While Dad dies, so do you.
We barely know you, know nothing of your story. During meals, we’ve sat with you and other residents, but you never spoke. Your wrinkles were deep, your face a natural grimace that at the slightest attention popped into a big, toothless smile.
In your room, you now die alone.
Whatever you have done, wherever you have been during your 80 or 90 years on earth, it ends like this: in a building where you have lived only a short time, with people who have known you only a short time. Whatever your gifts, whatever your wounds, where you die no one knows them.
Others have died like this here, are dying like this across the culture: breathing alone, without visitors, anonymous residents in anonymous homes.
When you breathe your last, an anonymous man will put your holy body in a bag – a bag he has used for many other bodies – zip it up, wheel you out the door, and that will be that.
I am sorry for this.
***
And so you, whose name I won’t mention here but that we remember in our family, will be part of Dad’s death ceremony. And he will be a part of yours.
Dad lies with his wife by his side around-the-clock, with his children and grandchildren and relatives filling up the room from early morning until long after dark, with music at times, with silence at times, with prayer at times. A body worker tends to him one day. An old friend sings to him another day. His brother sits by his bedside another day. Your room, however, is mostly empty, silent.
A couple of visitors do stop in briefly here and there, but yours is a lonely death.
Or is it a death of solitude? Do you perhaps want it this way? Surely some people do. But I can’t believe that most do. To be with others in death, to be tended by your circle of people, seems like an essential human experience. To help others practice their last breaths by bravely breathing your own in their presence seems necessary for all of us. While some may prefer to die alone, I have to believe that the epidemic of lonely deaths is one more sign of cultural collapse.
***
I don’t know why you die alone, and don’t want to conjecture. Your soul’s journey is what it is.
Generally, however, I can imagine why this happens to people. Families scatter across a continent, and the logistics of being together are too complicated. Or the wounds in a family are so deep – on a scale beyond the normal ways we suffering people cause our loved ones to suffer – that being together only deepens the pain. Or people fear death, have never been around death, don’t know the gift of death, so stay away. Or, most tragically, one ends one’s own life.
What are the particular circumstances that caused you, old woman, whose voice I never heard, to die alone? I’ll never know. During my father’s death ceremony, your ceremony sings of another kind of death, a kind of suffering in this world not so easily encountered. In this lonely culture, many people live lonely and many people die lonely.
If this is you, if you are lonely, then your loneliness is a prayer, too. It’s a different prayer than the prayer of togetherness we encounter in my father’s room, but a prayer nonetheless. Your death is holy, if we can bare it, and we can. Any kind of death we can bare.
***
While Dad dies, we occasionally take turns sitting with you, then one afternoon, my children come to get me. You have stopped breathing, they tell me. I should come.
I walk with them across the dining hall, where my mother and wife kneel by your bed. I kneel by your body with my children, and no one says much. The lights are low, the room silent. Your body lies between us, abandoned, liberated. After a while, we go back to my dad’s room. My brothers stop in later to be with you.
At my father’s funeral, we will make a petition for you. Your name, oh holy child, remains on our tongues even today.
Joe, these words really touched my heart. Thank you for sharing.