My mom always told me that death was just a part of
living. My dad has never been afraid to
die. Yet more proof that I’m the product of two hippie parents. Accepting that being born and being dead are
the only two definite promises life makes to you. Everything else is real up in the air. You may believe in destiny. You may believe in creating your own destiny. You may believe that you have to take what
you are given and do the most that you can with it. I always like to think that the latter is how
I live my life. Between us , though,
that’s probably not so true. That’s
really neither here nor there, however.
Point being, my hippie parents were probably right. We will never know how long we will live and
we don’t know when we are going to die.
But, living and dying are the only constants. That’s living life on life’s terms.
I remember very vividly a phone call, after midnight, on my
mom’s 43rd birthday. I picked
up the telephone and heard my girlfriend, Katie, sobbing into the telephone “Sarah
is dead.” She must have repeated that
phrase six or seven times before I realized what she was saying. And the as haze of sleep and the intensity of
panic melded together, I saw the blurred image of Sarah painting. Sarah was an artist. She was so talented and beautiful and crazy
and fun. She was one of my best
friends. And then she was dead. Without reason. At 17.
I don’t remember the rest of the conversation with Katie, but I remember
getting out of my bed and going into my mom’s room. I sat on the floor next to her bed and whispered
“Sarah died.” She was sound asleep and I
was certain she didn’t hear me. And I
remembered it was my mom’s birthday, so
I probably shouldn’t wake her up anyway.
As I stood to leave, she reached for me.
She said “I know. I just didn’t
know how to tell you.” She was
crying. I rarely ever saw my mom
cry. But she was crying. And so was I.
As she held me and I asked her “Why,
mommy?” She said “We can ask why all we
want. But its a God thing and we will
never understand why. That’s not our
job.” That was my first real encounter
with death.
After Sarah was so senselessly taken from us, death
snowballed in my life. Later that same
year, we lost another classmate. For
driving like an asshole on a country road.
My first day at a Coast Guard unit, I watched a human body disintegrate
after a med-evac gone wrong. Later that
year, on Christmas night, we pulled a lifeless foreign exchange student out of
the water while John Lennon played on AM radio.
Two years later, I saw a friend’s face on a memorial poster, after the
boat he was driving capsized in frigid waters In Western New York. That friend was a man whose children I had
watched and played with. That was a man
who rubbed my back when I was vomiting, while cleaning brain matter out of the
non-skid surface of a boat, my first day on the job. Then, not long before my 25th
birthday, there was a dauntless four-hour race to get one of my best friends
from Fairfax, VA to her dying mother in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. We didn’t make it in time. A night of wine and laughs and tears and
laughs afterword, I drove home to another loss.
As, the years passed, I worried that I will become complacent to
death. That I won’t concern myself with
it. I worry that I will forget how once
I quit a good job in private practice medicine.
Where I saw many people die. A
father with a beautiful wife and three young children. A baby, who died of SIDS while his mother
drank the pain away. A lonely veteran who
died in a filthy room at the Salvation Army, without a soul to mourn his loss. A very young man, who had been bedridden for
his entire adult life. I worry that I
will forget those things. Because when
you see too much death, you become callous.
It’s a survival mechanism.
But I don’t ever want to forget what loss feels like. I don’t ever want to forget the girl who
turned the wrong way on a one-way street.
I don’t ever want to forget the six aircrews who were lost in the last decade. I don’t want to forget the man who took his own life over empanadas. I
don’t want to forget the man chasing drug smugglers in that dark Southern
California night. I don’t want to forget
the two friends who were MURDERED at the hands of colleague. I don’t want to
forget my neighbor Kurt, who was epileptic, and had a seizure in his sleep and
BOOM…Dead. I don’t want to forget that kid who drew me an
awesome picture of robots and aliens on a record transfer form, then shot himself two weeks after he got to he
left Petaluma. I don’t want to forget
the round face and jovial smile, that I learned in my boss’s office this
morning, I’ll never see again. I don’t want
to forget any of that.
We have no control over when we come or when we go. But we do have control over what we
leave. Every time we suffer a loss in
our community, I call my mom. And every time, I still ask “mommy why?” And every time she says the same thing. “That’s not for us to know, Angie” She also says “it isn’t the dead who suffer,
it’s those who are left behind who grieve.”
I wish those words were as comforting now as they were the first time I
heard them. But she’s right,
though. I guess we just have to accept
what is and move forward. But when we
lose one of our own, we should always take a moment to remember what they meant
to us. We should always remember what
they did for our community. We should
always take a moment to grieve for our loss.
No comments:
Post a Comment