OpEdNews - Diary: Three Deaths in Three Days

Saturday, Sunday and Monday each brought another death into my life.

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On Saturday morning, my ex-wife Nancy, mother of our three adult children, passed away after a long fight with cancer. She was working just two weeks before she passed.

We'd split up in 2003, but, in recent years, had a cordial relationship, so she'd stay at my home to visit our youngest son, who's now in college. Nancy spent her last week in the hospital, alert and lucid for the first six days, then, once she agreed to a do not resuscitate order, after a CAT scan showed that the cancer was spread heavily through her lungs, bones, liver, bile duct, pancreas and lymph systems, with pain increasing, she was given morphine, that kept her somnolent. She spent those last days talking about forgiveness-- asking for it and giving it generously to all. This gif to me, and it was a gift-- our divorce was contentious-- is that I now have resolved not to wait until I am on my deathbed to forgive the people I see as transgressors. This is simple but not easy and I intend to work on this.

The next day I got an email notifying me that a dear friend, someone I used to jam with-- she on keyboard, me on guitar-- along with her husband Joel-- guitar and banjo, had passed away suddenly after a bout with a respiratory infection that got out of control. Caroline was an extraordinary women, loved by many, including me. She'd retired a few years ago, having been a social worker, and she was continuing to raise her grandson with her husband, Joel, who recruited me to sing with his barbershop group.

I've had friends who have experienced serial losses. THis is my first experience with this.

Theodore Parker wrote, "It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head." Nancy was always a loving, devoted mother to our three kids. She worked, as a home health care RN, even while experiencing considerable pain, even with far advanced metastasized cancer, because she loved to take care of the paraplegic under her care. Even as we discussed her going into hospice care, her main concern was being able to get back to work. I went to pick up some paperwork from her employer's office and the whole office expressed their love and concern for her. Nancy will be missed by many and her sweetness, kindness and love will love on in her three kids and the good she did as a volunteer eucharistic minister and in other capacties in which she expressed her deep Christian faith. As far as my kids go, they made me proud, being there for their mom, especially in the last months, as she needed more help, rising to their responsibilities, admirably. Stan and Kevin also made a major difference in those final days.

Sadly, the doctors, probably trying to offer hope, told us that they gave Nancy another month to three months, just two days before she passed. Some people who would have liked to say good-bye to Nancy based decisions to delay visiting on those numbers. The next day, Nancy entered a somnolent state she never left. There's a lesson there too.

Just the next morning, after getting the word of Nancy's passing, I got the word about my friend Caroline, who touched so many lives.

Death creates pivot points in our lives, in our points of view. Now, I have two funerals to go to-- one, for Nancy, a Catholic mass, the other, for Caroline, a reconstructionist Jewish service. There will be shivas for both.

I've wanted to share this with our community here, but frankly, didn't want to be responsible for a plethora of private responses. I felt this diary would be a way to connect with you, let not overwhelm me with response- ibilities.

I am feeling that I have not done justice speaking for either of the lives that were lost this weekend. I did tell my daughter a story about some of my last words with my mother, when she lay dying, 17 years ago. I'd told my mom that she was the one I called when good things happened in my life, that I wouldn't know what to do once she was gone. She told me to keep telling her. I do. Of course, now my kids are grown up and I share with them, and those I love.

I'd written this around noon monday. At about 5:00 PM I got a call that one of my closest friends spouse had died. Three deaths in three days. I don't have further words. The rest of this piece was written yesterday.

I often go to quotations for wisdom and guidance. Here are some quotations on death and dying I've collected over the years. I'll leave you with them,

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

Joan Baez

Whatever the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose.

Beecher

When I die,,,, I shall be wrapt in a robe-- an old robe perhaps-- and hoisted on a slender scaffold to the whistling winds, soon to be blown to the earth-- my flesh to be devoured by the wolves, and my bones rattled on the plain by the wild beasts.

Big Elk, Maha Chief from Commonplace book of Prose, 1830

"I would finish hoeing my garden."

St. Francis of Assisi (answering what he would do if he were to suddenly learn he would die at sunset that day."

Each Moment of life is a step towards death.

Pierre Corneille

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived..."

Thoreau, Walden

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.

Norman Cousins

Security is a kind of death.

Tennessee Williams

When growth stops, death begins.

Kall

Life is never steady. The steadier it becomes, the closer you are to death.

Kall

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (with dots over u) Death The Final Stage of Growth

"...death does not have to be a catastrophic, destructive thing; indeed, it can be viewed as one of the most constructive,positive, and creative elements of culture and life.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (with dots over u) Death The Final Stage of Growth

When curing is impossible, as in the case of terminal cancer, can we yet hope for "wholeness," the root of "healing?"

Bill Moyers, Healing & The Mind

"What is Forgetting if it be not Death?"

Musset, Alfred De,

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Anais Nin

It is in the giving up of self that human beings can find the most ecstatic and lasting, solid, durable joy of life. And it is death that provides life with all its meaning. This "secret" is the central wisdom of religion.

M. Scott Peck, TRLT

Self discipline is a self-enlarging process. The pain of giving up is the pain of death, but death of the old is birth of the new The pain of death is the pain of birth, and the pain of birth is the pain of death. For us to develop a new and better idea, concept, theory or understanding means that an old idea, concept theory or understanding must die.

M. Scott Peck, TRLT

"There is one great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and a migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. ....Now if death is like this, I say that to die, is gain; for eternity is then only a single night."

PLATO, APOLOGY OF SOCRATES

"This isn't a town and ours isn't a profession where one counts friends on both hands. One will do. And when you lose one of those fingers you begin to lose your grip on life. Edgar was one of those friends. His loss diminished our lives."

Vincent Price (on death of Edgar Rosenberg, husband of Joan Rivers)

I've come to believe that anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is managable.

Fred Rogers, children's TV host, on dealing with death

The world is a playground and death is the night.

Rumi

"...have you not a small store of recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of fast returning winters,-- a few such recollections, which, if you should write them all out, would be swept into some careless editor's drawer, and might cost a scanty half hour's lazy reading to his subscribers- and yet, if death should cheat you out of them, you would not know yourself in eternity."

Holmes, O.W.THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE

It was principle among the ancients that acute diseases are from heaven and chronical, from ourselves; the dart of death falls from heaven, but we poison it by our own misconduct.

Samuel Johnson, Rambler

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection. This is why even people who were indifferent to each other, rejoice so much if they come together again after twenty or thirty years separation.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

"When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults."

Aldiss, Brian

The heart asks pleasure first,

And then, excuse from pain;

And then, those little anodynes

That deaden Suffering;

And then to go to sleep;

And then, if it should be

The will of its Inquisitor,

The liberty to die.

Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 Poems