CFC Blog #30: How To Die

PIP NOTE:

I often say to people who are describing extremely challenging periods that they are going through…   

“I wouldn’t pretend to even imagine what this is like for you.”

To me…   it is a clear truth.   My wife Kelly shared a phrase with me:  “Every person you meet is fighting a personal battle you know nothing about… so be kind… always…”        I want to honor that even if I have experienced similar content in my life as someone else that in no way suggests that I know what they are going through.  I can be present and kind but I can’t feel what they are feeling.   I can know my own struggle and how  hard life might be and from there bring greater and greater compassion but even that doesn’t have me even pretend to know what it is like for them.

Sharing my truth of not knowing maybe  honors their struggle in my unknowingness of it.   It is maybe a signal of “I am here for you”… When my father was dying and then passed away in 1991, I recall how good it felt just to know people were thinking of me.

My friend Jim Othmer…       

I love his writing…   he has a gift (like many of YOU do) to be able to communicate such that for me he narrows the bridge between what others might feel and the best I can do to feel what it is like for them…    Thank you for sharing such a rich part of your life below Jim.  It ripples through me.  

With great care and love in mind,

pip

How To Die

(From Jim)

This community provides so much inspiration and insight about how to live.

Recently my sister taught me how to die.  

She had been sick for several years.

We knew it was coming.

She knew it was coming.

Her husband and children called me that morning and I drove the two miles to her house. 

They sent me up to her room, where she lay half awake, listening to the Beatles.

The last words to me from the woman who showed me how to tie my shoes, who encouraged me to be a writer, to suck it up and apologize to so and so, and who taught me a year’s worth of algebra in a weekend were a self-effacing joke and an existential question:

How’d you get roped into this?

Visitors began to gather downstairs.  Her children, her other siblings, dozens of nieces and nephews including cops and firefighters, teachers, builders, an authentic hippy and a Navy SEAL, then childhood friends and friends from the school at which she taught for more than 25 years.  Each had a story about the effect the teacher had upon her. 

I was concerned that it was too much, but her husband told everyone to stay.  He said it’s what my sister wanted. 

Our 90 year-old mother who lived with my sister was there too.  The visitors made her feel better.  Holding a newborn great-granddaughter made her feel better. 

It’s what my sister wanted.

By nightfall the group had thinned to immediate family.

Around 10PM my nephew, a composer, called me back upstairs.  The Beatles had been replaced by his acoustic guitar, instrumental versions of the songs she always requested at family sing-alongs.

Later, a priest arrived.  He had walked the half-mile along the lake road from the rectory attached to the elementary school my sister had attended, which was a few hundred yards from the one-room hospital in which she’d been born. 

Don’t get the wrong idea: my sister traveled the globe several times over.  Her world-view was the opposite of parochial. But on this day being in this house on our childhood lake surrounded by family was what she wanted.

We held hands and said a prayer.  I don’t recall the prayer but I’ll never forget holding hands with the people in that room.

As children our parents would tell us stories of relatives who had passed and been waked in their house for days. I imagined dour priests and restless ghosts.  I couldn’t fathom a darker, creepier more Irish ritual. 

But this was so different.  And kind of beautiful.