I don’t know where my parents are buried. I was at both their burials, in different graveyards. I don’t remember where. Nor do their graves have headstones.
Many find this weird, even off-putting. I don’t miss having a grave or headstone to commemorate.I don’t feel I need a place to go to think about, honour and celebrate my parents. The same with two brothers and a sister. They each and all have their own ‘warm’ spot in my heart and memory. Having said that, there is the urge to use the occasion for humour, as did the ‘voice’ of Loony Tunes Mel Blanc and comedian Rodney Dangerfield, whose tombstone reads: “There goes the neighbourhood”
My own dying and death journeys
I became interested (some say obsessed) with end of life conundrums way back in 2009. Back then, it wasn’t a personal situation that motivated this learning curve instead it was a logical progression of a health focus born of the arrival of daughters one and two. In 1986 – when daughter one came – I morphed from Entertainment Reporter to Entrepreneur, creating two hospital-based television networks dedicated to patient education. The first, The Parent Channel, the second, Healthtv. My approach was: ‘everyman’s perspective’.
In the fullness of time, children grew into adults and I stumbled onto a tweet chat where end of life options and their repercussions were being mulled by a spectrum of health care professionals: doctors, nurses, social workers, ethicists, chaplains, pharmacists. The virtual world crushed silos, and I was welcomed as a liaison between ‘their’ world and the rest of us mortals.
BestEndings.com, my book, Death Kills and my TEDtalk, Exit Laughing should give a hint of my penchant for humour.
I’m now invited as Keynote to conferences around the world. I also facilitate inter professional health students workshops focused on dying process.. For me, it was all about health decisions, repercussions. Questions to ask. Post decisional relief and regret.
Funeral plans were not within my scope of interest.
Fast forward: we sold our house and had new Wills made up.
With in a year, two dearly beloved people were heading to their ends. One of them, my 102 year old father in law, had his plot and officiant paid for. The other, my sister, is going to leave these decisions to her grown up son.
Husband and I had a talk. He, already paying yearly for the right to purchase plots. Me, it’s organ donation and cremation.
Then I decided to do something considered radical: rather than detail ‘what I’d want’, for daughters to honour, I asked each daughter what she’d like. Their initial reaction: “Whatever you want we’ll do.” I reminded them: I’ll be dead, with this story – allegedly true: When the late Dr Rob Buchman was asked by his children what music he’d like at his funeral, he answered, “Surprise me.”
Perhaps, for many, it is the funeral, the wake, shiva or other tradition that’s needed to comfort a grieving heart. But long after, what – if anything – can help with memories and feelings of loss.
My daughters are investigating making something from our ashes. Older favors a tree. Younger is contemplating something in the way of a piece of art. Both fill my heart with love and appreciation. Not a tombstone to be found.
This is Sam, my father-in-law. He’s going into his 103 year, and is still smiling. Yet every night, his last words before falling asleep:
God, please let me die
He’s not suffering in any major way: the swollen ankles and chronically congested chest don’t bother him as much as they do the doctor at his upscale Retirement Home. “He should go to the hospital.” Yet Sam does not want to go anywhere. He just wants out.
I’m going to die. [pause] I’m overdue
He has all his wits about him, still makes sure to get to the dining room for lunch and dinner – tho that may be as much for brief social contact as it is for nutrition.
He is everybody’s favourite there, too. This has become evident as his son puts in hours every day – spotting his father. The worry is, if he falls and breaks something, he won’t be able to stay in his ‘home’ to die.
These hours with his father are exhausting for sure, but memories are revisited, and laughter is shared. Finding a dirty coffee cup in the sink, his son scolds: “Mom would be giving you shit for this.” With a chuckle, the response is: “Don’t I know it”
His eldest granddaughter, explaining that she’s checking out studying abroad, elicits another zinger, with ensuing laughter, as this centenarian says:
I once studied a Broad
How to balance these joys with his desire to be gone. It’s my sister who came up with a ‘goodbye’ that’s better than Rest in Peace:
Live in memory, live in love
John Kastner 1946-2019
My bro died at home, on Palliative/Hospice Care
Although we did not know it at the time, my brother’s ‘end’ started November 2018, with a brain tumour diagnosis. Surgery before Christmas that year was deemed ‘successful’ and John was in such good physical shape that he was released early. He sailed through weeks of radiation and chemotherapy with few of the expected side effects. His only physical change was that he started wearing hats.
the man couldn’t resist mugging for the camera
John has a Brain Fart
the tumour came back with a vengeance
In August, results of an MRI were devastating. From then until he died –almost a year to the date of diagnosis – the speed of his physical decline was shocking. It was his confused speech that led to the initial consult that led to the diagnosis, but – until August of 2019 – he was able to have a conversation, with words ‘filled in’ for him. When he lost that ability, he still hammed for visitors. His right side was the first to ‘go’, but he still made funny hand gestures with his left hand and jiggled in his seat when bouncy music played.
Lovebirds Susan Teskey and John Kastner
In the picture in The New Yorker, sitting with his dog, on a bench by a park, Roger Angell, looked none of his 93 years.
Famous for his sports writing, ‘This Old Man’ is Angell’s reflection on life, starting ith what is and isn’t working- kind of a Medical History but with the life that was going on around the health issues.
The lower-middle sector of my spine twists and jogs like a Connecticut county road, thanks to a herniated disk seven or eight years ago. This has cost me two or three inches of height, transforming me from Gary Cooper to Geppetto.
My left knee is thicker but shakier than my right. I messed it up playing football, eons ago, but can’t remember what went wrong there more recently. I had a date to have the joint replaced by a famous knee man (he’s listed in the Metropolitan Opera program as a major supporter) but changed course at the last moment, opting elsewhere for injections of synthetic frog hair or rooster combs or something, which magically took away the pain. I walk around with a cane now when outdoors—“Stop brandishing!” I hear my wife, Carol, admonishing—which gives me a nice little edge when hailing cabs.
In the New York Times, James Collins (author of Beginner’s Greek – a novel) title had me gearing up for a grim diagnosis:
My office supplies are going to outlive me
But, no! No health issue prompts Collins. Instead, it’s when he takes stock of the sheer number of staples in his office he has yet to use (5,000 should you want to know), that Collins gives us some serious and often seriously funny reflection about life and its finality – all based on crunching numbers.
If I read one book a week … but you and I know that I don’t read one book a week, I read a couple a month, grazing in a few others. If I read two books a month, it would take me 137 years to read those unread books. So there we have it: absent the discovery that those long-lived, underfed mice thrive equally well on a diet of vodka and peanut M&Ms, I am not going to live for 137 more years, and therefore I do not have enough time left to read the books I own. Death will intervene (thank God) well before I get around to the later volumes of “A Dance to the Music of Time.”
By his count, his conclusion:
When do you realize that you are going to die? When you realize that, in the remainder of your life, everything is countable.
Then, there’s Noah Michelson, Editorial Director of HuffPost Personal who drew me in and blew me away with:
5 Things I learned from helping my Dad Die
Michelson’s courage and grace and strength to give understanding to what ‘makes up the day-to-day’ when you’re with someone who’s dying cautions what to expect: Hours and hours of doing nothing. Rather than railing, he finds release:
To pass the time, I decided to read the Tales From the City series by Armistead Maupin. I had heard good things about it, but I had no idea that I would be so wholly sucked into the charming universe that Maupin situated in San Francisco beginning in the ’70s.
I love that he wears his love for his father on his sleeve:
In honor of my dad, Robert Michelson, one of the most incredible men who ever spent a little time on this planet:
He read voraciously, wrote op-eds for our local paper and traveled whenever he could, but more than anything, he was genuinely curious about the world and the people around him, and his curiosity was infectious.
He loved my mother with a bright, white-hot kind of love that I haven’t seen again since he left. He loved me and my brothers unconditionally, and he made sure we knew we were loved. He asked questions. He gave answers.
His dad died within six months of diagnosis, having made the decision – a month before he died not to pursue further. Of that last hard month, when Noah was with him:
“The right to die humanely shouldn’t exist only in our fever dreams.”
With these three fine stories each of these fine writers are spirit-soaringly open with their love and fears and pride and sorrow. Such insights and perspectives and emotions.
Agnell, Collins, Michelson.
A-Men.
Kathy Kastner©
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