On a warm October Sunday morning we were told that she had fallen and was doing poorly.
On Monday we were told she was in hospice and decided to go the next day.
And so we did. A sunny Tuesday morning and the three of us told stories and shared our love of this 92-year-old woman. The hospice welcomed us and took us to Room 209 – (that was also the room number in which I taught for my first four years at a high school). Here, Room 209 was very large, lights dimmed, a sliding door opened out on a large patio and then grass down to some woodland. And quiet, so quiet one could have heard a wristwatch tick, if wristwatches still ticked.
In this large quiet room was a small white and blue hospital bed. Propped up but barely visible the woman we had come to see, “see” the only verb that could describe our being there. She breathed, she moved some, she was clean, she felt no pain. Our being there was more for us than for her. I told her I loved and was glad she had been in my life. Maybe she heard.
We left with the certainty that she would not return to clarity, that her last breath was not far off. Yet somehow glad we had come the miles, seen this woman, and spent time together as friends.
The following Sunday we were told she had breathed her last and would be buried on Wednesday.
That Wednesday, shortly before noon in a dark and blustery rain, five people stood sentinel as a station wagon backed toward the opened grave. She had wanted a green burial. A box of unvarnished wood, pulled by two men from the back of the station wagon, two black straps thrown across the grave, the box placed on them, and then slowly lowered to the bottom.
Music of wind and rain, then a large blue truck backed up at the foot of the grave, the red-orange Kubota jaws dropped pile after pile of dirt, rocks, branches to fill the opening. Those were the only true colors – blue and red-orange – in the dark rainy noon.
We watched, waited, witnessed the last glimpse of this wonderful woman. Then we shared a taste of red wine, said our good-byes to her, to each other, and left the piled dirt to settle over her. I was shivering, cold, wet, yet also glad as it reassured me that I was alive and there to say my good-bye to my friend.
Since that Wednesday, I have again been aware of the two, and only, absolutes. We are born. We die. Those are the only human absolutes. As a young woman I, too, called for “old age to rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The wisdom of my youth gives way to the wisdom of my antiquity.
We have done our raging, decades of raging against wars, genocide, discrimination against “the other,” starvation, climate misuse, glass ceilings, unfair taxation, fascism, lies, misuse of power – we have raged and raged and now breathe quietly. We turn to younger generations to take up the rage to protect and to perfect, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
This is the lesson of a life well lived and a plain pine box.
.