Gently going into that good night

My son Chris and me in 1966

Ever since Emily died last month, the whole concept of loss, grief, and death have been uppermost in my mind. Seeing my new doctor and talking with him about the cholesterol problem that caused the loss of my son when he was forty only magnified these thoughts. I think maybe I can use this vehicle to explore my own feelings a little. I hope you won't find it too depressing, but I need to go there.

Dr Whitehead is a very young-looking 36 years old, engaged and interested in his profession. He must deal with a fair amount of grief and loss every day, so it must be possible to come to terms with it. I notice that I usually submerge my feelings of loss until an event brings them up again. Frankly, though, loss and grief are part of the package when we come onto the scene here on Earth.

Long ago I thought about the fact that I would not live forever, but when you are young and have not experienced massive loss firsthand, it's all academic and doesn't carry much weight. I remember using the phrase "the rest of my life," which seemed infinite, and in a way it was, stretching out as far as my mental eye could see. Then at 22, my first really big loss occurred when my baby Stephen died of spinal meningitis. Devastated beyond belief, that event changed my life's direction forever. But I did recover. I still remember the day I was watching an infant and realized that I no longer averted my eyes from his beautiful baby's smile of delight. I was smiling back. It had been ten years.

Now I am childless, with Chris gone for almost a decade now, my parents both having died in their sixties, and now I am two years away from the Biblical life span of threescore and ten (seventy). That seems incredibly premature now, but it's not, really. I know I have lived most of my life and that going into that night is somewhere not in the distant future. I wonder how I want to go. Emily died suddenly and so prematurely that it still seems unreal. Not that way. Not in a parachuting accident, or car accident, or anything so... truncated. Not having the time to say goodbye, to make arrangements, to face the event.

My father's heart attack put him into the hospital for three days before he died. All six of his children came home to see him, to say goodbye before he "popped off," as he put it. His heart had been severely damaged and there was little hope, and he knew it. His last words to us were, "I love you all."

Mama had so much illness and pain in her life, and her final heart attack followed so many others, all of which she had pulled through. None of us thought it was the end, but Mama knew. Every one of us came to see her, and she went through her jewelry box and furs and gave them all away. She was in bed, sitting up and looking like her old self, but she knew it was time. I wonder what it is that lets us know? Will I know? She slipped into a coma for a few days, but suddenly she rallied and for a few precious hours she again was lucid and herself. She said God had let her come back to say her goodbyes.

That's an interesting word, "goodbye." It means so many things to me, and I am not exactly friends with that word, but a good bye is something to wish for. I have not had any family members die lingering and painful deaths from cancer, and I hope I never do. Now that I think about it, dying of heart disease might not be such a bad way to go. To me, the heart is the seat of emotion, the place I carry memories of those who have gone on ahead, the place that carries my core beliefs about life and love.

And the heart breaks, and the heart heals, and sometimes, the heart knows the future. Whenever it comes, I do want to go gently into that good night.