poorly-maintained crumbling monument, eating a tainted meal from careless hands, breaking your back in one of the thousands of potholes larger than manholes, or simply getting into a fatal fistfight over cutting off someone in line. There seem to be no funeral parlors here, no funerals in churches, no hearsts, no mourners wearing black. What do modern Italians do with their dying, their dead? Is it inconvenient to the tourists to wait for a funeral to finish, for the motorcades to pass? Just as it is hard for me to imagine living comfortably in Rome, it is hard for me to imagine dying comfortably in Rome.

That’s my rumination on Death, and now I’m done. (I know, bad pun.)