A Good Death

A year and some ago, I wrote a post that you'll have to go back and read for this to make any sense. You can find that post here.

I just refound and read it because I came across an obituary in the paper this morning that read:

Phyllis Straus

1928-2013

Phyllis Lindsey Straus was born on July 20, 1928. She died peacefully in her bed next to her beloved dog Solly on April 19, 2013. There is no doubt that if she could have chosen her death that would have been it.

There is more. The tender, bare outline of her life events but it is in those first lines that I am dumbfounded because in the conversation we had which sparked the post, that is exactly how I told her I wished she would die.

And she did it. 

I am thinking about her this morning and how I'd see her car at the Post Office, a beat-up old Volvo with a Janet Reno for Governor bumpersticker on it. She was not a small woman, she was a woman who even as she became frailer and slower you could just look at and know that once she had been very powerful, very strong, and she had to have been in order to do the giant sculpture that she did. She had those bright blue piercing eyes. She was fiercely independent. She was something. 

When I lived in the house she had bought from us and that she died in, I had planted a rose on the garden fence and it was the reddest, most blooming, fragrant rose I've ever seen and ever since I've been trying to figure out what its name was but I have never been able to and none of the roses I've looked at after talking to nursery people are the same. I wonder if that rose was still growing in her yard because if it was, it was probably blooming when she died. 

I hope it was. With all my heart, I hope it was.

I am thinking about that and her and I am thinking of how that little Cracker house which I did love so very much had two front doors and I was told that back when the house was built, that's how they did it. One door was used for the everyday comings-in and goings-out of the living and the other only used for coffins to enter and leave, empty and then filled. I wonder if they passed Phyllis out that door. I doubt it. Who observes customs like that anymore? 

It doesn't matter. 

What matters is that Phyllis Straus was able to die there, in her home that she loved with her dog whom she adored, some of her giant sculptures in the yard, her art which gave her life purpose. 

Well. It is a slow, quiet day in Lloyd and one of our inhabitants is gone and has been for a month and a half and I am not sorry she's gone because the way she left was perfect and exactly what she wanted. I am not sad at all, but thrilled for her. She got that job done and she did it right. 

I would wish the same for all of us- such a death. 

Meanwhile, life goes on for us who still live here. I took my walk and I saw a few people and said hello and I've taken the trash and gone to the Post Office where I will never see that Volvo again and don't remember rightly the last time I DID see it but I don't think it was that long ago. We never did talk again, me and Phyllis. We didn't have to. We said what we needed to say when we had that conversation back in January of 2012. And I'm glad we said it. 

All right. I've got stuff to do. The living are so busy, aren't we? But I'm thinking about Phyllis and I'm thinking about that house I loved and over the course of this one morning two magnolias which I can see from where I write on the back porch have opened up from their tight buds into full-flung and white-petaled flowers and their scent drifts on the air. It all goes by so quickly. Pay attention and do whatever it is that makes you feel alive because life is so short and the years that we can do what we love are even shorter.

Happy Friday, y'all.

Love...Ms. Moon

Not Your Typical Friday Post

I think part of my sinking spirits yesterday came from an article I read in a New Yorker by a man whose daughter had died from a very rare childhood brain tumor. One moment the child was a healthy ten-month old, progressing joyfully along the path of development, beloved by her mother, her father, her sister. The next moment, a diagnosis, followed by 108 days of torturous treatments and then death.

The article, which was in the June 13th and 20th edition and which was entitled The Aquarium and was written by Aleksandar Hemon, was honest and gritty and it dealt with how parents cope or do not cope with such situations. Such unimaginable situations.

After reading it, I felt angry. Not at the father or the mother, of course, or even at the disease- disease has no agenda. It just is.
I think I felt angry at the doctors who must have known that there was no way this child could live with such an aggressive tumor which was so rare that there isn't even a chemo protocol for it. And yet, they kept the parents' hopes alive as they kept the child alive, albeit in a state of profound suffering for the rest of her short life. The surgeries, the chemos which wiped out her immune system and created such agony for the baby, for those who loved her and tended her. They allowed the parents to have even a shred of hope so that even as the baby's major organs failed and they gave them the odds of any more interventions helping at all, the parents said, "Yes, please, do whatever you can. Don't let my baby die," and isn't that what any parent would say?

I don't know if my anger is well-founded. Perhaps the doctors did think there was hope. They had more knowledge of what was going on than I do, sitting here so far removed from the reality of the situation.
But I have personally witnessed the keeping of a sure-to-die baby alive by doctors with all of their surgeries, their medications, their interventions and machines to the point where that child's entire brief life was made of nothing but a tiny plastic box in which he laid, tubes everywhere, tiny veins constantly sliced into, tiny chest opened again and again, until the inevitable happened and he died, his parents finally able to hold him in their arms only in death.
Their solace, if there was any solace to be found, lay in the fact that their child would never be cut into again.

And yet, perhaps there is some comfort to be found in the fact that everything which could have been done had been done.
Medically, at least.
I don't know.
But I have to wonder at the way we here in the Western World define doing everything which can be done. Is it really honest and truthful and is it even slightly helpful to do all of the treatment humanly, medically possible when the outcome is so plain? Is it right to give people hope when perhaps there really is none? To offer them the barest eyelash of a miracle when any parent would grab onto that eyelash as if it could offer them safe passage through the stormiest of seas?
Would it be better to offer the parents compassion and help with the reality of the situation and let them live with their child for the rest of whatever life she has, offering palliative care and support so that when the moment of death comes there is not such shock, such disbelief, such a rendering of the soul into shattered fragments?
That there could have been at LEAST a small eyelash's hope of acceptance?

Again. I don't know.

We don't know how to deal with death here. Or suffering. We are not good at that. Here's what the author said about suffering:

"One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling- that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel's suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world. We learned no lessons worth learning; we acquired no experience that would benefit anyone. And Isabel most certainly did not earn ascension to a better place as there was no place better for her than at home with her family."

I think that one of the reasons I cannot go along with religion is the very fact that parents lose children, even the most faith-full and good and prayer-full parents. Could there be any prayer more unselfishly prayed than the prayer of a mother to save her dying child?
I doubt it.

And I am not trashing medical science here. It makes great strides and its practitioners, the good ones, save countless lives, give innumerable years of good life to those to who would have died without them and their knowledge, their care, their ministrations. I think of Kathleen's doctor and the entire clinic up there in Thomasville. I think of Kathleen who, if she had stayed with her original doctor, would most likely be dead by now but who instead, is in Spain with her father.

But sometimes, there is no hope and when doctors know that and yet continue to treat and give hope by the mere fact of that treatment, it is just plain wrong.

It is not death which is the enemy. It is our inability to accept it, even to the point of creating more pain and suffering than would naturally occur if we could just try.
We keep people alive. That is what our doctors do. That is their job, as they see it, and yet, all of us, every one of us, will finally and at last, die. When will we learn that?

I don't know but I know I have been present at deaths where there was acceptance and there was pure, strong love and there seemed to be something there which carried us all through the passage together and it was holy.
As holy as a birth and I swear that's true.

And I also know that it's true that if I were in the position of that author or his wife, I would have most certainly grabbed onto what the doctors offered me in the way of hope. That I would have allowed myself to believe that despite everything and all evidence to the contrary, my baby would be the one to live, to be able to grow up strong and as healthy and as smart and unaffected as any child who ever lived. Because that is what I would have wanted to believe.
But would it have been right for the doctors to offer me this hope when as the treatment progressed it became more and more apparent that it would not, in the end, end that way at all?
Where was the point when the doctors should have said, "Look. Your baby is not going to make it. Take her home, love her, cuddle her, be with her for every second that you have with her. Hold her in your arms. Do everything you can to love her until she goes on."?

Wouldn't that have truly been doing everything that humanly could have been done?
Sometimes I think that our godspirit lies not in our ability to try to reverse what is inevitable but in our ability to accept that which is inevitable.

Or to try.

Well. That's what I'm thinking about today and I wish I weren't but I am a human and as such, need to think about such things.
And my heart is sad for us poor humans, our suffering, our pain.

Tell me what you think because I think this is something we all need to talk about. The title of that piece, "The Aquarium" comes from the author's feeling that he was in an aquarium when his daughter was ill. That everyone else in the world stood outside of where he was and that what he and his wife were going through was impossible to share with others. Wouldn't it have been better if we were not so afraid of death, of talking about it, of being so superstitious that just admitting the possibility of death makes us feel as if we are beckoning it to us and the ones we love so that when we or others we love are experiencing something like this, we do not have to feel that we are in an aquarium?
That we could feel arms around us, helping to hold us up, even as we are holding the ones who are dying?

If we weren't just so afraid? Not only to reach out for help but to be able to offer it purely and unselfishly?

I don't know. But I think so. I really do.

No Funeral Tonight

I thought for sure we'd be having a funeral tonight but no, Pearl is walking around and I gave her some canned (!) dog food and okay, it was the Publix brand but hell- what does she know? and she ate it up and she could go on for another month, I suppose.

Lily brought Owen out to say good-bye when we thought that Pearl was approaching the Pearly Gates (haha!) and although Pearl lay on the chair for awhile and Lily hugged her up, she soon got up and began to follow Owen around as she usually does. She's a tough old thing, this boxer dog of ours. Owen hugged her and played and fed chickens and his Bop was here so he was getting hugs and kisses from all sides and Lily and I laid down with him and I read him books and he covered up and drank a bottle but then he wanted to get up and play some more and so he did.

Lily and Owen and Jessie took my mother out for lunch after her doctor's appointment and I'm sure that pleased her beyond all measure. I went to town and ran errands for hours, sitting impatiently at red lights, but being so happy at the nursery where everything was blooming and the breeze was blowing and the giant, deep wind chimes sounded like Buddha voices and I hated to leave but I had to, you know, after I'd picked out my flowers, my herbs, my eggplants and peppers.

And when I got home, Jessie came out and she helped her daddy in the garden and she's staying for supper, maybe the night.

And then it's TOMORROW that Owen is coming out at eight and so it'll be another full day and I am going to be so glad to get to bed tonight. I am weary to the bone.

But I swear to you- I can't even begin to say how precious it has been today to talk to all of my children, to see some of them and Owen too, for us all to draw together for this old dog so lovingly. I wonder if all the attention she got pulled her back away from death and gave her whatever it was that she needed to get up and eat and go on with life. Perhaps she, like me, feels needed in some way. She shares Owen responsibility with me in her doggy way and she's always loved babies and children more than anything in this world. I surely do not want her to go on living if she's in pain or too confused or unable to enjoy her life but for right now, she seems fine and so she has my full approval.

What a blessing it would be if she just went in her sleep, peacefully, curled up and not even aware of the transition.

And for all of us. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

Well, it will be what it is, for Pearl, for me, for you. We can't control how we die, mostly. Oh, I suppose we can to some small degree but for the most part, it will happen as it will and I suppose the important thing is not the way we die but the way we live, and if we are lucky enough to be needed, to be part of a group of people, whether blood-family or friend-family, whom we love and who love us, who come together for births and deaths and sometimes just to dye Easter Eggs or to sit on the porch, well, we're lucky.

And you know me. I am.

Unbelievably and sometimes almost unfathomably... lucky.

Yeah. Yeah. Here's My Solstice Post

Of all the pictures I deleted, there were as many of chickens as of anything else. If there is a theme to my photography, it is sunsets and chickens. I shit you not. I have a million sunset pictures. Dog Island, Cozumel, Roseland, Florida.
And chickens- well. Up until Owen they were the main focus of my lens.
Of course now that Owen is here, the chickens do not get as much photo-time as they once did but I still like to take their pictures. They still delight my heart, these fine, fat domestic birds of mine. This morning as Mr. Moon was leaving they were in the flower bed beside the kitchen, scratching away with great industry. Mr. Moon said, "You haven't had to weed that bed all year, have you?"
"Nope," I said. "And they fertilize, too."
They're like miracles to me, those crazy hens and that crazy rooster Elvis. Organic bug and weed control, organic fertilizer, all in one delightful package of comedic seriousness. And they lay eggs for us to eat!
I swear, whoever invented the chicken should be hailed as one of the major saviors of mankind.
Or, perhaps it is just the chickens themselves who should be hailed as such. Let me ask you this- who has done more, in practical terms, for the human race? Jesus or chickens?
No contest there, babies. Not in my mind.
Jesus may have fed the masses. ONCE! Chickens have been providing us with protein for hundreds of thousands of years, good perfect protein and they can do that with nothing more than the bugs and weeds in a yard.
Maybe this should be the Church of the Chicken Shit Crazy.
I'll think about that.

Yesterday was the summer solstice and I didn't say one damn thing about it. It's been so hot here for so long that the solstice had no meaning to me. So the earth was tipped a bit more this way, the day was the longest of the year? My legs did not register the tipping and I fell asleep on the couch at nine o'clock. I'd spent an hour or so weeding in the garden, forgotten my afternoon shot of espresso and ate a nice meal.
Knock-out!
I slept right through that extra one fifth of a second or whatever it is.
I'm not a very good Druid, am I?

Tonight, though, there will be a bit of a ceremony over at Kathleen's. She is having to help one of her dear dog children into the light on Thursday due to old age. The precious dog is blind and confused and as much as Kathleen hates to do it, she knows that if the situation were reversed, she would want to be held and let go. Wouldn't we all ask for that when the time comes? And Kathleen is the most responsible animal owner I know of. Her animals are adored and better cared for than most children. This is going to be very hard for her and of course, there is the matter of the grave. A Lab is a big dog so Mr. Moon and Rich and another friend are going over to help get that ready tonight. And on top of that, Kathleen has three roosters which are making life hell for her sweet hens and so Mr. Moon is going to turn them into meat for her. Two other friends are coming over and there will be food and beer and champagne and a celebration of life and a liberation of the hens through rooster-death.
Kathleen will freeze that meat and when we have our Jezebel party, she plans on making a dinner of cock to serve. Kathleen is like that- the tenderest of hearts and a streak within her as mean as Jessie's. You can just look at both of them and know how mean they are, Jessie and Kathleen. Both as pragmatic as accountants, both as ethereal as moonbeams, both as tenderhearted as...well- you know what? I can't think of any thing or any one as tenderhearted as those two.
So this is going to be a hard week for my friend, Kathleen but tonight we will try and help her in whatever way we can, a few of her friends. Second day of summer and we'll be gathering to kill roosters, dig a grave, eat some food, comfort our friend as she is about to lose one of her best friends. One of her kids as she calls her dogs. Kids without opposable thumbs.
Her kids have never let her down. Not once. And she has never let them down either. And on Thursday she will do what has to be done in order to do the best for her kid that can be done.

Life can be cruel and so can summer. One of the most beautiful passages in the Bible tells us that to everything there is a season. I take great comfort in this.

It is the season of the heat and the dark breathing green. It is the season of the afternoon thunderstorms and the season of the harvest of too many cucumbers. It is the blackberry season and it is the season for the chickens to rest long hours under the shed in the cool, sandy dirt of Lloyd after their work of scratching.

Death has no season. It is with us at all times. But so is life. And tonight we'll gather and celebrate that while Kathleen's dear kid is still with us and we'll prepare for her death.
Her release.
As death and life have no particular season, neither does love.

We will celebrate all of that in this season of summer tonight and it will be hot and the people digging the grave and slaughtering the roosters will sweat. We will all sweat, in fact. There is no way around sweating here in Florida one day after the solstice.
Part of life like tears and blood.

And we will put our sweaty arms around Kathleen and her still-living old kid and my friend's heart will hopefully be comforted, even as it pumps the blood around her body, even as she cries, which I imagine she will.

And her hens will be happy and will scratch around their yard with their one good rooster to watch over them as mine do here and there will be meat in the freezer, cleaned and ready to cook to sustain us in the future and well, to everything there is a season and we should all be comforted in that.

More Talking About Breasts

Ms. Maggie May posted something recently which was so beautiful- which is not unusual. But in this post there was a picture of Helmet Newton's wife with her breasts exposed and they were absolutely beautiful.

Go on. See that picture, read that post here, if you haven't already.

Worth it, wasn't it?

Anyway, those breasts reminded me of my friend, Sue, whom I have written about before. Her birthday just passed recently- a day before mine- and she died fourteen years ago.
Fourteen years ago.

She died at the age of forty-four and so she would be fifty-nine now, had she lived, but Sue wasn't meant to live out a long life. Life had been hard for her. She was too sensitive, too smart, too apt to fall in love with the wrong man and then be amazed when he left her. Amazed and taken under like a drowning pirate, like a mermaid brought to shore without lungs, only gills.

That was Sue. My Sue-Sue. She's the one to the right in that picture taken about 1986 so forgive us our trespasses in wardrobe and hair-styles.

You can't tell from that picture but Sue's breasts were about the most amazing things I'd ever seen. They were perfect breasts. Round on the bottom and roundish on the tops- oh. Those breasts cried out for a palm to cup them. I don't care what your sexual orientation is, there is something about the shape of a perfect roundness which makes you want to cup it. Have you ever carried a watermelon in your arms? Have you ever held a newborn's head in your hands?
Well. That was Sue's breasts.

I always teased her and said, "When I go to the plastic surgeon, I am taking you with me and you are going to have to show him your bosoms and I will say, 'These are the ones I want.'"

But she was so modest, my Sue. She called chicken breasts chicken bosoms. Seriously. She did.

We would meet every Friday at Happy Hour at a local bar where children and dogs were not only allowed, but invited. There was music and dancing and outdoor fanciness and every Friday, my husband would say, "Sue- come on. Just unbutton one button. Come on."
But she never would. She would giggle and say, "Oh. Glenno." But she wouldn't give him the slightest view of those perfect breasts.

And then she got sick. And then, she was dying. And on the day she was dying we gathered around her- her friends, her loves. She insisted that she had to move into a different apartment and her dying was so quick that the moving occurred on the day that she died. While her parents and other friends moved her furniture, a few of us, people who had known and loved her forever, gathered around her bed and held her as she died. There was me and that other woman in the picture and an old, old friend named Chip, and Mr. Moon. Glenno, as she called him. And we held her and at one point, she took Chip's hand and placed it on her breast and I will never forget the way his face looked, his hand on her bosom, his eyes spilling with tears.

It came time to move Sue. Everything was moved but the bed she was lying in and she insisted that yes, she had to move. And so, there were sensitive negotiations and she said this to Mr. Moon:
"Glenno. I want you to hold me like a mother holds her baby."
And so of course, he did.
He gathered her into his arms and pulled her to him and she was wearing a dress that I had made out of yards and yards of blue cotton. It gaped around her neck and she pulled it close so that even in dying, he could not see those perfect breasts.

And he carried her to Julianne's van and we drove to her new apartment and he laid her down on the bed which her friends had moved and within a short while, she had died.

She died. Sue-Sue died with so much dignity and grace that I was astounded. And as in all deaths, once they occur, the body is nothing. Just a shell of dust and clay. Those breasts of Sue-Sue's were nothing but dust and clay.

But that post of Maggie May's reminded me of all of this. Those perfect breasts, Chip's tears, Sue asking Mr. Moon to hold her like a mama holds her baby.

Listen- breasts are sacred. Not the breasts that have been inflated with bags of silicone. That shit is bullshit. Breasts are what make us mammals. Breasts are nipple and tissue and glands that feed our young. Breasts are art.

Breasts are beauty.
And that's what Ms. Maggie May's post reminded me of. Of the beauty of Sue-Sue's breasts. And how funny she would find it to read this post.

When Sue died, she was cremated and after we scattered her ashes, we licked our fingers.

I hope I got a molecule or so of Sue's breasts on my tongue. That would be holy. Whatever it was that I licked was holy.

And that's what I have to say about breasts tonight, inspired by Maggie May's post which made me think of sweet round bosoms, of the sustenance of nipples, of the perfect circle of life and of death. And of Sue. My sweet, sweet Susan with breasts so perfect that any woman would want them, that anyone would want to cup them, that maybe I took into my body by licking my fingers of her ashes.

"Glenno," I hear her saying. "Hold me like a mother holds her baby."

And there you are- a dying wish. Hold me like a mother holds her baby.

And the sweet roundness of breasts and the unknowable crossing of life into death and the friend that I had named Sue.

And Then....

Another good one died last night of another deadly neurological disease. My brother-in-law, my husband's sister's husband. He was less than one year from diagnosis to death, I think. ALS. Lou Gehrig's Disease. Let me tell you- it's not a good way to die.
Ron was a huge man, over six feet five and had two enormously tall sons and was as good a father and husband as anyone I ever met. Gentle and kind (as men of his size so often are), loving, funny, and just pure of heart.
He'd gotten to the feeding-tube/respirator stage of his disease and suddenly, last night, his blood pressure dropped and his respirations increased. They took him to the ER and he was dead within a few hours, leaving his wife in a S. Florida hospital, one moment a wife, the next a widow. They'd moved there recently and had no support system yet. Their sons were in other states, his sisters in Texas. He was retired, my sister-in-law had found a good job down there and planned to work for a few years before they settled into their long-dreamed of retirement in their nice home with a pool and a yard where they could grow citrus and palm trees.
She called my husband when Ron was admitted and so my man hit the road even before waiting to hear the outcome.
"Is it okay if I go?" he asked me and what could I say? Lynn's made the journey and he needed to be there for his sister. They're the only two left from his family and there was no decision to make except which shirts to pack.
I cried while I was making him some sandwiches and coffee, but I knew he had to go. He got the call that Ron had passed less than an hour after he left.
Death is taking no holidays around here.
But there sure are some beautiful souls adding their light to the universe. I'm trying hard to remember that.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking of Ron and how we sat on the beach at Dog Island a few years ago, watching the sunset and talking about the things that matter.
I would never have guessed. I would never have guessed.

Keeping the Sabbath

It's Sunday afternoon and I always used to hate Sundays. Sunday was the day that was the worst for me as a child. Abuse in the morning, followed by pancakes, sausage, then church, followed by the rest of a day set aside as God's. The All-American Grand Slam!

Then I grew up and Sundays held no abuse, no church, and pancakes only if I wanted them. And yet, I would find myself waking up on Sundays, sad and crying, weeping over some pain I couldn't locate, couldn't pinpoint or describe. Finally, I realized the pain was my inside-baby girl's pain; she was still there, she was still hurting.

Oh. Well. I see.

Got myself off to therapy which was wonderful, in the way that vomiting nails would be wonderful, because of the relief of not having those nails in the belly any longer. Still, though, Sundays were hard. I would tiptoe around the land mines always lurking there, no matter how thorough the digging had been to locate, disarm, and defuse them. Tricky business for me and for my family, too and I frequently bemoaned the loss of one seventh of my week to such ridiculous and needless sadness.

Then one Sunday, a good friend of mine died. She'd been sick for a long time and her death was as beautiful and grand a death as anyone could want. She was surrounded by friends who loved her. We held and stroked her, whispered our love for her. And she went like a rocket! onto the next level. Into the place where babies come from and where we will all return someday. Birth, in reverse, a tidy packet of here-to-there, instead of there-to-here. That's exactly what it felt like, including the joy.

After that I was fine for a long, long time on Sundays. It was if my friend had given me, with her profound gift of such a holy death, an erasure of the pain that day had always brought me. I could wake up on Sunday morning without the heaviness in my heart that foretold the heaviness in my eyes that preceded tears. It was beautiful. Divine, even. That was twelve years ago, and I am still mostly fine on Sundays. Mostly. That's how powerful my friend's gift was.

But there are still some Sundays that a trace of sadness can cast a tiny shadow over me. It's as if that inside-baby girl sometimes sighs on a Sunday morning. She doesn't wail anymore, or scream or even weep silently. She simply sighs a little breath of despair of ever being rid entirely of pain. But so what? We all have pain. How could we know the joy of release if not for the pain?

And I get up and make pancakes (real ones, not like the Bisquick ones of my childhood) and serve them up to the family I have now and we like to eat them under the trees in the back yard next to the bird feeder with the dogs lazing around our feet, hoping for scraps, panting softly in the building heat of a summer day.

No church for me, thank-you.

And I think ALL the days are set aside as God's, if by God you mean that net of life that connects us all- that web of quarks and sparks the universe is made of.

Or something like that.