Here & There November 2008
By James Kullander
Scrawled in blunt-pointed pencil in my At-a-Glance weekly appointment book, my list of things to do on Friday, September 26, includes items like get coffee, pay my American Express bill, and call my home post office to let the people there know I’ll be gone longer than I had expected when I’d dropped off a hold-mail notice as I’d left for Jacksonville, Florida two weeks before. Squeezed in at the very bottom of the long list is a small notation: Dad died. 11:05 p.m.
On Wednesday, October 8, I have items listed that include pay day, sell tickets to the k.d. lang concert I can’t get to, call a friend of mine in Queens, and in the middle of all this: Dad cremated.
Is this what the death of someone I love has come down to? A couple of items in an appointment book?
Since September 26, I have spent unaccountable hours on the phone with lawyers, bankers, insurance companies, and every other official body that needs to know my father is no longer among the living. One morning in my parents’ apartment, three days after my father died, I was on hold with the subscription department of the Wall Street Journal while talking to a hospice nurse on another line. I felt like a stock broker, frantically selling on one phone and buying on the other.
While this was going on, I was maneuvering around boxes from a moving company, which had sent three men in jeans and T-shirts to pack up the apartment and move it Colorado so my mother, whose grief and confusion in the sudden whirlwind needed tending, could be near the only one of my three siblings who is married with children, and where we figured she would feel most at home now that her husband of 60 years had passed. My life at the office, although a welcome respite from my other life, has been no less demanding. Things all around me—and in me—have been happening so quickly and my memory feels so compromised and stupid with unprocessed grief, that I felt I had to write my father’s death and cremation dates into my appointment book so I wouldn’t forget a week or two later.
Events are passing me by like rows of billboards I am whizzing past in the fast lane of the business of death and survival. In the blur I can barely read what’s on them, see the images enough to make sense of them. Maybe one of them is advertising what I’m really looking for: Time to do nothing. But in the car I’m driving—or in the car that’s driving me—I can’t find the brakes and I’m running every red light I see. Normally, I like long road trips for their soothing, highway monotony. But the drive home from Florida in my father’s car was far from soothing or monotonous. The traffic between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore was epic. While I listened to NPR about all the frightening news about the crashing economy, it looked like everyone was evacuating and heading to the hills. The highway choked with Joads, only this time each one driving alone in a gleaming BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus, the American dream suddenly one huge, incomprehensible nightmare. Sort of like my own life, I thought.
I am not one to run from difficult emotions and I want to stop and let the sadness catch up to me. Instead, it feels like a low-grade fever I am trying to shake because I have to keep moving. Yet, on these increasingly chilly and dark autumnal mornings, the simple task of getting myself out of bed feels like I’m lifting a sack of potatoes. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis mourns the death of his wife: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of death. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter if my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself. Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.”
From today’s standpoint, mourning seems quaint and old-fashioned, like a widow wearing black for a year after the death of her husband. Even our inherent responses to the death of someone we love—not only sadness, but also lethargy and confusion—seem like an indulgence we can no longer afford. When I e-mailed one my favorite Buddhist teachers, Sylvia Boorstein, to tell her about my father’s death, I was comforted to know she felt much the same. “I wish we had a society in which people could take a long break from work and other pressures just to be quiet and reflect for a while about a family death,” she e-mailed back. “The world is different after someone leaves it.”
If death has been with us forever and if the affects of death lay us low as much as they always have, then why should we allow ourselves to be so quickly pulled back into the tumultuous current of our lives like, well, nothing happened? Something did happen. Something big. These days I feel like a shell-shocked refugee from a country at war, where death is fast, brutal, and must be fled to survive. And I’ve found myself in a country where I feel out of place and lost, my normal points of reference back in the land I’ve left behind, which no longer exists as a sovereign state and which I would not be able to recognize if I could return, or even find my way back to, the path filling in with the undergrowth of endless tasks that threaten to overtake me.
One of the lessons I’ve learned in my years of study and practice of Buddhism is that we are the cause of our own suffering if what we desire is different from what we have, if we wish something or someone to be other than what they are. I’ve found these teachings to be a great solace sometimes. I am doing what I can to apply them to the events now going on my life; I am trying not to resist what I need to do to take care of the business of my father’s death and to do what I need to do to pay my bills, keep my house, feed myself—to get up out of bed in the morning and make my way to the office.
Yet, I can’t help but wonder sometimes to what degree does this approach snub my father’s passing and take a toll on my own well-being on account of that disregard?
What to do? At the moment, I don’t know but to keep on doing what I’m doing, like I’ve tripped over something and have to stumble along to keep myself from falling. In the weeks before my father died, he mumbled from his hospital bed that “the mountain is insurmountable.” I knew what he meant. He was ready to fall.
For me right now, I’m looking for something to break my fall, a place where I can stop, catch my breath, and for a moment look over my shoulder to take in the vast landscape of a life that is gone forever.
***
For further exploration:
C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed
