Death and Writing

Thoughts about death have so consumed me lately that I’ve begun to think the whole purpose of the postal experiment has been a means of holding it at bay.

The school year has come to an end, which is always a kind of tortured death for me. In the weeks leading up to it I fight it, I am exhausted by it, and as much as I want a summer vacation, I don’t want school to stop. I don’t want my students out of my daily life, I don’t want my lessons to come to a halt. I can’t ever remember how in August, I always feel like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of summer heat and lost skills when we are all reborn.

Our dog Sophie died in March, and we were with her as they administered the lethal dose.  I wept and moaned and clung to her as the life left her eyes. I spent the next two days curled up in a ball of loss and longing. Every time I woke or entered the house at the end of the day, I looked for her. I still do a double-take when I see a wadded up blanket on the couch, expecting it to be her.

In the two months since, I’ve regretted my bawling as Sophie died, believing I may have added to her anxiety in those last moments of her beautiful life.  I still worry over that, and cry. I was selfish. I am selfish. If I am like this over a dog I knew for five years, what will I be like when I lose one of my human loved ones?

A woman in my book club recently recommended Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as a book that demonstrates how one woman gracefully coped with the death of her beloved.  Wanting to learn how to do this very thing, I raced to the library to retrieve the book.  I’m reading it now, almost finished in fact. In this memoir, Didion is as concise and lyrical as a poet.  Yet while she illuminates the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness… about marriage and children and memory… about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” I disappoint myself in that I don't seem to have learned anything more than “Time is the school in which we learn.”

Even a lighthearted card-and-letter-writing campaign can be viewed, at this moment anyway, as my attempt to either hinder death or learn to cope with it gracefully. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but everybody’s got to go – we do know that much. Correspondence is more – much more – than having no regrets at someone else's passing. It's more than making sure you let your people know how you love them, or think about them, or forgive them, or want them forever in your life.

Or maybe that’s all it is.