It doesn't have to be sad?

[Above: A miniature design by Szymon Klimek.  It is solar powered and made of zirconium and brass plate.
Dimensions 11,5x9x7cm. Goblet high 30 cm. Thanks to the blog Book of Joe for finding it.]

Friday night -
I've been thinking about the article I started reading last week in a magazine in a waiting room.  It was about a home hospice nurse, and was titled "It doesn't have to be sad."

Death, they mean.  Just now I logged on Facebook to say goodnight, and learned that a friend, a woman I met only once who was in kidney failure like me, has died.  She did not get a transplant.  She was a year younger than me.  What is this feeling?  Maybe it's like suddenly going cold sober.  Just like that, a life gone, over.  It makes my mind go to poetry, searching in my memory for the right poem.  Only poetry handles death profoundly enough, and maybe music.

If you follow this blog you know that Tom's father has been slowly dying for some months now, losing a pound a week in skilled nursing care.  His mother has serious loss of judgement and a very bad memory, and is scheduled for hip replacement surgery for a worn-down hip that has her confined to a wheelchair and in pain.  All this, and turmoil over the financial aspects of caring for both of them, has been a great strain on the kids.
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Saturday -
I woke up hearing Leonard Cohen's Alleluia in my memory, and understanding it a little better.  Thinking about accepting death, as I often have, doesn't get me there.  It seems it often takes an exact language to move me to understand something.  But emotions I understand.  Sad is how you feel when someone dies, isn't it?  If you don't have to feel sad at a death, then what do you feel?

I know one thing you can feel: relief.  This I know because long ago I read a book by Jessamyn West, a fictionalized memoir of her sister's death from cancer titled A Matter of Time.  You can buy that book now on Amazon for $.01, plus shipping $3.99.  These are ex-library editions.  My own library, which is voted year after year the best public library in the nation, does not have it.  That made me sad.  For a while. But that's life: it goes on. In the words of a poem by Swinburne, "Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea."

Tom's parents are very old, 93 and 90.  They lived to see not just grandchildren, but great-grandchildren.  Jim had over 30 years in retirement.  Five years ago a stroke robbed him of much of his personality and coherence.

Just today I came across the astonishing work of art and craft shone in the video above.  I included it here because I love it, and tremendously admire the patience of good artists and craftspeople.  As I think about it, I remember how we make art to find a certain order in life*, so I believe it fits here after all.
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*I know, not every artist.  But it's true for me most of the time.

Dim and Cool

August, high noon
In the month and hours of fire, how soothed I feel by coming into my study, where the accordian shades are drawn.   There are thunderstorms coming in; I knew that before I checked the forecast, because my hands have been aching - weather sets off my neuropathy - and now my arms and back are aching, which is fibromyalgia.  That makes me think the storms will be here before evening.  I'm sure my grandmothers' generation was attuned to this kind of effect, as in "The rain makes my rheumatiz act up."  But we have been so optimistic, dreamed that we are creatures of personal will who can control everything, reach every dream, solve our 83 problems through technology, and surely cure every illness and become immortal. 

The problem with sickness and death that is now being discussed at length as the baby boomers pass 60 (for instance, see the current New Yorker) has much to do with this fight, fight attitude.  We believe we must try to defeat the most hopeless illness, survive even multiple organ failure, endure everything that could conceivably give us more time.  Time for what?  Well, the article does talk about that, what people want at the end of life, and none of it can take place in the urgent care unit with a feeding tube, a colostomy demanding constant attention, heart failure, pancreatic cancer.  There is no peace of mind when you persist in fighting the huge army of the inevitable.  It seems to me that hospice care is far more likely to give that peace of mind, and the chance to say goodbye to those you love instead of stringing out the inevitable heavily sedated against in acute discomfort.  Well, I remind myself that I have little enough say about when and how I die.  Perhaps no say at all.  I think of Art Gish, whom I wrote about July 29.  Seventy years old, hoping to live another twenty, killed driving his tractor when it flipped over on him and caught on fire.  Just like that.  Thus.

Too much fire, aches and pains, dim and cool somehow led me to thinking of all that.  Now I'm going to lie down on my yoga mat in shavasana (corpse pose).  I am behind a closed door, protected from interruption by a Post-it on my door that says "Meditating."  Close eyes, relax, lie still and perhaps be rejuvenated enough to go out and get some groceries, or maybe not.  I think I'll recite the Five Remembrances first. (See bottom of this page.)
[And see the video in the post below if you want to relax, too, or at least smile.]