Tag Archives: dying

I am of the nature to die.

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Faith at her 98th birthday party (c) Carole Craig

Faith at her 98th birthday party (c) Carole Craig

I am of the nature to die.  There is no way to escape death.   Buddha

Faith died at midnight on the 24th of October.  It is a date she would have liked.  When I was ten years old she took  me from school  for half a day because someone had given her tickets to the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the official founding of the United Nations —  24th, October, 1945.

It was held at the San Francisco Opera House.  In the way of many UN functions, individual countries got up and made speeches nominally about the subject at hand.  Such speeches  are usually small or large shots of propaganda about that particular nation’s own way of doing things.

And here I need to pause in this story to emphasise that my mother was in no way a Stalinist.   She wanted justice for everyone — her life is a testimony to that.  From the great distance at which she lived it was still possible to think the Soviet Union might be a good bet.   

When the Soviet representative got up to speak the name Vlaldimir Lenin appeared.  In the dim auditorium, among the official representatives, well dressed power brokers, and those who had obtained tickets because they believed,  in the middle of McCarhyite America, there was the sound of someone clapping.   It was my mother.

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill-health.
There is no way to escape having ill-health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love
are of the nature to change.

There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings.

I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground on which I stand.

  • Buddha –
    – Translation by Thich Nhat Hanh

Note:  There are two more posts to record the arc of Faith’s dying.  One I had roughed out before we were told she had hours or days and another to describe how we spent  the last times.

Then, I presume, there will be more about the contours of loss.

They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light,

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Golden Gate Park, evening

 

“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.” Cormac McCarthy, The Road

My world, like my mother’s, is shrinking. Each of us orbits three points.

Hers: bed, bathroom and bright sunlight in a lion-footed chair. In truth, the time in the chair is short.  A few vertical minutes and she wants to go back to bed.  She is most comfortable in a world that is largely horizontal if not quite flat.

When she arrived, San Francisco was to be first stop on a trip around the world; my mother planned to find a ship and sail West.   Waiting, she hung out at the Black Cat Bar on Montgomery Street.  It was frequented by writers like Saroyan and Steinbeck, a scene of Kerouac’s On the Road is set there.  Bohemian San Francisco enfolded and held her.

“It was five cents a song.  Some one gave you a quarter and you only played four.  The juke box gave you back a nickel. When you had a twenty five cents you went to Chinatown and bought dinner.”  The story was always told in a restaurant where Beijing ducks hung in a row by the cash register, the menu was written largely in Chinese and our chop sticks were poised over something sweet and sour.   Choosing to stay made perfect sense.

My world now is not much larger than the points my mother was able to walk to three months ago:  her house, the row of shops around the corner and Haight Street, two blocks from the famous Ashbury intersection.

I was here for the Summer of Love, but missed it, being too busy with a never-completed philosophy Ph.d or working in a topless bar to fund same, I can’t remember which.  So the current parade down Haight Street is a little lost to me.  Mostly young, they wear layers of clothes; the girls frequently have corn cob hair and the boys usually don’t have beards. They have backpacks and dogs and congregate in Golden Gate Park, but don’t make their own music, there are no fields for dancing, no signs saying “Make love not war.”  On the surface, it is more post-apocalypse The Road, than Hippie Neverland.

Perhaps deeper down as well.  I meet Benjamin who dreams of moving on.  Tall, with light red hair a few inches below his striped knit hat, good teeth and a great smile.   “My father was a Vietnam Vet.  When I was 9 he flipped out.  He wasn’t very nice to me,” he fondles his hair, “because I look like my mom.  I went to the Vets Administration to try to get help for my problems.  They helped him because he is a disabled veteran, but not me, his spawn.  Sometimes it is very hard.”  He has a list of cities where things will be different: Seattle, Vancouver, London.

I’ve lived in six different countries and been around the world twice.  I think he might be right.  Sometimes new, strange places, feet on the open road, wind in your hair work a cure.  I wish him luck and complete my tight little circle.

When I get home my mother is in bed.  Eyes closed.  Not sleeping, she says.  I wonder what goes on in her mind.

A visitor has brought her a tea towel.  Embroidered on it:   “I live in my own little world.  It is okay, they know me there.”

Paradise as a library…

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“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”  —  Jorge Luis Borges

In front of the house

The house I was raised in had a room called the library and it was, as befitted its name, filled with books.  The house needed repair and sat on a rutted dirt road close to the city limits.  Neighbors, few and far between, were blue-collar Italian and Irish Catholics.  They grew flowers or cut hair or worked for Southern Pacific Railroad or, these were the elite, served as firemen and policemen.   In fact, the policeman who killed the city mayor and a supervisor in the 1970s — because one was liberal and one was gay or because the policeman had been eating too much sugar — grew up just down the hill.

Our neighbors watched early television, went to mass, had light wall-to-wall carpets that were always clean, kept large ornate dolls with perfect hair and skirts made of lace spreading evenly over bedroom pillows, and had families that sat around the table at supper time facing each other.  No one lifted a fork until grace was said.  Our house was small and ramshackle; there were no carpets, TV came late, and when supper was ready my mother and I went to get our books to read while we ate.

Some  books were hidden at the height of the McCarthy hearings and I remember my mother’s fear when I found them and my fear when baby sitter said if I didn’t do what she said she would send my mother to prison and my mother saying yes, she could that.  But the books survived.

When we moved to the Haight Ashbury  — the Upper Haight it was called — on the cusp of the exuberant 60s, the library disappeared, but my mother kept reading.  Books by her bed: Native American history, modern novels, science fiction, nature studies, random essays, politics, short stories, and anything anyone handed her and suggested a look.  The books didn’t just sit, she read them cover to cover.

Recently, her reading became simpler: Carl Hiaasen, The Number One Ladies Detective Agency several times,  and whatever I brought her from the free box at Green Apple Books.

Not any more.

Ten days ago, having successfully reached the top floor after the heroic, arduous, hand over hand climb, she fell.  There were no injuries but no apparent cause. The emergency room doctor said they could do more tests or she could go home. Then he reached over and patted her hand, “I think you should go home.”

Her own doctor told us that perhaps it was time to have dessert before dinner if she wanted it or dessert instead of dinner if she wanted that, she could stay in bed all day if she so desired, but no stairs and maybe the hospice should pay us a visit.

At some point since, the reading stopped.  My mother lies in the new bed in the sitting room eyes closed or staring in front of her.  I’m not sure she understands what the doctors meant.  I want her to understand —  if she can, if she wants to —  because I would want to if it were me.

I sit on the bed next to her and take her hand.  Behind the bed is a wall of bookshelves, it has only the  books on folk music.

I look at them.  “What do you want to happen to them?” I ask.

It takes her a long time to say anything now.  Finally.  “I always thought I could take them with me.”