Can't remember where I read it - maybe it was Tom Robbins, I don't know, or in "Throat Sprockets" - but someone once wrote that "Fall is Springtime for Death."This Spring, Spring is the Springtime for Death.
Yeah, I just checked the news and Terri Schiavo is dead. One moment that headline wasn't there, and then a minute ago it was. May she finally have the peace that has been denied her for so long.
I have new friends who have lost a child - I have them because they lost a child. Shortly after Calvin was born I realized that from this point on, my life was going to be peopled with dead children. Most people don't live with dead children, they don't acknowledge them, they don't exist. And I resented no longer being one of the happily ignorant. It took a long time for me to be ... comfortable with that. Comfortable, that's the wrong word, but it comes close. Accepting is definitely the wrong word. But there it was. I had crossed over into the land of dead children.
And then, having written a play about, making my personal pain public, I had even asked to be some kind of representative, an official of that country. I wanted to do something, I wanted to help in some way, to let others know they aren't alone in this.
My grandfather, the Norwegian sailor, is closing in on his 101st birthday. Less than two months away. They get him out of his bed every other day. He seems lucid, most of the time. But he is not happy. He has a brain tumor and it pains him. But he has lived for so long ... you know, raising a small child I am more aware of how fragile life is, how many obstacles there are to survival, from inside and out. Perhaps, if we get so far, we reach a point where we simply do not know how to die.
A number of people I work with also have grandparents on the verge of death. A friend of mine fell asleep at the wheel last week and hit a telephone pole - and merely broke his nose. We celebrated Calvin's birthday and a wedding on the same day last week. The Pope slouches hopelessly against a window and struggles uselessly to be heard.
And at last, our entire nation, neurotic in all things, and more than happy to spill our guts about our collective drug use, sexual hang-ups and family dysfunction, is (for a moment) talking openly about the end-of-life, and about the right-to-die. We are speaking the unspeakable.
It's in this season of death that we prepare for another child. Our third. I put my head, my hand against Toni's comically large belly, feeling the Fish writhe and squirm (not Calvin, who was a flutter to me, not Zelda who ran in place and beat her fists for hours at a time) thinking, "That's a good boy. Keep moving. Please, please, keep moving."
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