This is Not My Last Essay
There’s an old joke about a prisoner being dragged to the electric chair, screaming, “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. “ When they finally drag him to the chair, he looks up at the executioner and pleads, “ I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” The executioner looks down at him and says, “Well, don’t sit down, man.”
As I prepare myself for my upcoming Angiogram/Angioplasty, I will try not to scream as they wheel me to the operating room. But I may be repeating that joke.
In both Buddhism and Hinduism the divine Garuda is a bird-like creature, that once born never touches the ground. It is said that as it flies it squacks, “Die. Die. Die.” it is constantly reminding us of impermanence.
Does that mean we have no responsibility for the lives we live. From my perspective, we absolutely do. My friend Richard Reoch in his book, Dying Well, (Wipf & Stock 2022) doesn’t just talk about that responsibility, he puts it into action. Conspicuously present, he picks up his Death File, an overstuffed folder which holds all his vital information. From bank accounts, to passwords, to wills, email listings, any and all things others would need to easily address his final deposition at the time of his death. Far from being a morbid collection of documents, it is an incredibly compassionate assemblage that is nothing more than responsible and considered care for others upon the inevitable, his death.
Delusion notwithstanding, it is inevitable. There’s simply nowhere to hide, because none of us have ever gotten out alive.
Every November, our magnificent, nearly half-acre, garden dies back. Its stunning and varied beauty becomes a palate of memories, beginning each spring with its broad swaths of white, pink and purple Spanish bells, covering every nook and rise of the garden. There’s the sun-bathed bee-kind garden, filled with California poppies, peonies, roses, sedum, and raspberries. The English garden with it’s well-mowed, brilliant-green lawn, surrounded by 20 foot high rhododendrons, whose complex blossoms burst forth in pinks, reds and purples. The main flower garden with its fabulous mixture of patagonias, pestimamines, oriental poppies, day lilies, hydrangeas, and dahlias, and closing each fall with a foamy white sea of waving anemones. The two memorial gardens, Peggy’s, and now Jerrie’s, celebrating both our mother’s lives and deaths. Peggy’s with Its colorful mix of ranunculus, rambling roses, clematis, columbine, and hydrangeas. Jerrie’s just being built, but already with sculptures and dotted with Spanish Bells.
When my mother, Peggy, died at 100 years and 100 days, my step-father gave me a large plastic bag filled with her ashes. The notion was to use those as the goodness in a garden Laura would build for her. Come the March following her death, Laura cleared an area of the garden that had become over run with a couple of ground-covering thugs that had staked this as their ground. They hadn’t encountered anything like Laura’s tenacity before.
We asked folks to give us flowers they thought Peggy would particularly appreciate. Then, once the ground was ready, it was time to spread Peggy’s ashes. There was only one small problem. We couldn’t find what we had done with them. We had placed them in a covered ceramic receptacle, for safe keeping, and then never saw it again.
When we discovered it was missing, can you really discover what isn’t there, we knew we had to tell my father-in-law. Laura and I thought the loss was actually pretty funny. We hadn’t lost Peggy, just the dusty ashes that were formerly part of her, but never really her. The absurdity of losing these lifeless remnants made us laugh every time we thought about it. Where’s Peggy? Where’s Peggy?
When I told my step-father, Norm, what had a happened, there was a brief silence on the other end of the phone, and then he started to laugh. Oh, good, I thought. He gets it’s not really her we lost. Even without her ashes, the garden was resplendent with the colors and vibrance of Peggy. Laura had conjured her magic gardener’s touch and the result was stunning. Now, each year’s return of her original planting becomes more lush and abundant than the previous. That was Peggy. It was alive with her memory, if not her ashes.
It has been said, dying is easy, comedy is hard.
It has been said, dying is easy, comedy is hard. When my angiogram was initially recommended and I accused him of being a surgeon, only knowing how to cut. He vehemently corrected me. “I am an interventionalist.” He said with an air of being insulted. This angiogram procedure, which appears to avert what my father had when he was 66, then commonly called, bypass surgery, is known, now, as an intervention.
My father was brought up in an orthodox Jewish household, the seventh born child out of nine children. His mother, my grandmother, was an amazing cook. She had come from the Ukraine and a small village outside Kiev. She and her four eldest children and her sister, Bessie, had traveled across Russia, through China, to Japan and then on to San Francisco. She and her family troupe then made their final journey to Milwaukee, WI, where my grandfather awaited their arrival.
My memories of her always took place in the kitchen. She made the most scrumptious Jewish foods I have ever tasted. And it turns out, one of the primary reasons her food was so dammed delicious was schmaltz… chicken fat. Is sometimes referred to as “liquid gold,” because it makes food taste so doggone good. It is also invariably the source of the demise of my father’s brothers and sisters and probably half his relatives from heart attacks.
In addition to the triple bypass my father had at 66, he had a heart attack at 44, an Aortic aneurysm at 79, and finally, an angioplasty at 89. His heart had been through wars and prejudice, and just kept on going. He died at 93 from what is lovingly called, congestive heart failure. It was true he outlasted everyone in his family, but he shouldn’t have with what he put his heart through or what his heart put him through. Fortunately, after the bypass surgery, He made a wonderful transformation. He finally learned to open his heart to the world, and he had a big one. My father was one of the funniest men most people ever met. He was the Jokemeister, and I believed his humor, also an inherited family trait, allowed him to traverse what would killed less funny men.
As one of the top admen in LA, he spent his working life swimming in that stressful, “gotta have it now” world of advertising. Until his heart attack, the three martini lunches were not myth, but reality. I once asked him, “how did you get any work done after lunch?” He said, “We didn’t. We slept.” I’ll add, he’d come home, having driven through bumper-to-bumper traffic from downtown LA to the San Fernando Valley, and immediately stir-up another batch of martinis. He stopped that practice after the heart attack, and began smoking pot not too long after.
When he finally came to live with us at 93, he knew it was to die, but Laura, who adored him, as did everyone he knew, wanted him with us. I often thought, he loved Laura more than me. It didn’t matter, because I knew he loved me, and I loved Laura more than, me too.
One day around 3PM, while he was living with us, he had an energy crash, and asked to be taken back to his bedroom. Our wonderful Philippine caregiver helped me get him into bed, and when he was there he grabbed each of our hands. It was then he began the litany. ”Tell Peggy I love her. Tell Laura I love her. Tell Rusty, I love him. Long about the 10th name, Laura came home and took his hand from the caregiver. He went on telling us who to tell he loved them. I finally interrupted, saying, “Dad, you know, you were seen by two doctors and a nurse today, and none of them said you were dying, today.” He stopped and looked up at me. “They didn’t?” he asked, his voice unwavering. “No, Dad, they didn’t,” I told him. A small smile crossed his lips. “In that case,” he said, now sitting himself up on the bed, “I think I’ll have a Scotch.” And he did.
He did die, two weeks later, in the middle of the night. Laura had taken my place next to him, so I could catch a little sleep. He died a short time later, holding Laura’s hand when he took his final breath. I told Laura later, that was how I wanted to die.
My mother was very different. Prior to us losing her ashes, (that’s invariably a given, but I feel it should be stated), I was at her bedside in Santa Monica. She was looking out her bedroom window at a coral tree she spent hours staring at. Everyday, about 3PM, a hummingbird would land on one of the spindly branches of the tree and look in on my mother. Day after day the hummingbird showed up, hunkered down on the branch of the coral tree, and looked in on my mother and just watched. It really was astounding.
She reached over the side of her bed and took my hand, looking straight at me, said simply, “Life is beautiful. Life is beautiful.” That was the exit line. I knew it was time to go.
The last thing I remember my mother saying to me, as she turned from that sight, shortly before I had to return to Oregon, was something that taught me more about how to live than almost all the things she’d ever taught me previously. That’s probably not true, but it was powerful nonetheless. She reached over the side of her bed and took my hand, looking straight at me, said simply, “Life is beautiful. Life is beautiful.” That was the exit line. I knew it was time to go.
I know I won’t die during the intervention. Not because my departed parents are somehow looking after me, but because it’s not how I see myself dying. I once was allowed to go into Left Hand Tunnel at Carlsbad Caverns. This was the part of the cave that was still unexpurgated, purposefully left wild, and definitely not for tourists. I was researching a book on caves and caverns, two terms that are without distinction. I was being led on this journey by undoubtedly the three most experienced cavers in the country: Ron Kerbo, the National Parks Cave Resource Specialist, his equivalent with the Bureau of Land Management, and the current Carlsbad Cave Resource Specialist. They had led me through the darkness, our headlamps our only source of light. We moved along a portion of our passage that was through a round tunnel. At its end, we came to an abyss, the trail’s end. As was pointed out to me, the trail picked-up about four feet across this abyss, for which the bottom could not be seen in the darkness, and about two feet below our side of the crevasse. Kerbo blithely told me to go ahead, jump across. I turned to him and said, “No way!” I may have inserted a word between those very firm directions, then added. “Not until I see you do it.”
With one deft, confident step, he leapt the abyss, landing adroitly on the other side. He then turned back to me. I sat down at the edge of this deep trench, stuck my leg out to see how close it came to the other side. It didn’t. Then a very strange feeling came over. A very distinct feeling, accompanied by an inner voice, I knew it was mine, that said quite clearly, “this is not where you die.” I immediately stood up and made the leap across that depthless abyss. OK, Kerbo caught my arm as soon as my foot touched the other side, but I knew, that flight across the abyss was not where I was going to die.
In my Buddhist practice, we discover we can meet the world exactly as it shows-up, without expectation, bias or prejudice. I know this. Occasionally, I’ve done it. I also know this angioplasty is not where I’m going to die.
Illustration by Huxley, age 6