2019: Death Says Hi
We end the year with a naked, honest look at grief, death, and mortality itself — because we’ve been left no choice
This piece was also featured in the Late Winter 2020 Monadnock Underground print quarterly.
“Who said you were supposed to survive? Who gave you the idea that it’s preferable to go on and on and on? Obviously, we can’t go on living — we’d overcrowd ourselves, for one thing. So, in actuality, a person who dies is honorable, because he or she is making room for others on the planet. Nothing else is workable. Even if we could live forever and ever, we’d eventually realize that it wasn’t the way we wanted to survive. Why else have children? Children are our survival. We pass the torch on to them — you don’t carry the torch forever; you offer it to someone else. It’s a far more amusing arrangement for nature to continue the process of life through different individuals than by doing it through the same individuals forever.” - Alan Watts
When I read those words sometime around the middle of the summer on some beautiful day sitting by the side of Cunningham Pond, I had already been dipping at least a toe or two into the death-related waters. It was a little bit after my birthday in March that the whole mini-life crisis started, centered initially around a ritual rewatch of Six Feet Under.
HBO’s masterpiece family drama, focused on a family that runs a funeral home, is unflinching in its confrontation of death and mortality, what it means to die and how the dead impact the living as they continue to live. It’s been a top-top favorite of mine since it initially aired in the midst of the turn of the century Golden Age, but this year I realized upon turning 35 that I was now the same age as Nate Fisher — the show’s (primary) protagonist — is in the first season. I was only 16 in 2000, when that season aired (and was set), and 35 was the age of a very old man. I didn’t think actor Peter Krause looked nearly old enough, underscoring how little I comprehended being 35. So as spring turned to summer, I slowly and casually made my way through the show’s first three seasons, reaping for the first time in probably half a decade the episodic lessons and meditations on death and dying and living, and the way all this goes on usually almost in the background of our more mundane day-to-day dramas.
So it was that I was primed, when I came across those words of Alan Watts as I sat behind the pond. There was something thematically fitting about all of this.
I remember thinking to myself, “This fall, we’ll take some time and explore the topic of death a little bit.”
I bought Walking Each Other Home, the new book about death by Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush. I figured I could read that, identify my highlights, and then combine those ideas with the quote above in a modest little summary easy I could publish around Halloween. Nice little idea, right? “Death is Fine, Don’t Worry: A Primer for Beginners”, something like that; 2,000–3,000 words, easy peasy.
Well.
It was another couple months before I had a real idea of what was going on. Death really came calling in 2019. That’s what it turned out to be. Not an exploration of it, but a brush with it, a standing in the cold close enough to feel the wind from its wings.
I finished the summer on a strong note. As August blended into September I resumed my daily walks and daily prayers, practiced more regular Tai Chi, upped my overall mindfulness, and continued reading and writing at a brisk clip. Alas, it wasn’t to last!
No later than September 24, in fact, it all came to a crashing halt when I learned Robert Hunter had died the night before. I was in a conference room in the middle of a meeting. I was leading the meeting. I tried to avoid skipping a beat (and I probably succeeded because I’m pretty good at that) but inside my skull it was like there were flashes of white, silent alarm bells blasting electricity throughout the cranial chamber or whatever.
Robert Hunter.
Look, I know how old a lot of my still-living heroes are. I know this is only going to happen more and more often. Hunter was 78 — not far off from the current average lifespan for the American male, 78.69 years. I don’t usually get all emotional when people I don’t know die, even if they might have meant something to me. Hunter is in a different category. If I’ve cried more tears in this calendar year than any other time in recent memory — and I say I have — the tears started here.
I can’t even really explain them. Yes, Robert Hunter wrote a huge percentage of the words I consider the world’s holiest, and now Robert Hunter is dead, but those words aren’t going anywhere. Whether I should ever desire to hear the songs that set music to his words or simply read them on their own, they’re always in my pocket.
I cried not for the man himself. There’s no indication that he suffered and just as surely none that he greeted death burdened with regrets. No, he had lived fully, well, and intentionally, by all accounts, including his own. Nor could I in a million years believe him for even a moment to be afraid of death. The man wrote “Brokedown [fucking] Palace.”
One could possibly cry for the loss to the world in his passing, in that he is no longer around to give us the gift of his bright-moving inspiration. But I mean, doesn’t that seem greedy? Why are his existing contributions not gift enough? Surely they are. And more.
Perhaps one might then instead grieve for the fact that no heart or mind of similar stature seems poised to fill his shoes. For all we know, that may be true — and again, it may not. How would we know? And anyway, I could stay my own tears secure in the faith that each era produces the souls and the roles required to meet its challenges. Who’s to say what rough beast might rise, perching confidently on the shoulders of wise ancestors like Hunter?
I feel a great loss with his passing, but I don’t in my core believe anything bad has actually happened. I don’t even think anything has been lost. I don’t have a bad rapport with death, at least as far as these things go.
Maybe I just cried to do him honor, an inner, semi-conscious compulsion toward respect. I certainly believe, with all the fervor of a zealot, that the man deserved it.
Maybe I cried for my own part in this involuntary dance called mortality, cried for the heaviness you feel when you confront directly the idea that we’re all headed that way ourselves.
Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was the sudden stark awareness of the responsibility, the knowledge that somebody, somewhere — or, more likely, a whole bunch of people in a whole bunch of places — has to take up the burden and the yoke of this giant and continue the work. There’s a certain overwhelming enormity in the notion that we need to take our part and do the work in our time, for soon it will be our time to go as well.
I never recovered my balance, and I wonder now if I could sense something rippling back toward us from the near future. It was only a month later, just before Halloween, that we got the news about Anthony. Anthony, devoted step-father to my older two sons, loving and dependable husband to my friend and ex-wife, Anthony was dying.
Anthony, just 36 years old. Anthony who never smoked and rarely drank, an honest man who worked hard and with unfailing precision, Anthony who was described by all who knew him as one filled with unparalleled integrity and character. Cholangiocarcinoma, that’s what he had, out of nowhere. Bile duct cancer. One day, life had been pretty much normal, and now he was dying.
Nobody even had any time to figure any of this out, least of all himself — he was dead only five weeks later.
Sometimes I even have mixed feelings about my pretty deep grief over Anthony, like do I even really have the right? He wasn’t my step-father or husband or brother or son. Yeah, we’ve all for years gotten along and functioned as a broad parenting team, but we weren’t even what I’d call friends. He didn’t like me much — and why should he have? But why, then, have I felt such profound grief, not just since his death but since the death sentence that preceded it?
Some of it, certainly, is grief on behalf of my sons; Anthony was, without question, the best step-father they could ever have. He was no less than a real father for them — and so they would lose a father. Powerless and with horror, I would be watching as they at eight years old suffered a greater loss than I still have yet to face. I have been troubled with great fear thinking how this might affect their entire worldview, how it might change the trajectory of their lives in any number of ways; or maybe a simpler way to say it is just that I have fear because I can imagine the raw, blunt pain that they’re going to take from this, because I want to stop it or take it away, because I know I can’t.
But from the time I got the news about the fateful diagnosis, what I experienced was never confined to mere empathy or any other form of wounding-by-proxy. I knew it and I felt it and I tried my best to process it — and I also wrestled with it. Did I have the right? I continued to wonder. I wondered and tried to do most of my internal work alone and with music. I’m always listening to a lot of Grateful Dead, which is to say a lot of songs written by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, but since the former’s death in late September I’d been blasting it all the more and all the more heavy, so it was easy to just continue doing that, to go on even deeper into that.
I’d already been spending a lot of time in the company of my favorite Big Death Songs: “Box of Rain,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Standing on the Moon,” “So Many Roads,” and “Black Muddy River”; now, again, I would continue doing that, would go on even deeper into that.
But did I have the right? Was I using this real and proximate tragedy just to deal with my own issues regarding mortality? Was all this too much purely because it was demonstrating all too undeniably that I — or anyone I love — can be struck down in an instant. And am I ready? Am I just crying for my own self?
I may be corrupt but everybody’s gotta draw the line somewhere and I don’t like the idea of coopting tragedy to work through my own shit. That’s a rat bastard thing to do, even if only in private. To my shame, however, I realized this internal conflict was based in the fact that it seemed easier for me to see myself as motivated by ulterior motives than the more difficult truth: it was sincerity.
It was sincerity. It was because he was family, like it or not. close family. And like close family so often is, where we may have lacked in warmth or enthusiasm for each other we filled the space instead with an enduring respect. Here was a really good guy, somebody who deserved better, and it sucks, and we’re all worse off for it.
In this family, my side of it not least of all, we will forever honor his memory.
When I got the news via text, we were sitting up on the second balcony at Symphony Hall. It was in the middle of Christ’s passion, the core of the second part of Handel’s Messiah. Here, again, as we remained for the second half of the show, the music fused with the overwhelming sorrow and loss and crashed upon and around and through me like the breakers on the beach in the storm, and nothing will ever be the same.
“Oh death, where is thy sting?”
Indeed.
I had just gotten almost all the way through Walking Each Other Home, both five weeks later than intended and also seemingly right on time, bringing me all the way back to the thing I THOUGHT I’d be “exploring” and writing about: that it’s okay to die and it’s okay that people die. As Ram Dass says in the book and elsewhere, as he’s said for years, decades, “Dying is perfectly safe.”
We’re all going to be fine.
I paused a few weeks and then finished the last few pages of the book, and then Ram Dass himself died. Again, bummer — but not because the thing that happened was bad. Ram Dass was very much cool with all of this and we should be, too, on his behalf if not more generally.
It’s more difficult, obviously, when it’s an actual family member. To this, I’ve little to offer beyond the trite six words I’ve heard attributed to some Jewish tradition: “Life is wonderful. Life is terrible.” That tension is at the core of everything.
So it is clearly and brilliantly illustrated in Six Feet Under, our television drama of death. I returned at last just before and after Christmas to experience the life-altering ride that is the final two seasons of that show, concluding with me positively crop-dusting the land with more of my tears. One of the many highlights of this show, and particularly its conclusion, is that by thrusting unmitigated death front and center, right in our faces, it ultimately shines a maniacal, wonderful spotlight on the real nature of this life — the way it ripples outward in all directions but also the fact that it’s ultimately a finite tale with real brackets on one side and the other. Death itself may be an illusion of sorts but even if that were so, it is only during a specific window that we are able to breathe and create and stand.
During that time, during that larger story, we’ll play out many smaller stories, form and break some number of significant bonds, undergo at least a couple metamorphoses, smile, and laugh, and cry. There will be important people that flow along with us for small chunks or big chunks of this time; when we are very lucky, there are even people with us for almost the entire ride. All the while, in the end, however it seems to turn out, from our perspective, we’re also playing our role in the continuing tapestry of everything, that which is way above and beyond just us, that encompasses everything, that thing which will continue regardless of what happens to us individually or even what happens to all of earth.
And that’s it.
Pour a little out for the ones we’ve lost. Hug the ones that are still here and don’t let them go too far. Be aware that you’re living a human life and what that means while you’re living it; and while you’re on it, try to enjoy the ride, to do what you can with it.
That’s all. We’ll all float on okay. After all, nobody ever said we were supposed to survive.