The Widow Speaks . . . Again

I know something about death because my husband died. It’s seven years this month, in fact. The truth is we can know something about death, but little, really, of its process and nothing of how it feels until we ourselves die, and no one I know who has died is coming back to enlighten me about all that. I’ve always wished someone would, like my mother or my dad, but they didn’t. Then, I thought, maybe my husband would. But no.

I mean, I could see death happening to him, and truly it broke my heart. I can report something of its process as I witnessed it, but I’ve done that. Now, of course, I’m thinking of me and death. My death, not that I think it’s near, but come on, death is one of the real, universal, perplexing, whatever other words to describe it, topics in this world. A person simply must address it, in thought, and in writing.

This line came into my mind today. “Death was near, he surely knew.” It’s from an essay I wrote, “Age: Perspective from An Artichoke Farm.” The topic was aging and the focus was my dad, who had died a few years earlier. I thought I knew something about aging then and its relationship to death, but I was in my forties when I wrote it, thinking that time was slipping away. Now I’m nine months from being 70, and I think I know more about the topic because time is slipping away.

As that line from my essay ran through my mind, I said out loud, “Yes, he surely knew, but even if we know, we don’t want to give up living because of it.” That’s true for most us, isn’t it? Well, it’s what I think, anyway. I mean, don’t we want to live until we cannot avoid death any longer? I do.

I thought for a while that I had not understood my dad, but when I reread what I wrote back then, I think I did understand him. I did understand, at least in my head. The older I get the nearer I come to understand in my heart. That’s obvious, isn’t it, because it becomes more real, occupies my thoughts more often.

Here is the section from the essay where the line appears.

In the last year of his life, his 90th year, he wanted Mama's green 1967 Dodge back from my teen-aged son. Daddy was going to move to Watsonville, California, and buy an artichoke farm. He would live the rest of his life there.

Watsonville. One of the many places Daddy fell in love with in his earlier travels up and down California as a soft-sell life insurance salesman. Wherever Daddy would go, he'd get the paper and check the Want Ads for real estate buys. That's why he had property here and there—not vast holdings, but a house or 5-acre farm. "Income property," he called it. He had a place in Santa Cruz, near the Begonia Gardens; a small farm in Oceanside, southeast of the Rosicrucian retreat; and a cluster of rental houses in Lancaster, on the Mojave desert. Daddy didn't own property in Watsonville, though I often heard him and Mama speak of the place fondly. And he loved artichokes.

But my dad had no driver's license in the 90th year of his life. Cataract surgery on both eyes had left them only partly seeing—those terrible thick glasses he wore made his eyes look bigger than eyes ought to look but did not make them see. He couldn't sit, rise, or walk unaided. He didn't dress himself. We all knew he couldn't move to Watsonville or drive or raise artichokes or do anything but stay right where he was and let us take care of him. And when we told him, he knew it too, likely had known it all along. He said, "I know. But I want to."

Maybe these were his attempts to keep living. Death was near, he surely knew. These were ways to turn his back on it, ignore it. Maybe then it would go away. Maybe then he would be young again.

Back then, that last paragraph was pretty good, I thought. It had a rhythm to it and the ring of truth. Today, I understand it and know it is true.