The New Neighbor

There are a lot of  ways to tell you're getting old. The revolutionary anthems of your youth are playing in the pharmacy aisle. You can mold your own elbows like Play-Doh. You have a different relationship with death.

Young people don't think about death much at all. When they do, it's in the form of nameless terror that comes unbidden, a sudden, nocturnal wad of dread, to be replaced come morning with your regularly scheduled immortality.

Old people have more familiarity. Death is the new neighbor who moved in down the street. We can smell what he's cooking. We've been peering at him through the blinds for a while, and we're getting to know his habits. They're not all good. We probably should bring over a fruit basket so he will think kindly of us, but it's too late and awkward now.

Old people get specific about this. It's not a big dread-wad anymore, but a sober review of options, most of them unpalatable. Most of us have notions of the nature of our own demise, educated guesses mostly, and we also have our druthers.

Me, for instance. I druther be minding my own business on the street and have a piano fall on top of me. According to cartoon lore, this sort of thing used to happen all the time. People stared at pies on the windowsill by means of hyphens, people ran off cliffs and were doing fine until they looked down, and people walked under falling pianos. My friend Bill actually had his grand piano craned up twenty floors into his apartment, and back down again later. So I had a shot. When I go, I want to be smashed into veneer and hear that 88-key clusterjangle, last thing.

But that's not what I think will really happen. I think one day my neck will gang up on me and sit on my windpipe. I can feel it gearing up sometimes when I fall asleep in my chair. Any time my chin drops forward, my neck gang convenes and plots to take me out.

Another way to tell you're getting old is if you refer to your own neck in the plural. But there you go. It's a gang. It's three against one. I don't like my chances.

In Oregon, It's "Rust To Rust"

Ruth

Slipped away, left this world, lost her battle, entered eternal rest, died, went home, was called home, went  to be with his Lord, succumbed, passed away.  Those, in no order, are the top ten ways we Americans try to not say "died." Except for "died." "Passed away" is the most popular. ("Pissed away" refers to how we spend our lives.) There are regional differences in the words we use. "Died" is popular in North Dakota, for instance, where "bought the farm" isn't all that metaphorical.

Someone calculated the most characteristic death euphemisms for each state based on obituaries.  Here in Oregon I am led to understand we characteristically use "succumbed." I always, always read the obituaries (you know, just in case) and can't remember having seen that word even once. But I like it. "Succumbed" is succinct and apt. If you succumb, you have yielded to an inevitably greater power or force, such as death, which is currently batting a thousand against humanity, all rumors notwithstanding. Relatively few Oregonians are ever called home, or go to be with their Lord. (Oregon ranks first in the nation in churchlessness, beer, and strip joints. I think the strip-joint stat is old news from back before we had internet porn.)

If we get to choose our own verbiage, I'm going with "filled her eternity shorts." But "succumbed" might be the best way to refer to my friend Ruth, who just did it a few days ago. She was not interested in dying. She was a remarkable woman whose sweet face belied her strong convictions. For instance, she despised the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical industry never sank a single claw in her. Which is unusual for a woman her age.

Generally speaking when a girl gets to be 102, she's kind of ready to go. She might not know how to accomplish it, but she's ready. Not Ruth. She had stacked up a nice neat pile of years and didn't see any reason they couldn't keep on coming. Ruth was about as bright as you can be when you're that old, though we might have lost her two years ago if Trump had been in office. She couldn't have survived getting a congratulatory 100th-birthday card from him, but she liked the Obama one, and promptly signed up for more birthdays. We were getting the idea she'd keep them coming out of sheer habit, but one morning she just succumbed. Or--even better--conceded.

Coincidentally, Dave and I had just taken care of his mom. I found him studying the contents of the dining room hutch, looking for something to evict--he's a neatnik--when his eyes lit on a garish golden box. The Mommie. Dave's mom always signed her cards "The Mommie."

"Let's stick her in the garden," Dave said.

"What? Now?"

Now. He opened the box and retrieved a shockingly large baggie of ashes and bone bits and headed to the back yard. Mom Flambe.

Dave's mom hasn't been around since 1989. In her case, we will say she "clocked out." I don't know what else you can call it when you find her sitting up in her chair with her coffee cup to one side and the newspaper in her lap and the Cubbies on the TV and otherwise lifeless. Her ashes went to live in Dave's sister's closet, where she could visit them when she needed advice, and then two years ago they were "passed on," as it were, to us.

We didn't want them. This kind of thing is not our thing.

What was supposed to happen was she was supposed to be surreptitiously sprinkled on Wrigley Field, but you really have to work at something like that, and we're not ambitious. So the garish golden box ended up in our hutch until now, when Dave took it out the back door.

"How about the compost pile?" I contributed. "That way she'll end up everywhere, if I ever get around to turning it."

We got our neighbor Anna to put on real shoes and come over to witness, because she's a caring soul and already knows we're nuts. I think we laughed a lot but didn't say anything noteworthy as Dave shook out the baggie over our compost pile and began turning it with the pitchfork we're saving for the Revolution. We empty the vacuum cleaner bag for the same reason and with as much ceremony.

We loved The Mommie. But she wasn't in that box.

Justice Served

Well it's always shocking and sometimes titillating when someone turns up dead who used to be alive, like, a few minutes ago, but there it was: Antonin Scalia's big old face right there on the internets with X's over his eyes, figuratively speaking. And I kind of went huh and I'll be and went about my day, wondering about the circumstances (head first in a platter of manicotti?) and possibly humming Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead to myself--these things come unbidden, you can't turn them off--and maybe I was humming out loud, because I was abruptly reminded that one is not to Speak Ill of the Dead.

I don't know where that rule came from. Seems like once they're dead that's the perfect time to speak ill of them, when they can't come after you by, say, accidentally sitting on you because you're little and they haven't been able to see their own dick for decades. But even if you have been speaking ill of someone for years, once he's dead you're supposed to stop.

"I don't wish death on anyone," people will say, primly, even though that's usually followed by a big "but." I'm just being honest here: there are all sorts of people I think could improve the world by not being on it. I'd trade a thousand poachers for a rhinoceros any day of the week and consider myself money ahead. Most of us are not all that crazy about the fact of our mortality and so we get all precious about the Big D. But my goodness: there are seven billion of us swarming this marble and we can't all of us be worth saving. Nor would it be possible. I think Scalia has ceased to exist in any form but carbonaceous debris, but if it turns out he's working on negotiations for the hereafter--they can get pretty baroque when you're a Catholic--I wish him the best of luck, and a good lawyer. He knew some.

He was in the majority in the Citizens United case, touting the constitutional imperative of protecting expensive speech. Free speech, I mean. One imagines him dutifully appending his name ("Fondly, Nino") to his Christmas cards to corporations without complaint, although he probably had people for that. I believe he would have defended the rights of gay fetuses, but one wonders. He wrote colorfully. And "jiggery-pokery" came up in the Obamacare dissent, not the gay marriage dissent. (At least it wasn't "jigaboo-pokery.") He eloquently enshrined traditional (one might say hidebound) viewpoints on the basis of their sheer historical persistence, but one can't help but sense that his animus toward gays was entirely rooted in his conviction that they're icky.

Oddly enough I don't bear any personal ill will toward Antonin Scalia. I think he was pretty smart, and an entertaining wordsmith, which always puts people points ahead in my book, and he was consistent about his principles. It's the principles that need to die, and since a lot of them reside in a particular generation, maybe it's time to start getting that generation's things in order, bequeathing the china, taking a load to Goodwill, and disposing of the photos in the underwear drawer.

So it's not so much that I want to engineer anyone's death. I can't even skoosh a bug, but I'm not beyond suggesting that they've got to go sometime, and now's as good a time as any.

Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights

It's been a boom year so far for famous dead musicians, and not just the ones nobody has heard of unless they're under forty, but the real ones. Right out of the gate we lost David Bowie. He epitomized an era about as well as it can be epitomized. I can't listen to Starman without being transported to a small basement flat in London where I spent a year slowly losing my mind and also drinking Guinness (so, on average, a good year). I have an acquaintance who reportedly threw out all his Bowie albums when he found out the man might be gay, which raises several questions about my friend, including: how did that little tidbit sneak up on him? The point is, things are different now, at least I hope they are, and Bowie's been with us for all of it.  Then Glenn Frey keeled over. Then Jefferson Airplane lost two members on the same day. Then Dan Hicks. And all over the social media (or, at least, Facebook, which is the platform that gained legal custody of the old farts), people were wailing along with the equally dead Marvin Gaye: What's going on?

Sure, we lost some along the way. It happens. Especially when a generation is experimenting with a lot of drugs. The adults always called it that, "experimenting," but in reality a lot of us were way past the test ride and had bought the whole fleet. Hendrix, Joplin, Lowell George--there were so many great musicians, and also Jim Morrison. It almost seemed sort of exciting and exotic at the time. Actual cessation of life--bold move! We didn't expect people to just die. Like, ever. And there was that romantic notion of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. You know, if you ignore the vomit and stuff.

And some of it just wasn't fair. Zappa, Beefheart, Nyro? We wuz robbed. But now they're dropping like weighted flies. "It always comes in threes," you hear, which is true, because after the third one you start counting over, but we're getting into the serious multiples here. We feel betrayed. These people wrote the very soundtrack of our youth. They were our youth. And if they're dying, it means...wait a minute...it means...

[tension builds as the boomers begin to put the puzzle pieces together. Shark music commences, swells. There is a gasp, and, off stage, a scream.]

Who's next? we say, alarmed, as though we are in the presence of a stalker. Bulletin: we are. We're old, people. This isn't some cosmic plot. You start edging up on that three-score and ten, you're going to have to expect some attrition.

You're not really expecting The Eagles in my collection, are you?

It's not like we're wanting for evidence. The younger generation has started to mumble, and even when you can hear them, they don't make any sense. Remember when you could use nudity as both a political statement and a personal ad? Now look at you. You're completely covered in spots and speckles, little messages, like your skin has set up an informational picket. And that's just the organ you can see. Inside, all your moist, pink, baggy bits are trying to send you messages too. Your kidneys, your liver, your heroic heap of intestines have all been saving your ass for decades, and now, they've just about had it with you. They've put up with your bullshit all this time and now they're thinking it's time to send you to the Big Time-Out.

So don't ask who's next. You might not want to know. We've been on the downhill skid since John Lennon's Revolution was first used to sell shoes. Someday soon we're all going to be gone. Some of us might be able to buy a stairway to heaven, and the rest of us, grateful or not, will be friends of the devil. Keith Richards will spend a little time sweeping up after us, and then he's out, too.

Hot On Hood

Basically, if at some point on a hike I say "it's just up here around the bend" and Dave says "you do realize we could actually die," you know the Price and Brewster family has had a normal adventure. Dave likes to anticipate the worst so that anything short of death seems like a bargain. I don't care if we die as long as I don't have to be aware of it beforehand.

In this case, we'd come up to Mt. Hood in order to get away from the heat. It was slated to be 100 degrees in town and theoretically the idea of being 6,000 feet higher, where in a normal year we might have snow, back when we used to have normal years, sounded cooler. I think the way most people do it is they drive up to the Timberline Lodge and slug beers inside where, if it's not actually air-conditioned, it is at least a massive enough building that it maintains an even temperature. We didn't do it that way.

No. What we decided to do was see about a few little trails we hadn't been on before. It's getting harder to find those. But we discovered a little nest of them at the end of a dead-end road and we started exploring. It was hot in the shade. But the trails all interconnected, and weren't long. Which gave us plenty of options to bail out. There was a little lake with salamanders in it, a very good sign. The network of trails was like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, and we figured we'd noodle around until we'd exhausted them.

And then we came upon a sign at an intersection. One trail said: "Timberline Lodge 2.5 miles." Really? Dave looked at me. I looked at Dave. Done deal. We can do 2.5 miles on our hands without shaking out pocket change. There's beer at the Lodge. Off we went.

Well, up we went, at a dead trudge. The trail was boulder-strewn and dusty and there wasn't any shade on it anywhere. It was like a spa for scorpions. If it wasn't a hundred degrees, it was one whisker-on-a-desert-rat shy of it. We had water, but salt began to crust on my face. That's about when Dave began to talk about death. He doesn't have a good sense of direction, and it's easy for him to imagine that the trail will go on for fifteen miles and they'll have to send out trained corpse-sniffing badgers to find our papery remains.

And yet, we did paw our way to the top, and Timberline Lodge was there as advertised, and they still sold beer, and the nice waitress allowed as how we could supersize it for a buck, and sure enough a crane came in and lowered a couple massive glasses onto the table for us. And Dave had a second one just to check quality control, and we went outside, where it was still possible to bake a pizza on one's backpack, and, with almost no forethought, and for the first time in forty years, we stuck our thumbs out and got us a ride to the bottom of the mountain.

Took all of thirty seconds. Evidently we don't look very menacing anymore. "Or," I said to the nice snowboarder who picked us up, "maybe after all these years I've still got it." Actually, I don't know if I've still got it, but I admit I did stick it out a little.

"Or maybe he's still got it," the man said, hooking a thumb back toward Dave. God bless America. Everybody's a little more relaxed. It's all good, as long as someone's still got it.

The Wraith

When I have visitors, I like to take them on mountain hikes because that's my favorite thing to do, and so I'm pretty sure it's their favorite thing too, even if they don't realize it at first. These are five-star humdinger hikes, with meadows and hummingbirds and paisley drifts of wildflowers in every color and vistas of volcanoes on the horizon and a scatter of beeping pikas and, theoretically, maybe even a fat furry marmot: every component, in other words, of true happiness. And the hikes are mostly flat, too, except for being inclined at a sharp angle. Remarkably, several decades'-worth of visitors have--independently of each other--referred to my hikes as "death marches." I'm sure it's meant affectionately.

When Linda and Walter came for a vacation actually devoted to hiking, I made sure to front-load the event with my very favorites, figuring they would be left breathless by, probably, the beauty. And then we went to hike on the coast, where a surprising portion of the beauty is at sea level.

Everyone loves the ocean. People in the personal ads always say they like long walks along the beach. No one ever mentions death marches. Walter and Linda were thrilled. The waves roll in and out and people stand before them mesmerized, as though they are watching infinity in a frame, and are somehow comforted by that.

I'm not. It creeps me out. The ocean is just fine from a distance, like a hundred miles, but up close it's all drowny. There's nothing but water out there and most of it is over my head. There's teeth and tentacles and stingers and slithering and darkness and death. It reminds me of the very dwindlety of life, crushed under time, the waves inexorable, doom, doom, doom, and some day one of them is going to take me out. Somewhere out there is my wave, getting a suggestion from the moon and a spin from the rearing continental shelf and beginning to crank my way. I can't look.

But there are distractions. The cliffs are a frozen snapshot of lava hitting the sea. Birds coat the sea stacks. Every tidal puddle is its own neighborhood. We tread the sand for hours and nobody gets even close to dead. I begin to relax.

"What's that?" Walter asks, pointing at the shoreline.

I raise my binoculars. It's a murre, and it's all wrong. Murres shouldn't be standing at the shoreline all by themselves. Murres should be diving for fishes and flying in bunches and jamming the tops of sea stacks and pooping on rocks. Murres definitely shouldn't be shuffling their feet and letting me walk up close enough to take a picture.

My murre is dragging a wing and has a major gash on her breast. My murre is going to die soon. I long to wrap her up in a fleece and drive her all the way back to the mountain and leave her in the custody of a kindly marmot with a well-stocked larder and a dab of mercurochrome. But I turn to leave. I got the message, friend murre. It's all teeth and tentacles and darkness and doom out there.

Still Between Dust And Dust

At some point, the mature person who has already bushwhacked her way through all of life's other milestones begins to think about death in a non-fictional way.  That's all that's left, and it is moreover closer than it used to be. Some people have grand plans for themselves, but I don't. I figure on being a brief damp spot, followed, in a geologically insignificant amount of time, by a small heap of dust and flakes with no opinion. Don't be sad for me. I'm not. For those of us without even the staying power to be an all-purpose spirit drifting in stardust, thinking about death gets pretty specific. I just hope for the best during the endgame.

The way I prefer to imagine it, the act of dying will be a gentle thing, somehow devoid of panic. There will have been some sort of shift so that the mind is no longer afraid of being quenched. Ideally, things will just wear out and I will slip from this life without stress or embarrassing emissions. I gave the concept a practice run the other night when I got sick.

Not sick sick. Just one of my peculiar colds in which the symptoms occur all out of order or maybe some of them don't manifest at all. In this case, I developed a blatting baritone that was only minimally sexy and began to want to cough recreationally most of the time. No sore throat. No congestion. It was merely annoying until the third night, when a little fever crept in.  At that point I holed up in a comfy chair with a blankie over me and churned out heat for the lap cat. Dave poured me a beer and I soldiered through it.

Uh-oh. I don't soldier through beer. Probably, I thought, this is a sign that I am dying. And I don't care. It's okay. As long as I don't have to get up out of the chair, I'm fine with whatever comes. It's peaceful, really. This is what is supposed to happen. You begin to separate from the joys and cares of life. Like, right now, as long as the quilt is still up under my chin, and the cat doesn't have an epizootic and patch out, and nobody is expecting anything of me, it's all good.

Dave made me a steak and hash browns with a bright salad on the side, and asked if I'd like a glass of red to go with. No, I don't think I want any wine. I caught his raised eyebrow of concern, and realized: yes, I am dying. I can see that now. It's not so bad. It doesn't hurt. Do not worry about me. I will just sit here and fade away. I will be a pile of dust soon. I don't need to tell anyone what folder the book I'm writing is in, or where the sheet with all my passwords is. They'll either figure it out, or they won't, but either way it doesn't matter. Nothing really matters, as long as I don't have to get up.

With a sense of heightened self-awareness, I focused on a small, dark presence deep within me. It was the Seed of Death. It began to grow. I acknowledged it with a pitiful rattly cough, and it dislodged. It was a snot nugget after all, but it was right next to the Seed of Death.

I ate half the steak and half the potatoes and couldn't manage the salad at all. Yes, I am surely dying. I will cruise in and out of consciousness, and at some point I will no longer cruise back in. She didn't want that second beer, Dave will tell people afterwards, and I knew she didn't have much time left. I just kept her comfortable.

What a nice man. I hope he doesn't miss me too much. I don't want him to be sad. With great effort, I unbundled myself from the blankie and staggered up to bed. At 8:30, four hours earlier than usual. Yes, clearly, death approaches.

Twelve hours later I managed to make it downstairs in my jammies and haystack hair and announced myself with a loogie-rattling honk. I'd stayed in bed just to make sure, but I was not technically dead at all. Someone had tied a clatter of tin cans to my lung bumpers. Jesus Christ, are you ever going to stop coughing? Dave said, with a little edge. He won't miss me too much. That's good, I think.

Pre-Planning For The Future

Dave got a solicitation in the mail the other day from Neptune Cremation Service, which thought he might want to plan for the future. The only plan we've had so far is to have him go first, so that part was appropriate. And since cremators don't charge by the foot, he's already getting a better deal than I would. In the advertisement, Neptune Cremation Service points out that we can lock in today's prices, and that is a legitimate selling point in these days of rising energy costs. It's not easy to burn people thoroughly--we're seventy percent water, and it takes a lot of energy. That water weight is a big deal. If a woman succumbed during her period, she could end up smoldering for days. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often. Most deaths occur to people who happen to be nearby a woman having her period.

We also get mail from funeral homes. Most of them also remind us of the need to plan for the future, even though that is so much more challenging than planning for stuff that's already happened. Some of them up the ante by recommending pre-planning. But pre-plannig is what I'm already doing. I'm perpetually at the stage before planning, and that is why I'm unlikely to respond to this sort of advertisement. I am also not reassured by these outfits' tendency to use the word "pre-need." It should go without saying. People tend to lose a lot of their former charm almost immediately upon death, and something should be done, but you don't want to jump the gun on cremation. Some folks could use a little exfoliation, but that's about as far as it goes.

Neptune Cremation Service brought up some valid points. People move around so much these days that it makes less sense to place one's loved ones in a "local" cemetery. Which means "rest in peace" has turned into "buckle up, because your shiftless son is going to be toting you in a can from sofa to sofa for the next forty years." It's true that embalming and burial are a waste of resources, but cremation is not without its environmental impact. It would make more sense to get dug into the garden; it's not legal everywhere, although you could probably get away with it if you topped it with a little plywood headstone labeled "Fluffy." Better yet is to get staked out for the vultures, but people are excitable, and oddly begrudging of vultures, especially in your urban areas.

But wait! There's more! If we send in the enclosed card--you have to use your own Forever stamp--we can be put in the hopper to WIN A PRE-PAID CREMATION! which is no iPad, but I'd still probably mention it on Facebook if I won. The card insists it is a Confidential Data Card. No information will be released. So it's a little odd that they reveal last month's cremation winner. It's Charmaine Reed, y'all. If you know Charmaine, you might want to check on her to see if she's looking a little, uh, dehydrated.

Dave has cleaned out crematoria before. He used to be in the business of repairing and relining kilns and boilers. His mom sort of expected him to be an engineer, but instead he wore coveralls and scooped out cremation burners. Anyway, he's said many times that he wants to be cremated and have his ashes sent through a lime kiln one last time. I've got a plan too.

I want to have any functioning innards donated to whoever needs them (tip: go for my liver, it's a frickin' miracle worker), but then I would like to be taxidermed. I want my arms up and a fierce expression with big googly glass eyes, and then I want to be interred inside the wallboards of a new and totally useless partition in my house. One that the new owners will be anxious to demolish. They should probably have a pre-plan in place, too.