"A sense of liberation"

In her book Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, Susan Gubar says than when she found out she had this cancer in her early 60s she felt almost “euphoric” because it meant that instead of a prolonged death enduring pain or dementia—what she envisioned—she was going to leave this world at a time in her life when she was still successful in her career, was in a good marriage, and her daughters were grown and on their own.

I’m the same age as the author and I’ve been around a lot of death lately. Mark, my partner of 34 years, died of cancer in his early 60s (described in my Diary of a Bad Year series of blog posts). Butchie, eulogized in my previous blog, died less than a month ago of cancer. Last Sunday I went to a wake for Sebia Hawkins, a longtime anti-nuclear activist who also died of cancer having just survived an aneurism that set her back for more than a year. Ed Quillen, publisher and editor of Colorado Central and longtime columnist for the Denver Post, dropped dead of a heart attack in early June. So it’s not surprising that I’ve been thinking about “the right time to die.” Susan Gubar described her situation as a time between a life cut short—certainly how I felt about Mark’s death—and debilitating age, which I’ve seen far too often in my parents’ generation.

While my kids are also grown and on their own they just experienced the death of their father and they’re still quite young; one just out of college and the other starting a family. We’ve been lucky enough—and privileged enough—to make it this far together, so I’d like to see them through a few more years.

The critical component to this “through” is that “I” see “them” through a few more years. I distinctly remember the day I realized that my own mother and I were reversing roles: I needed to be the one upon whom she could always depend instead of the other way around. It was a gradual process, but my feelings that day were stark: I felt the loss of the person she had always been in my life, and I wasn’t ready for it, although I was already a mother myself.

Now I’m that person in my kids’ lives, and I don’t want to be the one who will depend on them. I want to keep editing their papers and articles; keep counseling them on life choices; discuss Habermas and the “Orientalist” gaze; and spend money on them. Neither do I want to be the person who can’t weed whack the grass in the orchard; irrigate the hay fields; fix the lose pipe under the sink or replace the gasket in the faucet; split my kindling, or any of the other daily tasks I’m confronted with in my house and on my ten acres.

What these things contribute to, of course, is my sense of who I am, which is constructed from what I do in the world, how I am related to others, and how I take care of myself. On NPR the other day I heard an interview with a woman from Japan who was discussing the cultural impacts of growing old in her country. Historically, when one got older than one’s usefulness, grandpa or grandma was thrown off a cliff or left out on the mountain to starve—literally. Now, with 21 percent of the population 65 or older, that’s not going to happen, but the idea of usefulness continues to resonate, and several of the people interviewed on the program expressed their terror at becoming a burden on their families and society and vowed to end their lives before that occurred.

Nora Ephron died last week at 71. She had no illusions about what it meant to get old, even in the good old USA. As Susan Gubar hopes for herself, Ephron left this world still writing the articles, books, and screenplays she’d been producing for most of her adult life, despite her complaints about loss of short term memory and the elasticity of her neck (she also left two grown kids, oddly enough named the same as mine: Jac[k]ob and Max). I doubt if she felt Gubar’s initial “euphoria”— Ephron had the same illness my mother had, a form of leukemia that makes one susceptible to infection, hers being pneumonia—but it seems she left at a time when she felt she was still who she had been for most of her life: a successful writer, a mother, a wife, a warm and funny person.

When I read back through this piece I realize I give rather short shrift to the “what I do in the world”, or the “legacy” part of the equation. That’s a function of the ephemeral nature of the effect one has in a dynamic world, the disappointment that elicits, and the fact that I was so often implicated—happily so—by the day-by-day demands of the life I chose. I had the luxury of making choices about how to live, but choosing “the right time to die,” if it’s allowed at all, is going to be a daunting task.