Death

Who Can I Offend Today?


It seems my ranting about mammas who rant got me unfriended on Facebook. Between my pruning and my offensive nature, I will soon be left with just family and that is the realm of the truly uncool.

I think I must have slipped in a whole truth or two about family recently because my sister-in-law unfriended me too. Not the lousy one. The other one.

And in other social networking news, I have greatly annoyed an old high school chum who has grown up to be someone who would have made a great next door neighbor for my parents. Passionately to the right on nearly any topic you’d care to name. My feed must be an eyesore to this friend.

I rated a mention over at Ye Ole Widda Board the other day in the old timers quarters. A friend, thank goodness, who confessed to still peeking at my blog in her five year update. The goddess must have been smiling because no one noticed me and I wasn’t ridiculed or barbecued in absentia – though you can be perfectly present and roasted for the titillation of others while the multitude stands by as silent as collaborators. A recent perusal of the main forum there revealed another posse had run someone out-of-town. And good riddance to non-conforming grief too.

Mostly this week I have been memoir writing. A project that is sure to offend in-laws but possibly my own family too. In earlier drafts/attempts I tried to keep my point of view as non-committal as possible on the subject of those I didn’t care for or when I was recounting events where I was simply left to sink or swim, but in its current incarnation, my memoir is not holding back that much. I am not trying to be mean, but honest observation is sometimes painful.

So four chapters and probably closing to the point of having caught 20,000 words.

Yesterday was the chapter on Will’s final hours. It was ouchie to say the least possible. Another two chapters of widowhood, which won’t sting as much because I was mourning myself more than him rather early on in the process and then on to the rediscovery of joy, love and regrouping. Nicer though not always easy times.

Which brings me to something. While catching up with my bloggy friend as she shared what’s been going on in the last year, I noted that there were several other four and five year updates. So I read them too. It shouldn’t have surprised me but a senior widow or two managed to slip a snarky line in here and there because if there is one thing on the Ye Olde Widda Board that just don’t fly – it’s remarried widowed folk who grieve out loud. Maybe it’s jealousy. There are one or two I might comfortably accuse of that, but I think it is more that they just don’t want to know that there isn’t a magic pill that makes it all go away. They give lip service to the idea that grief is lifelong really, but they don’t really want to believe it. The remarrieds are proof that there is no “all better now”. Who wants that knowledge?

Today is a PD day at Dee’s school, so we are out and about having some of that quality time together I read about on the mommy blogs. Library, shopping for a new skating helmet and lunch with Rob.

TGIF, people!

A Dirty Dancing Angel


Fear must be gripping Hollywood as the rich and famous wait on the Angel of Death’s next two celebrity recruits now that he has Patrick Swayze in hand. Unless two famous people have already died that I am unaware of, the rule of three* is once again in play.

I saw the news flash about Swayze on Monday on one of the news sites but passed over it without a second thought. It wasn’t a surprise given the tabloid photos of his gaunt haunted face which have adorned the checkouts at the grocery for months now. He had pancreatic cancer. You don’t beat that. You simply hold it at bay for a while.

On Tuesday at yoga, Swayze was the topic of conversation among the women before class began.

“It’s so sad,” one remarked, “because he was only 57.”

Fifty-seven is actually not all that young, and over the course of those years, he was an Olympic contending gymnast and a dancer who rehearsed with the likes of Barishnakov. He married his high school sweetheart and despite the difficulties his alcoholism caused, they were married for 30 years during which time he  built a solid acting career. It’s not as if he couldn’t look back and see a life lived. It’s not like everyone has that rearview moment at the end.

There was much discussion of the movies that touched them at different points and in different ways.

Dirty Dancing came up – of course. I have yet to see that movie all the way through. What I have caught, here and there, hasn’t compelled me to carve out the time to do so. The acting is pretty bad. And one person mentioned having pulled out her dvd of North and South for a marathon after she heard the news.

Ghost never came up. Which surprised me. But then again, it was an awful movie. A friend of mine dragged me to it when it was first out. We sat in a shoulder to shoulder cineplex where I could hear people all around me sucking air and/or panting as Swayze and Moore did that … thing … with the clay. Had those around me not been audibly aroused by this, I would have laughed because it is probably one of the cheesiest foreplay scenes ever filmed. But the “romance” of Ghost escaped me as much then as it does now.

“What is so romantic about a dead husband?” I asked Rob who shrugged as he chuckled a bit.

I remember Swayze most from Red Dawn and The Outsiders and Roadhouse. The first because I have always been a sucker for a good “end of life as we know it” flick. The second because it’s a fairly faithful adaptation of a wonderful book. The last because it is cheesey in it’s goodness. What’s not to love about a Zen bouncer who just wants to do his job? And have sex standing up.

R.I.P Patrick.

“That was the most sensual love scene I have ever witnessed,” my friend gushed afterward. She was a drama teacher with a flair for it herself, so perhaps that’s why she didn’t recognize pottery porn when she saw it. The things that rendered some of my gender wet to the knees escapes me sometimes.

*And the second is Mary, of Peter, Paul and Mary. Three? Anyone? Anyone?

Dear Prudence


Emily Yoffe writes an advice column over at  Slate called Dear Prudence. Rob reads it with fair regularity and occasionally shares the dilemmas she is called upon to “solve” with me. I haven’t been much for advice columns since the long ago days of reading Ann Landers in my hometown paper. I guess I have come to a point where I don’t believe that rigid etiquette will save the world as much as people simply learning to mind their own business at least twice as often as they mind someone else’s and remembering to listen more than they comment, which is an odd sentiment coming from me – a blogger with an attitude and an opinion.

Yoffe’s advice is usually well-grounded in sense and not too heavily coated with some of the rigid Miss Manners’ stuff, but a recent reply to a fellow non-plussed by a female acquaintance of his wife raised my hackles enough to inspire me to email her.

The gentleman reported that a friend of his wife’s had sent her a series of text messages to let her know about the funeral she was planning for her husband. The funeral was set for a week later and the gentleman and his wife were a bit disconcerted to discover that the husband in question was technically dead yet. He’d been ill for a long time and was in a coma, not expected to live much longer. The man wanted to know if the widow-to-be was wrong to jump the planning gun by informing others in advance of the death.

Yoffe’s reply was by the book. Yes, the not quite widow was wrong. Her husband might not die on schedule after all. But she went all stand-up comic in her approach,

Not even Sarah Palin has had the audacity to imagine the advent of scheduling people’s funerals before they actually die in order to get the old and sick to move along.

And added,

It is rather chilling that the wife is texting everyone with the news. (Did she write, “Hubby OOH; funeral Sat”?) I suppose you can be grateful that as a further convenience, she’s not sending around advance information about her wedding gift registry in case she finds a candidate for remarriage.

Following up with this condescending comment,

…refrain from pointing out to the widow-to-be that her behavior is appalling. She’ll be an actual widow soon enough, so all of you should just act as if her grief has gotten the best of her.

It’s hard to say at what point I was most offended but by the end, I knew I had to write her. And this is what I said,

Dear Ms. Yoffe,

I read your Sept. 3 Dear Prudence reply to the gentlemen who was appalled by a friend’s setting up funeral details for her dying husband in advance. As someone who did this herself, I was offended by the fact that you not only didn’t stop to consider that their might have been (probably were) details about the situation that the letter writer wasn’t privy to, but that you felt it necessary to take a swipe at the widow to be by making a cutesy crack about wedding gift registries.

I realize that your advice column is more about clever entertainment than actual advice, but I wonder that someone who is married to a widower herself wouldn’t stop and consider the impact of her words on people who’ve been in the situation that poor widow in waiting found herself.

I won’t bore you with the details of my late husband’s death. If I am to believe you, I apparently missed the meeting on exactly what a good future widow is supposed to be doing in those last hours when there is nothing left to do. The handbook hospice gave me didn’t cover funeral planning or how to project a Jackie Kennedy aura. I will say that on a more personal level I was more offended by your implying that grief is the ultimate pass card and that the ignorant gentlemen should simply join you up on your moral high horse for a more sympathetic view of a situation neither of you know anything about.

Even though that widow will never know you used her to sharpen your wit on for the entertainment – though not the edification of others – you still owe her an apology.

Not surprisingly I got a reply in which she defended her advice on the grounds of anecdotes of situations where people outlived their expected date of expiration, resulting in messed up funeral plans. Not surprisingly, however, she didn’t address the remarriage crack.

“She’s an idiot,” I told Rob after relaying her reply.

“Really?” he said. “After giving her the thumbs up as someone who understood after that piece she wrote about her husband’s late wife?”

And therein lies the problem. The dying thing is complex. There are so many sides to death, and as many people to take them, that sometimes a person is faced with themselves across the debate table with their own conflicting view points hurtling back at them  – because perspective does matter. I am widowed. I am remarried. I am remarried to a widower.  And there are times when none of these experiences line up neatly or at all.

I understand her advice in its context. Everyone wants to believe that reports of death are greatly exaggerated, that doctors are wrong more than they are right, and that terminally patients routinely defy odds. It makes us feel better.  Safer. Death is scary after all despite it being the one thing that we all will do someday.

I still think her wisecracks were cold and calculated for their effect. She is a writer and I can do that too.  They were definitely at the expense of that poor widow who hopefully has no idea what judgmental friends she has. The truth is more people spend a loved one’s last days and hours engaged in similar activities than not, but we keep it to ourselves to avoid this type of censure instead of sharing our turmoil and anguish in the hopes of lessening the burden through distribution. I know. But I’ll let it go now because it is kinder to leave people to their delusions about death and what really goes on until they have to live it themselves.