Dear Death

About our Love/Hate relationship

Please enjoy my reading of this essay.

Dear Death,

When you gave mom a stroke, and then dementia, my perpetual positivity prevailed. My friend even commented how in spite of my circumstances I could always find something for which to be grateful. My gift, I suppose.

But later, as mom’s full-time caregiver, when she asked me the same question every two minutes, I wondered how long I could live with Groundhog Day being my constant companion. And then I would help with her shower and be amazed at her velveteen skin and the way she loved me more every time I helped her. The dark and the light danced with me every damn day.

When the weather warmed, we sat together on our porch, rocking in the big white rockers like the ones at Cracker Barrel, all in a row. She had her spot, I had mine. She loved the way the birds flitted around, also forgetting what they were, and even though she called the squirrels and chipmunks the “four-leggeds”, she enjoyed watching them.

You took her slowly and then swiftly, from the agonizing drip of memories lost – to the inciting event when she lost her balance and fell while the Hospice bath aid was drying that famous velveteen skin. Dead three weeks later. 

My first thought when she fell was that she was choosing this way out, so as not to suffer a vocabulary of five words, the end game for dementia.

Those three weeks were sleepless torture because of the pain the drugs could not obscure. You made her moan incessantly and stole any option we had for a comfortable, peaceful passing. In a moment of mercy, you gave us mom the lover for one full day just before her last. She hugged everyone anytime we got close enough, and told us over and over through the lips of dementia “I love you more”.

So screw you and thank you, death. I guess I couldn’t completely know the bliss of sitting in that same rocking chair, loving her, without also feeling the sharp shards of my heart falling into the pool of tears this morning when she wasn’t sitting next to me, in it.

Death, I’m ready to go when you take me, but not yet please. See? I’m ready and not ready. After all, mom got to be eighty-nine and I’m only just about sixty-four. I am well aware that we are all dying, every day and am willing to allow you to take me at the perfect time. I’m generous like that.

But you make me worry about my heartbeats, tracking them incessantly. Because there are so many ways to die, I wonder which way it will happen. I have taken steps – God-willing not too late – to be healthy so I can enjoy the time I have left for what I hope is another thirty years.

But of course there is no guarantee, and that's when you get the last laugh.

Meanwhile, as you lurk, you make me appreciate the moments of pure joy I have when I’m with my husband and we belly laugh, or when I bite into the perfect watermelon because I’m not dead yet. I notice the mother tree on our hike, and pause to have a conversation with her. These experiences are all I have, really.

You make me see that this body is on loan, and that I really should love it more. You make me notice when it’s not functioning like it did when I was thirty, which is a super dirty trick, you rascal.

Death, I know we’ve had this love hate thing going on for a while now, though I really didn’t know you until a few decades ago. You’re a mean one, plucking people away like when that two-year old drowned in our neighborhood pool or when you took my best friends’ mom way too early. 

But when you took mom, it was mercy. 

Death, I appreciate your everlasting presence, better for it, because without you I wouldn’t know how to be truly alive.