Endings
Goodbyes are overrated, and the luxury of spring.
There are a whole lot of endings going on around me, and by endings, I mean death.
I have reached the age where friends are dying.
Thoughts have turned to my own ending. Or at least, how do I want to spend the time I have left, which means:
Do I want to keep an old house in Virginia?
Because I made the mistake of leaving New York once. I won’t again.
I’m down in Virginia this week. I’ve spent a few days cleaning up plaster dust because part of the ceiling fell in my bedroom. This is a terrible and tedious job and my body is killing me.
That’s what having an old house is like. This is the second ceiling to come down in 18 months.
While emptying the vacuum it occurs to me I could do a TV show called,
“So You Think Old Houses are Beautiful?”
It would be filled with episodes like Yet Another Plaster Ceiling Fell; Victorians Sure Had Creepy Wallpaper; There is Nothing More Important Than a Good Plumber; The Snake Basement; and The Bathroom Floor Needs Replacing: $8,000 Please.
Would you want to watch that show? Me neither.
And yet here I am, sitting in my chair beneath the portrait of my mother, perfectly content.
Ambiguity and I are friends. The thoughts about selling were last week, in New York. The day I got here, as soon as I sat down in my chair, I felt perfectly happy.
Selling is impossible again. The only reason I’m thinking this way is because I’m suddenly acutely aware of time.
In the midst of endings, it’s one of the most beautiful Mays I’ve experienced in a long time. It’s cool, but the flowers are exquisite. There is such luxury in late spring.
I arrived just in time to see the last flower of the ancient Silver Moon rosebush. It was my father’s favorite, so it’s always meaningful to see it bloom.
The magnolias are also blooming, and Tammy brought over a gorgeous bouquet with one as its star.
But what I love most of all are the pink old-fashioned roses on the border of the property. One of these days I’m going to have to hire someone to dig out the poison ivy growing with them to see if they’ll flourish more.
These old roses were here with the first inhabitants of the house. Seeing them has always been a link to the passage of time, of continuity.
They also remind me of being a child. I’d go into the yard in bare feet to explore all of spring’s beauty.
Do kids even go barefoot anymore? Maybe on some farm, somewhere, far away from the internet and dire warnings of what happens when you don’t put shoes on children, some child in their bare feet is looking at old-fashioned roses and wondering about the passage of time.
It’s strange to admit, because thinking this way is thinking the impossible, the opposite of how I’ve felt my entire life. But lately I’ve allowed myself to consider the possibility of selling this place.
I grew up here and have always been over-attached to it. In the book I just finished writing, the house is a character.
But I do not love being a landlord, which I must do if I want to pay the taxes and insurance. And to get this place into the shape I’d like, I’d need at least a million dollars to renovate.
Adding to the equation is my age. In September, I will be entering the last third of my life. That’s if I live till ninety. (I am not interested in living past ninety.)
I’m thinking about how I want to spend this third.
Empty space has become my greatest luxury. I need far less than I ever imagined.
I would be perfectly happy with a studio apartment in Manhattan, with a comfortable bed and a good laptop. This is the proverbial room of one’s own I would most like.
We’ve lived about 20 minutes north of New York City since the aughts. Although I’m in the city frequently, it’s different than living there. I can’t wander downstairs to the deli to get a cup of coffee; I have to make my own.
And it doesn’t come in a blue and white paper cup.
Although there are great benefits to living where I do, my blood pressure goes down when I’m in Manhattan. I’ve always felt it’s where I belong.
If I sold the Virginia house, I could get an apartment in the city without having to sell our house in New York. Secret Service doesn’t mind NYC during the work week, but he needs to be somewhere else on the weekends. Besides, I have no idea what we’d do with the contents of the garage.
It’s lucky the bedroom ceiling fell when it did, because I’m staying with Fred this week, my former teacher and lifelong friend.
Tommy, who takes care of him, is out of town on holiday. Our friend Jackie and I split the ten days he’s away, being Tommy for Fred. She left the day I came in.
So I’m staying upstairs in Fred’s beautiful little house, safe from falling ceilings and plaster dust. And he has someone who loves him with him at night.
Fred is winding down. His death isn’t imminent, but his health and age make it…possible.
A world without Fred is unimaginable.
That’s the thing about death. It is so weird. It is the one thing we know will happen, not just to us, but to everyone.
And it’s a shock, every time.
Thankfully Fred still has his marbles and memories. We have laughed a lot.
My friend Ellen died a few days ago.
I so admire how she handled the illness that led to her death.
She didn’t tell us she was sick. A couple of weeks ago her husband Jim texted a mutual friend that she was in hospice, and asked her to tell a few others.
I was one of them.
The group she selected to get the news were all part of a writing salon in Greenwich Village years ago. We met once a month. Our mutual friend Austin Pendleton led us.
Ellen suffered from an aggressive form of melanoma, a skin cancer that can metastasize quickly. I know, because it killed my father at the age of 49. Apparently when she was diagnosed the doctor told her between 2-5 years. She lasted three.
I have the most enormous respect for how she handled it.
When you tell people you have cancer, they treat you differently. I suppose she just wanted us all to keep treating her the way we always did, even if it meant not seeing us.
You never know what you’re going to do till you get there, but if this happens to me—a diagnosis with a poor prognosis and little chance of recovery—I can only hope I have the discipline to refrain from telling people.
I admired her so much. As a mutual friend said,
“Ellen was the bravest person I’ve ever known.”
She always did think of others. But there’s thinking of others, and thinking of others. She let us live, unaware of the impending loss of one of the best people we’ll ever know.
I told someone about how Ellen kept her illness private. They said something to the effect of not giving people a chance to say goodbye.
Goodbyes are overrated.
There was a time when my mother and I were not speaking, and I fretted that she might die without my having the opportunity to say goodbye to her. Secret Service said something which changed how I think about endings.
He said the end of a life isn’t the whole relationship. And whether or not I was with her when she died didn’t negate any of the time I spent with her when she was alive. Our relationship still existed in time.
I loved that. It took a lot of worry off my shoulders. Not just for my mother, for everyone.
I’m against any form of obligation, including goodbyes. The only person I feel obliged to at this point is Secret Service, but he hates obligation as much as I. It’s a break-even situation.
I have more than one friend with cancer right now.
I correspond with one of them. And we rarely, if ever, speak of his health. We trade Prince videos and old stories of when we were young.
I won’t see him before he dies. I don’t need to.
There’s a great line at the end of Dying for Sex, said by Sissy Space, who plays Gail. (Spoiler alert, I suppose.)
Gail looks at her dying daughter and says,
“I already know. Anything you could say to me, I already know.”
We’re like that.
Being here this week has been great for my depression, because I’ve been too busy to lie in bed wondering when the depression will lift.
I know, the jokes write themselves.
As I enter this part of life, my rational brain tells me I need to adjust to death. There won’t be fewer deaths of my beloveds; there will be more.
Oh, I’m thinking I have to do that thing. That phrase people always say when someone is about to die, the phrase that always sounds so ridiculous to me:
You have to prepare yourself.
As if you could ever prepare yourself for a loved one’s death. I both know I cannot and the rational part of my brain says I must.
I must do the impossible. I must know how to handle life’s greatest mystery.
The jokes write themselves.
Good news. My grandkids were visiting me at the river, and most of them refused to wear shoes even when walking over the gravel driveway. I smiled the whole time I was mopping the dirty footprints from my floor this afternoon.
I've thought a lot about how to prepare myself and others for the possibility of death, and all I could come up with is writing letters. Before I was admitted to the hospital for my stem cell transplant, I wrote one to each of my sons, my husband, and my sister. I'd written one to my mother too, but she died while I was in the hospital.
Now that I'm in remission, I've become much more aware of living in the present. My intention is to be as deeply connected with my loved ones as I can each time we're together. I no longer worry about everything being perfect. I just make sure they know I love them each time we part.
I get your emails and read when I can. I saw the splash(?) …endings headline and it instantly captivated me. Have been pondering on death (in a positive realistic way) due to my aunts long slow decline. And put my phone and your piece aside for 20 minutes or so and then found out my aunt had passed away ( was expecting any day as she was well into 7th stage dementia). When I took a few breaths I cleared my eyes, read your article
and subscribed! Life is beautiful, precious and mysterious,when you look in all directions, and experience the gamut of human emotions. Your writing speaks to that. Thank you!