Category Archives: death

A Eulogy for My Mother

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My mother passed away on October 7, 2020. She’d outlived all her friends, but she lived to see her four great-grandchildren. She was 101 years old.

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t know her, what a force of nature my mother was, but I’ve been writing about her in this blog, off and on, for years. You can begin to get an idea of what she was like by following this thread.

Never one to shirk a difficult task, my mother planned her own funeral and wrote her own obituary and her own eulogy. And that eulogy says more about her than I ever did, with all my blog posts. I would like to share it with you.

Say this of me: I loved life and mostly everything in it. The world is mostly beautiful and I have tried to add a bit of beauty to it. My involvement in art for most of my life has brought me pleasure and solace, and I have been grateful for the gift.

I have been blessed with length of days, generally good health, family and friends, and thanked God for all of it every day of my life. Most blessed was I with grandchildren—my arrows into the future.

I do not fear death, that final, inevitable chapter which is a part of life, the endless circle. I have enjoyed my stay in this world but do not regret my leaving to return to whence I came. I have faith that the Creator of All (of which I am but a tiny part) has yet another purpose for having created me.

I give thanks to all my loved ones for having been a part of my life.

My daughter, my mother, and me, on the occasion of my mother’s 101st birthday

Blood Meridian

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I am reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. By “reading” I mean that I am listening to it on CD, a rather odd and, well, bloody companion to my food preparation and meals.

“What’s it about?” you might ask. It doesn’t have much of a story arc, and so it can be easily summarized. There are no spoilers.  Here goes:

A young man and assorted companions travel through a vast, magnificent, desolate, and wonderfully described landscape, in which they encounter a diversity of people and other creatures, mostly dead. Those that are not dead generally either kill or are killed by them, often in gruesome ways described in the same emotionally neutral yet poetic language as the landscape. And then they ride on.

It’s the weirdest thing, but I wish I could write like this.

Poison

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While research poisons for a story I’m writing, I have discovered that the aconitum I planted in my garden last year (and that has come back so nicely this year) is none other than the famous poison monkshood, or wolfsbane. It is a potent neurotoxin that produces numbness, paralysis, and (yes) death. All parts of the plant are poisonous.

But never fear. Yesterday, right next to the aconitum, I planted foxglove. Foxglove is the source of digitalis, itself a deadly poison. But digitalis is fortunately also an antidote for aconitine.

What luck!

The Shadow World

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Last night I had one of those dreams where there is a whole other world adjacent to ours and connected by a doorway that doesn’t exist when I am awake.

In the first such dream, I was in a public building, something like the Gardner Museum with a central courtyard. Off the courtyard, on the second floor, was an exhibit room that had on one side a hip roof. On the straight lower wall under the sloping roof was a small door, as into an attic crawl space. I opened the door to find a homey, bright, comfortable apartment. I remember open windows with sheer curtains blowing in the late spring breeze. My father lived there.

My father, who has been dead now for twenty years.

A few years later, I dreamed myself into a department store in Montreal. In the housewares department, along an interior wall, was a door that blended so perfectly into the wall that no one would notice it was there. You had to feel its edges with your fingers. You had to know where to touch to find the catch. The manager showed me and Dan in. Behind the door was a sophisticated urban apartment, loft-style, with exposed brick walls and a high-tech open kitchen. It was my father’s, but he wasn’t there at the moment. Some day it would be mine.

My dead father.

And now this. Off the entry hallway of our friends’ house, to the left, where, in waking life there is a window that looks out, in the dream is a doorway. In waking life, beyond the window is the outside yard. In the dream is a room that had been the master bedroom, but our friends had remodeled the house and were eager to show us that they had built an entirely new guest suite there. What had been the old bedroom was a living room; the old bathroom was still there, but they had added on a new guest master bedroom and bath. All the rooms were new and clean and bright and inviting.

Dan and I would be staying there.

My mother had a dream about a month ago that was …

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My mother had a dream about a month ago that was so vivid she can’t get it off her mind. She mentioned it again to me today. She called me especially to tell me about it the day she had it, and her telling of it was so vivid that I can’t get it off my mind either. But for a different reason.

My mother is 87 years old. She has now lived longer than both her parents and all three of her older siblings. (Her younger sister is not yet 80.) She is in good health, lucid, and has more energy than most people her age. Looking at her, you would never guess that she is as old as she is, and, though I know this won’t go on forever, I like to think she has a good chance of breaking 100.

But about a month ago my mother had this dream. In the dream, she came upon a lot of people she didn’t know who had all gathered for some sort of celebration. Everyone was very happy. Mom asked what the occasion was, and they said it was the opening of a Howard Luggage store. Howard Luggage is the store that her father (dead now) started and passed on to my mother’s brother Sidney (dead now). Uncle Sidney built it up and intended to pass it on to my cousin Marvin, who would have been about ten years my senior, but he died maybe forty years ago under tragic circumstances. My cousin Steve now runs the store.

In the dream, my mother was happy to find out that the celebration had to do with this store that has been in the family for so long. She decided to go inside.

She went through the doorway.

It was at about this point in the story that I started crying. Fortunately, we were talking on the telephone, so I didn’t have to upset my mother’s happy mood, but I cried through the entire rest of the tale. To me, going through that doorway sounded a lot like dying. I tried to be glad that she saw it as a happy event.

Inside the store, my mother related, “Guess who I saw?” I thought, “Your father,” but I said, “Who?” “Your cousin Marvin!” my mother announced happily, “and I went right up to him and hugged him. He told me he was doing really well and was very happy.” My mother was very moved by this dream because she had never dreamed of Marvin before, not close up like this. Not touching. My mom woke from the dream feeling that it was more vivid than life, and she felt very happy about it.

I think that she was beginning to explore the new terrain on the other side of dying by contacting the people who had gone on ahead. I can’t get it out of my mind that, in this one dream at least, she has crossed over the threshold.