To thine own self be true

Death: Process, and Information

Very much how any death goes, starting with the process of actual dying, survivors’ various reactions to this, and, picking-up-the-pieces, the start-up of estate biz. The whole dealing with a house and the things that remain to be done to ‘close down a life’, a house, and a large chunk of tangible family history is also a huge process, having mostly to do with information–finding it, digging for it, verifying it, sharing it with complete strangers (for instance, in the informational processes of obituary and funeral, or with banks, companies, government, etc.), all the while immersing oneself in a large information context. And so it is, with death, dying, grieving, and closing down: process and information, quite aside from whatever memories, associations, surprises, secrets revealed, and so forth.

Moving Forward after Death

All about movement (opening windows of houses to let air in, cleaning-up, reorganizing what’s left of a life and that information). Determining and securing what’s left. Making numerous choices. Dealing with burial and financial matters. Obtaining what remains or is available–any entitlements. Cancelling, cancelling, cancelling–taking apart and closing down a life and any physical, more tangible sense of a person, a life, a history, and an ‘estate’.

What Remains After
(“Anyway…”–Ellen DeGeneres.)

Passing, ongoing memories and associations. Happy times, connections , relationships. Funny moments. Funny quotes and situations. Whatever good the deceased did for others. A long list really. Plus whatever ‘ghosting’–the never-ending intrusions on one’s present and future reality when one feels the presence of the deceased and honours who they were and what they said and did. Are the dead ever really gone or simply obliterated? No, as long as there are survivors who find the deceased in the course of the process after death. An unexpected, pleasurable, welcome presence–itself a comforting knowledge and residual information that come as close to immortality as time and human experience permits.

Concisely

Regardless of death, it is best to live in the here-and-now, making plans, living fully by one’s values and dreams, making personal choices for our own allotted limited amounts of living and time alive. Death creates focus. Death affords us the opportunity of authentic living, and helps us to concentrate the mind, its consciousness and choices. Ironically, death–more than anything else–gives our whole lives meaning and purpose.

(the childhood home, centre, some 30 years later in the 1990s–after a garage and paved driveway had been added and a caragana bush in front was removed)

Grade 4. My mother’s farmer-father had come to stay with us. He was in his late 50s and spoke only a harsh Ukrainian that only my mother understood as she tried to cater to him. I was directed to avoid him. And so on a memorable Saturday night, my Dad unexpectedly took me out to a Winnipeg Warriors minor pro hockey game at the newish Winnipeg Arena.

It would have been in the first period that a P.A. announcement was made for ——– which didn’t sound like his name, but my father must have sensed the notice was for him and he left me to check. When he came back, he said “Grandpa died and I’ve got to go home. Here’s some bus money to get home. Stay and watch the game.”

Which I happily did, enjoying a treat on the money he magically gave me (We were always poor). For an only child, suddenly empowered, it was frankly fun. I was suddenly left by myself in a crowd of strangers. In the first intermission I giddily walked the concourse around the rink through the knots of adult men smoking before coming back to my seat.

The November bus ride home was similarly memorable–I didn’t usually travel by myself on bus or on Saturday nights when I’d be at home watching what was then an early tv version of ‘Hockey Night in Canada’. I recall it was a spooky long walk in the cold darkness up my street to the World War 1 house we lived in, without a clue of what I’d find when I got there.

Inside, no sign of my grandfather who’d died suddenly of a stroke standing by the stove, vainly trying to warm up his hands over the burners. My mother sat at the table crying and my Dad was trying to comfort her. I knew something majorly sad had happened, but in those days, many kids were largely kept at the edges of death to spare them whatever pain or grief. Maybe then that was moreso for only kids like me, or was in my case for sure.

Going to sleep that night under the cold covers, I thought about what a great game it had been and the abruptness of being regarded old and responsible enough to be left on my own to be left alone and to make it home from a considerable distance. For me, it had still been a heady evening, but I was glad that both my childhood home and parents were still there when I returned, after my grandfather had been so quickly taken away, even though now everything seemed so strangely changed and different.

And then I thought for a long time about the timing of the death–how a special evening out with my Dad had hastily ended, his sudden shift in tone and behavior at the game, and my mother still weeping in the kitchen for the father I knew who had treated her harshly and unlovingly, as just one dumb farm kid of a brood of ten.

And I thought, too, of what had become of a grumpy old man who spat sharp incomprehensible words at us in our home, why he had even come to visit and died just like that. Whatever the case, It was quite clear, though, to me that night as I went off to sleep, that he had absolutely no interest in hockey.

Trust. It facilitates whatever is mutually imagined, needed, wanted, and desired. Nothing significant or consequential, no forward or positive movement happens without it. No trust=no relationship.

“It’s a brutal fact, Zoe, that after one is 45, it simply rains death, all about one, and after you’ve passed fifty, the storm grows fiercer. I never open the morning paper without seeing the death of someone I used to know, East or West, staring me in the face. And in the days when I first knew you, people didn’t use to die at all; all the obituary page never had the slightest connection with our personal life. Death just becomes a deep, be-numbing fact in one’s life long before it ends one.”
–letter to Zoe Akins, Nov. 21, 1932

1. The Ultimate Scary Kids Movie: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (on The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad)

2. Ultimate Ghost Stories: The Innocents (1961)–Truman Capote-adapted version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting (1964)–based on Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House (which I once taught)

3. Best Roger Corman Adaptations of Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death (both Vincent Price tours de forces)

4. Best horror Hitchcocks (for those who have not seen them) Psycho, The Birds

5. Best Vampire Flick: Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula

6. Best Canadian Horror Movie: The Changeling (George C. Scott)

7. Best Kid/Devil Pic: The Omen (Gregory Peck)

8. Best Nicholas Roeg Atmospheric ESP Pic: Don’t Look Now (Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie)

9. Best Stalker/ESP Pic: The Eyes of Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway & Tommy Lee Jones)

10. Best Early Movies`Special Effects: The Invisible Man (Claude Rains)

11. Best Helpless Terrorized Blind Girl Pic: See No Evil (Mia Farrow)

12. Best Mutant Invasion Flick: Them! (James Whitmore)

13. Best Modern Witches` Tale: Rosemary`s Baby

14. Best Humorous Farce: Arsenic and Old Lace

is that you, those closest to you, others you know, your lifestyle, your relative good health, institutions, services you take for granted, your screens and the Internet, countries, indeed the planet–will all be here tomorrow. We constantly experience change, chaos, non-structure, destruction, deconstruction, atrophy, and death. All that we realistically have–for the time being–is our transitory presence and the choices we make for the day. Choices that are extremely important, and way more relevant than people typically, limitedly, ’know’.
(previously published here Jan. 3/15)

makes the whole world kin”–Shakespeare

(Feeding sparrows at the park. Stand near trees in a noisy chickadee area and hold your hand very still with black sunflower seeds on it, palm up. Stay immobile, especially when the bird lands.. Savour the feel of small, light feet perching for a seed grab. Have patience and confidence. Do not become rattled when one sparrow or nuthatch after another quickly come and go.)

better batten down the hatches, stay inside, and turn on Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, op. 55 “Eroica”, Allegro con brio, the 1st movement.

(Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral; from eulogy “Death the King of Terrors”, read at the memorial service of King Edward VII, 1910)

Death is nothing at all.
It does not count.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
Nothing has happened.

Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you,
and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and unbroken continuity.
What is this death but a negligible accident?

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you, for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just round the corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

“And take me down to the harbor now
Grapes of the summer are low on the bow
Ghosts of my history will follow me there
And the winds of the old days will blow through my hair.”
–Joan Baez (1975)