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Oh, the ironies of living! A couple of weeks after I wrote this a test ordered by my oncologist informed me that I now have metastatic breast cancer. Six years to the month after I thought I’d whomped the beast with surgery and radiation. Still, the basics are the same so here’s the post.
Here I am behind my family a couple of days ago at our annual foray to The Pumpkin Patch. It’s a lovely farm outside the little city of Madera, California, where a friendly farm family has hosted happy pumpkin hunters for years. If you like the pumpkins, you’ve also got to admire the rich, red pomegranates awaiting harvest on their small trees.
“Dost thou think thyself only a puny form when the universe is folded up within thee?”*
Throughout life I’ve felt the closeness of death. I’ve nearly died a few times, yet here I am. Inwardly steady, outwardly sentimental or ho hum because well, death, like birth, is an existential reality.
Energy may neither be created nor destroyed; each one of us is equipped with so much of it, to juggle our way through life on earth.
My experiences with death began at age five. First during the 1953 polio epidemic, when the little girl in the bed next to mine in Haynes Memorial Hospital in Boston quietly passed away during the night. This might have been shocking to me if I hadn’t also been deathly ill. Was that my grandmother’s voice murmuring some Baha’i teachings regarding death and what to expect afterwards? Gradually I felt certain that the soul of the girl, whose name I never knew, had gone to another place where she would be beautifully cared for, surrounded by pure love.
Back at home later on, a few of our house cats got run over on the street in front of our place because In those days nobody thought of keeping their kitties safe indoors. Their little deaths were traumatic for my brother and me. We picked out our kitties when friends’ cats had litters; we fed them, combed fleas out of their coats and played with them. The loss of them lay heavy in our hearts. We seemed to have no control over the wanderings of cats.
Then came our grandmother, known to us as Grammie, who ran in front of a car as she walked home from visiting a friend one night. That was a huge disruption in our family for years. My mother never got over it. She always said, “My mother was the best person I ever knew.”
Grammie may have done that on purpose, bothered at age seventy eight by the incursions of age into her formerly bright life. This possibility never entered my mind until I, too, got up into the mid-70s and realized how precariousness prevails more often…
Since then there have been many passings of cherished family members, friends and pets. Even non-pets, but animals brutally killed and brought to my attention by various animal activists online. Those are some of the unresolved deaths in my life. Why is it so hard for humans in general to understand that animals feel all the same things that we do, but unlike us they are unable to change the circumstances of their lives very much. Choices are forced upon them and they deserve mercy from us.
“Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning; for death unheralded shall come upon thee and thou shalt be called to give account for thy deeds.” ~ Baha’u’llah, Hidden Words
The most dramatic death was that of my brother, Donny to his family and friends, Donald to the schools he so disliked attending.
I had just come home from my dorm at Boston University, where I was scheduled to graduate in a couple of days. A friend came with me. She went to bed early that first night at home, but my mother and I stayed up late in one of our many deep conversations. Meaning, it was deep until two police officers came to the door to let the family know that Donny and his friend, Kevin, had just died in a flaming car wreck a couple of miles from home.
Wrecks are commonplace at the end of school years, sadly. This one was dramatic enough that kids spoke about it for years. How, despite the falling rain, the race car hit a tree so hard part of the engine flew over phone lines to start a fire on the woods. How a few of the people who had homes tucked into that wooded area sold out soon after.
How a younger friend of mine, Mary, had crushed on my brother, whether or not he realized it, and how she came early to the funeral home with me to tuck a beaded necklace she had made for him into his coat pocket. For my part, I stuffed in a cookie I had made, as Donny liked to swoop down on anything I had just finished baking. He was a big guy, and could disappear food before you realized what was going on.
I wanted to play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture during the service, but was overruled. Donny’d have loved the cannon fire
I shall never forget the minister, who following the graveside service we had in the old family plot in Pine Grove Cemetery in East Pembroke, caught my eye and walked over to where I stood saying a silent farewell to my brother. The man said, “Admiring the rig?” He meant the setup to lower the coffin into the hole when the time came.
Speechless then, so I will remain.
Pomegranates awaiting harvest on a local farm. They are so bursting with life!
Since that time more family,, beloved ex husband and friends have died, and yet here I am, mid 70s now, living in the vibrant heart of my daughter’s family. Her husband and two small kids, lots of friends. There does lurk a threat over me, a cancer that may creep back into my system. This is part of the dance, too. So many of us try to understand what it all means, and I don’t think we can, not in this life. I think of an Avett Brothers song, “What doe you see in the fire?” If I could stare into another cozy wood stove fire on a cold night I bet I would see wild, crazy love dancing all around me. The pulse of life.
The way I think about death is that life plays out along a spiral, we all are on there for a certain period of time; when our revolutions end we step off onto something awaiting. New recruits set out from the bottom, twirl their way around till their stop comes.**
My personal studies suggest that the type of afterlife awaiting us depends on how genuinely we have sought God in our lives. On our own. Not through what our parents said or did, or a tv personality or some peer group of ours said or did, but out of our own personal longing, curiosity, need to know. The choices we have made through the free will that is given to every child at birth.
Baha’i teachings say that we will know one another, those who with genuine love will go on together. That there is a special mercy for the very young, the disabled, the ones who never stood a chance to survive given the circumstances they were born to.
And so much more!
*Attribruted to Imam Alí, quoted by ‘Abu’l-Baha in Some Answered Questions
**Strictly my own idea, not Baha’i or from any other Holy Scriptures
I dearly love this Avett Brothers song from over a decade ago, called Live or Die.. It’s my theme song for living!
Rising Over the Smoke 