Leaves

I have been thinking about death this week.

It started on Tuesday, when the boys and I were walking to All Saints' Day Mass at the Newman Center.  We were talking about the Catholic churches in China, one state-sanctioned and one faithful to Rome, and about why communist ideology and Christian theology often conflict, and about Marx and "the opiate of the masses." 

I thought about writing a post called "Opiate Schmopiate" after that conversation -- we talked about what opiates do, how they blunt sensation and addict their users.  I told the boys about Mark Shea's wonderful recent post -- about how holiness, instead of straitening and stripping away, allows us to be who we truly are and relish life in all its richness and luster.  We celebrate the saints' lives because they show us a promise fulfilled:  I come that you may have life, and have it abundantly.

Or maybe it started before that, when we found an injured squirrel on the sidewalk.  He lay at the base of a tree, a broken branch nearby.  I called animal control from the ice cream shop, but when we walked by the next day he was still there, eyes closed.  "I don't want the squirrel to be dead!" Joe burst out.  "Can you make him be alive again?"

I always think about dying in the fall -- don't you?  It's the leaves, with their tumult of color against black boles and boughs.  I remember St. Francis' prayer as I scuff through them:  "It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."  Mostly I repeat the first part, IT is in DY-ING, over and over.  The dactyl-spondee rhythm is good for walking, and as I walk I pray for a peaceful death, in God's time.

Friday I went to our little homeschool co-op and found a friend in tears.  Her mother had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in August and they were waiting for the end. 

It came that night.

Saturday morning I was talking with some other friends about it and I said I felt a little pang of envy for my friend.  And then I felt like a tactless toad for the rest of the time we were all together, because who would envy someone facing the death of her mother?

But here's the thing:  when I die, I hope it's something like that.  I hope I have some notice but not too much.  I hope I can say goodbye to the people I love.  I hope they hold my hands in the last days.  I hope my pain is managed well.  I hope my kids pray the rosary at my bedside and call the priest to administer last rites.

Also, and maybe this part is toadly, I envy my friend her relationship with her mother.  I love my mother fiercely -- I called her up as soon as I came home on Friday to say "wear your seatbelt! eat your vegetables!" -- but I wish our relationship were a little easier.  I have this inner certainty that I am not what my mother wishes I were:  not pretty enough, not polished enough, too intense, too sensitive.  Oh, ugh, I just had to take a five-minute break from typing so I could put my head on my desk and weep. (sniffle, snuffle)  I am afraid my mother is going to die and I will never have been sure that she was proud I was her daughter. 

Okay, moving on.  In a minute.  [insert sound of grip being gotten]

Yesterday a song for my friend came burbling up out of me.  The chorus came together quickly but I was stuck on the verses until I found this poem via Anne Lamott.  The last couplet -- "and here, in dust and dirt, O here / the lilies of his love appear" -- speaks to me so clearly that I am borrowing it in two different verses.

"In dust and dirt," Vaughan says, and I think about bodies, fashioned from dust and returning to dust.  I think about love undying, taking root in a temporary home, and I think especially about motherhood -- a body created from dust brings forth another body created from dust, and a loving heart teaches another heart to love.  The temporal and the eternal, spliced together for a time. 

My friend's mother was an artist; she taught her daughter to draw and now her daughter is teaching my sons and their friends.  Beauty, I think, is one of "the lilies of his love," and I believe the gift God planted in her will continue to bring forth beauty even now that she is dead.

"In dust and dirt" also reminds me that there is loveliness in the muck.  In the most difficult patches of my life as a Christian, grace has been most abundant.  In the moments when I have faced down my worst fears, God has poured out strength and love on me.  Do you remember the scene in Voyage of the Dawn Treader when they are sailing away from the terrible dark island, and the albatross whispers to Lucy, "Courage, dear heart"?

I have heard that voice in the darkness.  So why am I afraid?

I have been thinking about my own death.  I have a lump in my left breast and I have been avoiding making an appointment to have it checked out.  (I have been lactating for nine solid years, people -- shouldn't tumor cells commit apoptosis at the mere mention of my name?  I have also been thinking ruefully that the last time I had a benign condition diagnosed, the result was a $4000 bill.  But I'll make the call.  Soon.)  I have to tell you, because I am being nakeder than usual in this post, that I am imagining the worst, planning my funeral as the tiny sad violins swell to a crescendo. 

I am thinking about my children's deaths.  Elwood and I were talking about lead last night; we have just learned that we have a few areas of lead paint to deal with and I am kicking myself for not testing before it got too cold to paint outside.  He said, "You know it's not the lead that's the worst hazard, right?  The worst hazard is going to be something we haven't thought of."  And I started to cry, wishing for a world in which forethought and good intentions could be enough to keep my children safe.

Joe, when he heard about my friend's mother, began to sob.  "I don't want their grandma to be dead," he declared.  "Can we get them a new grandma?"  I hugged him, and told him no, and wished that painful truths didn't have to intrude quite so soon.

The leaves are covering the ground now, scarlet leaves from our walnut tree, tiny golden leaves from the locust trees.  When we moved here at the end of winter all the trees were bare.  I have been thinking today about the leaves unfurling in the spring, feeding the trees and shading the people in the summer, dying in a riot of color in the fall.  I have been thinking about my own life, and praying, Oh, God, let me provide nourishment and shade in a world that needs food and shelter.  Let me grow in beauty as I age.  Let me live a life I can lay down unafraid and unashamed.