On Death and Acceptance

Last month I wrote a column about the way we all used to tan so madly, all heedless of the consequences.  It was a humorous piece, or so I thought – until, this email about skin cancer arrived from a reader:“Parents and middle-aged adults can quip about how fun it was to tan, or do all the stupid things we did as kids and then ask coyly how we made it this far. The answer is that those who didn't make it aren't here to write an article.”Her words led me through many long corridors of regret and ended by bringing me to this memory: of an essay someone wrote for a class I once taught in which he described the final days of his robust 40-something son, who died of this disease, leaving his own young family to live on without him. The slightly shortened piece appears here below:

Our son’s death was a sledge-blow, but from the gentle way he told us of his diagnosis until those final days he lived his time with grace.He had no illusions about his illness. He recognized that this sudden ambush attack by a cancer of unknown origin had made his body a battleground.Doctors hoped he would have a few weeks of relative ease, and though his body lost the battle in a matter of days, his spirit remained undaunted. “It’s a good day to die,” he told us on one of those days. “‘I have just seen my beautiful place and I want to go there.’We knew he would, because anything he ever wanted he worked for, and he was working for this.There were important papers to be gotten together which would require his signature. If we worked all night, we saw that we just might have them ready. We asked him if he could hold on and he said, “I will wait.”On the road home that night, we received a call from his sister, herself an RN who had been in constant attendance. She said we should come back. Then our son insisted she hand him the phone  and his voice came clear through the night:“Mom. Dad. Don’t rush back. Don’t do any more work. We’ve said our good-byes. Remember when the children came in? Have you ever seen such a day?  I love them! And I know you love me. Good-bye!”We cried.Then his sister had the phone again.  We talked it over there in the dark and decided maybe it wasn’t yet ‘a good day to die.’ So we kept on, collected what we needed, and gave it to the lawyer who worked all night. The next morning we presented the papers to Scott. Propped up with pillows, he signed them with a barely legible signature.He and his mother talked for the last time. Then he smiled at her and said, ‘Night ‘night, Mom,’ reminding her that, as in childhood, he felt loved and unafraid as he went to sleep.When it was my turn, I told him I only wished I could have been as good a father as he was. He asked me to kiss him. As I bent down to his bed, he squeezed my hand, smiled, and said, ‘On the mouth, Dad.’Then something wonderful happened: As we held each other, a great clear aura of love filled the room. There seemed to be no furniture, nothing physical at all, and I saw that all the love he would have shown had he lived was now here, to be felt and used by us all. That love has already bound our family closer together, given us more understanding and more consideration. As John Lennon wrote, ‘All you need is love.’  Love is here for us all. Believe it , feel it, use it and add to it from your own stores.”

My thanks go here both to the wise reader who led me back to this story and to the brave grieving father who first set it down.

C'mon Married People

I just finished reading Mindy Kaling’s 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns, a part-memoir, and part-general-musings-kind of a book that dances right on the edge of the funny and the moving.Mindy stars in The Mindy Project on FOX, but for many seasons prior she has also played the inimitable Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s blockbuster hit, The Office. She has, in also written, directed and co-produced many episodes of both shows. No flies on this girl!One short section of the book shows what I mean about her ability to both amuse us and touch us. It’s about marriage, and her parents’ marriage in particular. She says her parents get along because they are pals. They like to talk about the same things.

"In my parents’ case, they can spend and entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of A Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, drink a vanilla milkshake and go to bed."

I should point out that the name of this section is “C’mon Married People” and in it she talking directly to us wedded folk.She begins by saying she doesn’t want to hear about the endless struggles to keep the ‘spark’ in marriage or about the work it takes to plan date night.Instead,

"I want to hear that you guys watch every episode of The Bachelorette together in secret shame, or that one got the other hooked on Breaking Bad and if either watches without the other, they’re dead meat....I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun. I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.”

That right there. That’s the what I mean about the disarming double tone:  “I want to hear about it because I know it’s possible, and because I want it for myself.”She says, she guesses that “happiness can come in a bunch of forms, and maybe a marriage with tons of work makes people feel happy. But part of me still thinks… is it really so hard to make it work? What happened to being pals?

 "I’m not complaining about Romance Being Dead – I’ve just described a happy marriage based on talking about plants and a canceled Ray Romano show and drinking milkshakes; not exactly rose petals and gazing into each other’s eyes at the top of the Empire State Building. I’m pretty sure my parents have gazed into each other’s eyes maybe once, and that was so my mom could put eye-drops in my dad’s eyes."

Funny, right?“I’m not saying that marriage should be easy, but we get so gloomily worked up about it these days.”And that part’s surely true, is it not?“Maybe marriage IS work,” she says, “but you may as well pick work that you like.So “Married people it’s up to you. It’s entirely on your shoulders to keep this sinking institution afloat. It’s a stately old ship, and a lot of people, like me, want to get on board. Please by psyched, and convey the psychedness to us.

And always remember, she ends by saying, “so many, many people are envious of what you have. You’re the star at the end of the Shakespearean play, wearing the wreath of flowers in your hair. The rest of us are just the little side characters.

And there it is: a sweet, funny and sage perspective on marriage from a single girl. Next in this space: Companion thoughts on marriage from someone more than 40 (?!) years in.

Undressing a Maiden

Back again to Emily Dickinson who was the opposite of tame, the opposite of conventional.Our Emily, who would never use proper punctuation.How that shocked the literary bigwigs! No commas or semicolons for her! She favored the dash.This killingly beautiful poem by Billy Collins gets at her nature and the world she lived in too. You might have to be somewhat knowledgeable about her poems to recognize the fly buzzing and the plank and the loaded gun - she really did say Life was a loaded gun - but you don't have to know a single thing about all that to see the beauty and eroticism of this piece. And for you strictly 21st century readers, a tippet is a brief ornamental garment that hovers about the shoulders. Tulle is like organdy if that helps at all: stiff and somewhat gossamer in nature.  And whalebone stays were the joists in a corset that kept the whole edifice erect.I'll assume you know what a bonnet is and can visualize the ever-startling iceberg of human nakedness. Here is the poem then. Hold on tight!

Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,easily lifted off her shoulders and laidon the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a morecomplicated matter with mother-of-pearlbuttons down the back,so tiny and numerous that it takes foreverbefore my hands can part the fabric,like a swimmer's dividing water,and slip inside.

You will want to knowthat she was standingby an open window in an upstairs bedroom,motionless, a little wide-eyed,looking out at the orchard below,the white dress puddled at her feeton the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarmentsin nineteenth-century Americais not to be waved off,and I proceeded like a polar explorerthrough clips, clasps, and moorings,catches, straps, and whalebone stays,sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebookit was like riding a swan into the night,but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,how her hair tumbled free of its pins,how there were sudden dasheswhenever we spoke.

What I can tell you isit was terribly quiet in Amherstthat Sabbath afternoon,nothing but a carriage passing the house,a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhalewhen I undid the very tophook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,the way some readers sigh when they realizethat Hope has feathers,that reason is a plank,that life is a loaded gunthat looks right at you with a yellow eye.

What a relief to undress and be undressed as she undresses and is undressed in this the poet's fantasy! Every woman who ever wore a bra or girdle, or pantyhose,or Spanx understands the feeling. “Wild nights!” she said in one poem, a gossamer-spun fantasy of her own.And now the poet laureate himself, reading the piece aloud:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5oUS3_3Dsg]