memento mori

when i was a kid, i loved the saturday paper. the big thick version of the evening telegram, served up on the kitchen table, packed with flyers, the tv guide, the colour comics, and, more importantly, the expanded version of the in memoriam section. i read that section obsessively, and furtively - i was not unaware that such macabre interests in ten-year-olds tended to be frowned upon by the grownups in the room.

of course, i didn't think of it as macabre. there was something in those columns of bad verse, headed up with a photo of the dearly beloved if the family had the money or maybe if a good photo was available, that i was drawn to. i counted the number of years that had passed since the people had died, contemplated the span of the memory relative to the span of the life lived. i said my small agnostic prayers, especially for the young, or those whose frozen smiling faces caught my attention. i imagined writing such a column for my grandparents, for my parents, for my sister, for my cats. i imagined such a column being written about me. what would be said to sum up a life? how would you pick just the right verse, say just the right things? how would you craft a fitting tribute in 32 agate lines, an inch and a half wide? how, though at ten, i'm certain this would not have been my language, do you bear witness to a life?

and now, 25 years later, i spent this morning making beds and serving water, combing hair and holding hands, in a palliative care unit. and i'm thinking a lot about what it means to bear that witness, to be present at the end of a life. to be present takes on such different meaning when the future has become so short. it seems to me that all you can do, sometimes, is to not look away unless you're asked to. to let an hour go by without pushing it into purpose. to let life run its course. which ends. inevitably, indiscriminately, intolerably, infinitely, infallibly.


lucinda williams - side of the road




postscript: i know i said i might stay away, but i lied. this seems as good an antidote as any to heavy snowfall warnings and falling rocks that might come my way, and it's good to talk. however virtually that might be.