Death of a Frenchwoman

“Death comes in threes.” This is the bit of metaphysical superstitious advice I took from last Sunday’s episode of “Gray’s Anatomy.” I had never watched it before, but I enjoyed it. Sandra Oh is my favourite part of the show—she’s usually my favourite part of any show, a ser honesta. I think she’s amazingly beautiful and intelligent. She steals whatever scene she walks into, in my opinion.

But about the death. La muerte: viene por tres. The verity of this anxiety-producing thought had not congealed into consciousness in my brain until just this evening, when I was writing a sympathy note to my godmother. Her housemate of many years passed away last week. My mom just told me this morning. I realized as I wrote this letter to Hildegard that it’s the third sympathy note in as many weeks that I’ve sent out. First it was the mother of my friend and pen-pal of a decade whom I met in Zimbabwe. She died unexpectedly, leaving him groping for a way to travel to Nigeria while awaiting green card status without permission to travel. Then, a week later, I received an email from the Mrs. of the neurosurgeon I used to work for, telling me that the doctor’s mother had passed away, to whom he was so devoted. Now, I hear from Mom that Denise has indeed crossed over.

It’s an odd thing to think about, for me. I don’t spend much time dwelling on the end of life, except in philosophical, libertarian terms. I think about “The Right to Die” more than any tangible effect dying has on one’s surroundings and surrounders. I spend so much time thinking about what to do NOW, while I’m HERE, and what I can AFFECT or in what I might PARTICIPATE, that it feels unnatural or strange for me to try to understand death in any meaningful or personal way. It’s seems far off: not part of me or my life or my identity. I’m a living person, surrounded by other living persons. I prefer this.

The ratchet thrown in that wheel of living, however, is my mother-in-law. She’s not terribly well, you know. She’s in her 80s, and her health declines yearly. I visit her often, and spend a lot of time talking to her. She’s helped draw my attention in a visceral and emotional way to the end of life, since as much as my husband and I prefer not to think on it, my mother-in-law has many more years behind her than ahead.

Still, this thought does not affect me strongly—at least not in the way I suppose it ought to. I see people grieve and cry and heave and thrash when a loved one dies. And I certainly love E. (not going to put her name on the blog, out of respect for privacy; she’ll just be E.), but I don’t think I’ll do any of those things when E. finally takes her rest. She wants to go; she tells me so—verbatim—every time I see her. She was an active woman for most of her life, and now mostly lives in a 20-foot radius. She hates it, because she sees how limited her body and her brain have made her life, and it frustrates and saddens her. When I see all this, it doesn’t make me feel anything hysterical; I just feel sympathy. I can’t say what I’d do in her place, but I think I feel the same frustration and exhaustion, anyhow.

Which is all part of why I don’t feel like death is something to mourn or dread. E., for instance, has lived a good long life, and now she wants to go, since her level of existence has changed so drastically from that to which she had been accustomed. I understand this; it does not make me sad or lonely. Is this freakish? Ought I to feel the loss more strongly? Perhaps it is because she is not my own mother? I doubt it. I love E. as much as it’s possible to love, and I’ll miss her a lot when she goes. But I don’t dread the thought of her going or being gone. I wonder if this is normal, or if I’m some kind of psychopath....

In other news, I haven’t written in a while. I’ll post more about my trip to Bloomington, etc. v. soon. Must go finish my homemade chai tea and get some kiddies to bed. “Turn of that Friday Night Smackdown! Time for prayers and stories!” (Things we normally say around our household.... Pro-entertainment wrestling with a chaser of prayers and bedtime stories. It all makes sense. ...It’s a good life.) More to come. Tx for reading; vos agradezco.