Laughing at Death

My family has a dark sense of humor.

I think that is typical in families that have had a high level of dysfunction. It's kind of a coping mechanism.

My father was the model for us in this, even though he was also the source of much of the dysfunction.

The last time I went to see him in hospital, he wore an oxygen mask and I had trouble understanding him. So he had my brother Mark relay a joke he'd heard:

A nurse walks into a patient's room at the hospital. He's wearing an oxygen mask and she's having trouble understanding him but finally makes out, "Nurse, are my testicles black?"

 She tries to ignore him, but he persists his questioning through his oxygen mask, "Nurse, are my testicles black?" 

"Mr. Smith," she says, "that is really not a polite question." The man looks puzzled.

"Nurse, are my testicles black?" he asks again, gasping for air through the oxygen mask.

Finally she walks over to him, lifts the cover and answers, "Mr. Smith, your testicles are fine."

He looks at the nurse very strangely and then takes off the mask. "Nurse, are my test results back?" he enunciates clearly.

My dad couldn't stop laughing at that joke, in the face of the pain he was in, or perhaps because of the pain he was in.

Or maybe it was the fear.

I've had some experience with fear in the last few years. I can say, without a moment's hesitation, that fear is the worst emotion there is. It is crippling. When you are in the grips of fear, there is virtually nothing else you can do.

Except laugh, strangely.

When you are standing toe-to-toe with the unknown, the Big Bad that's finally come knocking at the door, laughter is the only life-affirming response. All of the "focus on the positives" and "all things work together for good" and all the rest don't amount to a hill of beans from a practical standpoint, not for me at least. They give no comfort against the evidences you've witnessed of the indifference of the universe toward your own pain.

Therein must be the origin of gallows humor. It probably also explains why horror-comedy is such a popular genre.

My mother was the ultimate straight man. It wasn't that she didn't have a sense of humor. She did, she just also said some ridiculously funny things without realizing it, often at what others might judge to be very inappropriate times.

I went with my mother and brother to the funeral home after my dad died last January. When it came time to discuss the obituary, she said that she wanted donations made to Hospice of Southern West Virginia, because they'd been so good to my father. Then she says, "Of course, Don's brother Eldon didn't care for them. He wasn't expected to live long but finally sent them home after eight months because he said they kept getting in the way. Of course, I guess that's what happens when you don't die on time." She delivered that last line as straight-faced as Bob Newhart.

When she died, just ten days ago, it was harder to find laughter. We didn't make pancreatic cancer jokes. We were too much in the grip of absolute fear. Instead we became centers of activity, taking care of things, making arrangements, making lists, moving things around, doing something — anything — to keep ourselves from imagining our lives without her.

It was the trip to the funeral home that finally changed that for me. If you've never had the chance to sit in the mourner's chair at a funeral home and gotten the sales pitch, you don't know how ridiculous human beings are. They sell thumbprint jewelry. Like, they take a thumbprint from the corpse and then you can buy cuff links or whatever. And pendants made from your loved one's ashes. I am not making this up.

I started to lose it over a mix-up with the disposition of her body.

We were brought a form that bore a notice across the top: "CREMATION IS IRREVERSIBLE AND FINAL."

I got the giggles. We questioned this clause with the funeral director, who sought to explain it in hushed, soothing tones. Apparently there is no process for the reversal of cremation. Who knew? I couldn't stop giggling.

My mom had specified in her will that she was to be cremated, but according to the good folks at Blue Ridge Funeral Home, West Virginia code does not allow an individual to select cremation: it is done only upon agreement of all next of kin. This simultaneously sounds like something they just made up and something dumb enough for the West Virginia Legislature to have enacted, so I'm not sure where I am with that.

My initial thought was, "Just leave her then. You guys can decide what to do." It's hard to explain why this made me laugh, but it did. I was just imagining the mortuary stuck with this body and no way to get rid of it, just moving it from room to room to accommodate new arrivals, it becoming a fixture there in a sort of Weekend at Bernie's way. Maybe they'd dress her up for the office Christmas party or the funeral director would find himself talking to her about problems at home.

I just heard you cringe.

Yeah, I know: it's my mother. How can I, blah, blah, blah . . .

But fuck you if you think that means I don't love my mother enough or don't love her the right way. For all of the mistakes they might have made, my parents didn't raise me to cower in reverential fear when Death entered the room. We never whispered the word "cancer," or used florid euphemisms to avoid speaking Death's name.

There at the funeral home, I had to call up my siblings and ask all of them to come sign the release form. They arrived about twenty minutes later.

It was just the five of us us there and it was probably then that I realized that this might be the last time we would all be in a room together.

We were making jokes and laughing. Some of us took photos. Sarah had noticed a Keurig and began dispensing coffee like a barrista trying to set a record.

I did not witness my mother's passing. Sarah did, and told me about it. I will admit: it sounds frightening to me, standing there at the abyss, looking into the blackness and wondering what, if anything, is beyond.

How can we possibly face moments like that?

I promised my mom I wouldn't tell a dick joke at her memorial service. I suppose I will keep that promise, but I will laugh. It's the only thing I can think to do.

Let It Bleed

My mother, Dora Leigh Deskins, died last night, December 7, 2014, after discovering last month that she had pancreatic cancer.

There was a book that came out several years back called On Death and Dying. The author offered that there were five distinct stages of grief. There hasn't been much research since that time to support that assertion. My own experience seems to indicate that grief can vary widely.

My father died on January 27 of this year. I grieved for him, but I can tell you already that the quality of that grief was very different. He had lived a very hard life — drinking, smoking, generally being a rough character. He'd had three heart attacks and quadruple by-pass surgery. I had been anticipating his death for many years.

I had never even considered the fact that my mother would die.

Her death was very sudden. She was 75, but she never seemed elderly. She never drank a drop and smoked only briefly in young adulthood.

I'm feeling and thinking so many things at once that it is hard to even notice each one.

I'm struck by how casual death is. She sat in hospitals, talking to doctors about dying and now she is dead. It seems like it should be more elaborate, accompanied by more pomp and circumstance.

Death is dehumanizing, in the most literal sense. When someone is sick, you watch them gradually lose those things that attach them to their humanity. It robs us of our dignity.

I'm confused. It seems like this is all a terrible mistake, as if someone else was supposed to die. She was supposed to retire. Her paperwork got mixed up with someone else's. She paid her fees, she talked to the guy. We need this corrected, as soon as possible. This cannot be right.

If I think about her voice, it is almost more than I can bear. I cannot believe that I won't ever talk to her again. It's only been a day and I miss it more than I can stand.

I spent today at her house with my siblings and some of our families. We walked around this house where we all once lived, but now the owners are gone. It's not our house. It felt weirdly like we were trespassing. When I think of all the times I walked through that door and heard Mother or Daddy call me from another room, happy to see me, glad I was there . . . that is gone. The house is nothing now. There is no more warmth or love to be had in it, and it will be sold and others will live there or maybe even tear it down.

What do I do now? What do I do now that I don't have parents? Who do I go to when I fuck up?

Death Without God

I write this at my mother's bedside. She is at the Bowers' Hospice House in Beckley, West Virginia. She came here after being diagnosed just last month with pancreatic cancer and spending the last few weeks in and out of hospitals. Her last words to me were yesterday afternoon, whispered "I love yous" to me and to my infant son. She has been mostly unresponsive since then. Her family is now relegated mostly to watching her die.

My mother is a deeply religious person, with a belief in a personal God, the reality of the devil, and an afterlife spent in the eternal peace of Heaven or the eternal torment of Hell. I shared those beliefs until about seven years ago. Mine has been a gradual process of losing faith, part of what could be called a midlife crisis, I suppose.

I haven't discussed this very much with my mother. I think it would cause her too much distress. That is, after all, one of the things that makes religion so very successful. It is near torture to imagine yourself and your loved ones facing eternity separated from all comfort, your bodies being burned with a "fire that is not quenched," and subjected to unspeakable torments for eons. The alternative, by contrast, is a promise of life eternal, a life without pain or even emotional distress, where God Himself "wipes every tear" from your eye. The only price to be paid? Believe. It is that simple, we are told. The price of Heaven has been paid for us by another if we only believe.

That sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?

Only it isn't. Not really. Because belief in this instance means subjugating one's mind to the teachings of others, abandoning critical thought, waiving one's right to question. It means accepting as truth that which goes against reason and to do so without evidence at all, because "faith is the evidence of things not seen." It is to completely surrender one's life, the only one we are certain exists, for the promise of another that no one has seen.

It took me some time to reach this point in my own thinking and I'm well aware that most of you reading this will disagree quite sharply. As I was relaying to someone today, the question turned for me on a spiritual level, not on matters of science, as is the case with so many. It's a topic for another post, but suffice it to say that it did not happen overnight.

To have won the right again to question all received wisdom, to reject anything that comes without evidence, to organize your morality on human reasoning rather than 3000-year-old tribal ethics, to marvel at science and human understanding, and to again be humbled at how little we truly know − well, that is liberty. As was said, "The truth will set you free."

Yet I have expressed to many my reticence to abandon all that I once knew. For all they lack if understood literally, Christian scriptures are rich with metaphor for shaping life's meaning. Eating forbidden fruit does bring knowledge of good and evil, a loss of innocence but growth in wisdom. We have witnessed our own Davids slay mocking Goliaths. We know the power of grace in our lives and that forgiveness exceeds vengeance in every way.

I still think in those terms and truly long for the experience of the "holy," not something supernatural but the setting apart of times and spaces as sacred to the human spirit. I relish Christian mythology without being beholden to its cosmology or ethics.

It is at times like right now that I long for it the most. I'm at my dying mother's bedside, the scene of dozens of bluegrass songs, where those old-time mothers say, "I've just seen the Rock of Ages − Jacob's ladder coming down!" I want something of that experience, without needing to abandon reason. I long for this to be a sacred time, a time to reflect on a life well-spent, a time to ponder life's hardest questions and construct meaning for the dying and those that remain.

A few short years ago, it would have been impossible for me to imagine meaning apart from God. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever," I would have told you. To reject Yaweh, whose very name suggests that He is the ground of all being, is to have no meaning at all.

It's not like that for me any more.

I suppose I'm "apostate," to use the old-fashioned term. Even as I type that, I realize it is likely to land me on more than one church prayer list. That's okay.

The meaning I make at this passing is one that acknowledges what we know of this cosmos and re-imagines those tropes that served to comfort me in the past.

I look at my mother and I hear the Apostle's words, that hers is a body "sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption; sown in mortality, but raised in immortality." Then I think about what might become of her body after her death. It will be returned to the earth, sown in one sense, and provide life again to plants and animals and again to generations after us. And her DNA we now know was sown in the five children she bore and again in her grandchildren, and will continue on as long as her progeny continue to reproduce. The words she spoke, at home and in the classroom where she taught, were sown in the minds of her children and students, and will bear fruit long after she has perished. This, then, is true immortality. This is immortality rooted in the cosmos as we know it.

I look at my mother and I hear the words of the Preacher: "As one dies, so dies the other . . . All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return." Then my mind turns to what astrophysicists tell us of our origins some 13.8 billion years ago, and the fate that awaits us many eons from now. Because every atom that is in us − every bit of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon − was there at the big bang. "We are made of star dust." And when the cosmos cools, all that is shall return to star dust, including those atoms in her body now.

It is a triumph of the human spirit that we even know this, that great women and men asked questions and questioned assumptions and made these discoveries.

So as I sit with her here, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, these things are a great comfort to me. They are the meaning I make in the face of death.

I meditate on them in the knowledge that my mother does not share my beliefs. That is okay, too, because there is no Hell for the unbeliever in a world of reason. There is only love for her and a great sadness, knowing how much I will miss her.

Nana

Dear Monkey,

I took you today to see your Nana. That's my mom. We saw her in Beckley, where your old man is from and close to Nana's house. We didn't go to her house, though. We went to a place called the Hospice house. We went there because your Nana is dying.

I really never imagined having to write this. I always thought you'd grow up knowing Nana and spending lots of time with her. In the one year you've been on this earth, she has loved you very much. You spent a few days with her just a week before she went into the hospital. She told me that you've brought enormous joy to her life. It causes me more pain than I really thought was imaginable to know that you will grow up without her.

Here's what's happened. Nana hasn't felt well since your Grandaddy died, about 10 months ago. She's a teacher. She's 75-years-old, way past the time most people retire from teaching, but she started the school year just the same as she has the last 25 or so. You see, Nana didn't start teaching school until she was 50. Anyway, she called me about a month ago to tell me that she was quitting. She was going to take a leave of absence for some minor medical problems and then retire.

That was on a Monday. That Thursday or Friday she went into her doctor for some tests. She told me that next Monday that she had to go to the emergency room because there were some irregularities in her blood. At the hospital, they discovered a growth on her liver and pancreas. It was something called pancreatic cancer.

I'm not as knowledgeable about medical science as a lot of people, but a cancer is a type of growth that sort of takes over your body. It wants to reproduce itself just like all living things do, and pancreatic cancer is really good at that. Unfortunately for us, it uses our bodies the same way we use food and land and all sorts of things to stay alive and grow.

Nana went to a lot of hospitals, but there wasn't much they could do for her. By the time you are her age, they may have found a way to fight that type of cancer more effectively. I sure hope so.

So I guess I'm writing this letter to you so that you will know and remember what your Nana was like after she is gone.

First of all, she is really beautiful. She's an old lady now, of course, but I remember when I was just three and four years old thinking my mother was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. She used to wear kind of bright red lipstick when she got dressed up and she put something called Oil of Olay on her skin every day. She never looked her age. Even looking at her now in her bed, she doesn't look 75. She had almost no gray hair till she was about 60, I think. She smiled a lot, too. I suppose if you remember anything about her, that will be it, because she always smiled when she saw you.

She is also really smart. She was voted "Most Studious" in high school (Man High School, Class of 1956) and she always read. When I think about the number of books she devoured, it's almost unreal. That was her real passion in life and it's something she passed along to me. She read everything, too. She read the Bible regularly, of course. She read history books and historical fiction. She liked novels, too. I remember her telling me that she read Song of the Lark by Willa Cather almost entirely by flashlight under her blanket when she was young. When I was a child she read trashy romance novels, but she gave that up eventually.

She loved learning, which I guess comes along with the love of reading. She'd gotten married when she was 17 and had to quit college when she got pregnant with your Uncle Don. But the entire time we were growing up she concerned herself more with our education than anything else, I think.

She took us to the library all the time. I remember once that the librarian at the Raleigh County Public Library refused to check out more than three books to me. Well, your Nana got so angry that she marched herself up to the desk and told that woman that unless there was some formal policy that applied to all library patrons that I was allowed to check out as many books as I wished.

She went back to college herself when she was 45. She got a degree in library science, because she thought she wanted to be a school librarian. She got her masters in special education with an emphasis on gifted education and became a gifted teacher instead.

She always talked to us like adults. This is something I remember from my earliest childhood, and I hope I have the good sense to do the same with you. She insisted on using an intelligent vocabulary and correct English grammar all of the time.

Oh, and she hated obscene language, which is really pretty funny considering she married Don Deskins. Once when I was in 8th grade, I was playing music with some friends at the Ghent Fair. Just as we were about to take the stage, I discovered that I'd left my sheet music at home, which was some 15 minutes away. I let loose repeating a single expletive ("shit") about 50 times in a row. I didn't know she was standing behind me. Oh, goodness. That was one of the few times I think your Grandaddy saved me from your Nana, instead of the other way around.

She and I happened to teach at the same school for a few years. It was called Beckley-Stratton Middle School and she taught gifted and I taught music. One time a group of students who had both of us in class told on me to her because I'd used the word "crap" in class. They told me that my mother said that was the sign of a limited vocabulary.

You know, when we worked and taught at that school those years, she ate lunch with me almost every single day. I say this because it wasn't like a chore for me. (I hope it wasn't for her.) It wasn't a case of feeling obligated to spend time with her because she was my mother. She was a really interesting person to talk to. She talked about politics and religion and education and the books she was reading.

She is a good cook, too. She grew up in that generation where the mother did all the cooking in the family and your Nana had to cook for five children, her husband, and herself. Every meal was a big meal. Her style was a blend of what I guess could be called traditional mountain cooking, 1950s housewifery, and experimental cuisine.

Sometimes we ate beans and cornbread; in fact, we ate cornbread almost every meal it seemed, and hers was the best. She made cornbread dressing for Thanksgiving, which is the best kind of dressing. But she also made really great lasagna, even though we aren't Italian. Every Christmas Eve, we ate fried fish, fried oysters, shrimp, and scallops. Potato soup, chili, chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, lima beans, deviled eggs, pork roast, peas, corn, mashed potatoes, cheeseburgers on grilled bread, homemade "pronto pups," hot dogs with her own chili, pepperoni rolls . . . it was all so good. And chicken chow mein, which while not tasting very Chinese still was very good. Oh, and cherry pie. I make cherry pie like she did, or at least I try.

You Nana is very devout, after her own fashion. She grew up a good Methodist but became a Baptist sometime after the family moved to Raleigh County. She went to church regularly for many years, without your Grandaddy. She was probably less regular in that as time went on, but she still read her Bible, read theology, and listened to preachers on TV. (Not the holy rollers, but the ones that had lots of notes with their sermons.) We always said "grace" before every meal, but I wanted to hear her pray: she sounded more sincere than everyone else.

That didn't mean she believed every thing she was told by preachers hook, line, and sinker. She didn't see anything wrong with rock and roll music, so we played it at home, in spite of what the preacher and the holy joes down at Daniels Missionary Baptist thought.

She played piano at the church, for the choir and for services. She loved to play hymns in the evening, too, and she made sure we all had music in our life. She had played soprano saxophone in the Man High School Band. (It was a Selmer they had bought used from "someone in New York City" for $125 in the early 1950s. It kind of makes me nuts to think what it might be worth if she had kept it.) She made sure we had piano lessons (and saxophone lessons and guitar lessons and flute lessons and voice lessons and anything else any of us ever wanted to do).

Nana and Grandaddy liked to listen to music a lot when I was younger. She liked a lot of Glen Miller and pop singers from the 1940s and 50s. I don't know what her favorite song was, unless it was "Too Young," by Nat "King" Cole. She and Grandaddy both sang that one a lot.

She thought a lot about the "extras" in life, things other parents might not bother with. Your Aunt Sarah and I took watercolor painting lessons for several years from Chris DellaMea's mom because Nana thought we should expand ourselves that way.

Nana did most of the day-to-day discipline at home, with Grandaddy brought in for the bigger jobs. If you got in trouble with her, she'd make you go cut your own switch in the woods. If she didn't like the one you brought back, she'd send one of your brothers or sisters to get one. You did not want that to happen.

Once she was whipping me for something in the kitchen and your Aunt Sandy Jo (who was an older teenager at the time) began laughing at my tears. You know what Nana did? She turned right around and whipped Sandy Jo, quite against her loud protests, for being so mean.

She had this kung fu move, too, that she used in the car. If you were sitting in the passenger seat while she was driving and you said something smart aleck, she'd flick the back of her hand lightning fast and smack you in the mouth without even looking. It was pretty impressive.

But really, she didn't spank us very much. In fact, she was the first to take your part against a teacher or bully at school, sometimes to a fault. I once called the gym teacher at school "stupid" (I wrote it actually) and she defended me because she thought he was. She'd never let the preacher or another parent or anyone correct us: that was her bailiwick.

She defended me against others clear on into my adulthood. I think her love for me sometimes blurred her realization of just how much I screwed up sometimes. As a grown-up I found myself confessing horrible sins to her, over the phone or sitting on her couch back in Daniels, only to have her assure me that what I did was perfectly understandable and no one should fault me for it. She thought I set the moon.

When I was about seven or eight-years-old, I got ahold of a book of poetry that belonged to Nana. It was called The Best Loved Poems of the American People. It had all kinds of stuff in it like "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and "Song of Hiawatha," and it was divided into sections with titles like "Home," "Faith," and "Humor." I think one section was called "Family," and I read a bunch of those poems. A lot of it was maudlin stuff. There was one poem that I liked though, and I memorized it. It was really saccharine and sentimental and silly in a lot of ways, but it was sentiment I finally loved, I guess. The final stanza went:

My friends be yours a life of toil or undiluted joy,  

You can learn a wholesome lesson from this small, untutored boy.  

Don't aim to be an earthly saint with eyes fixed on a star,  

Just try to be the fellow that your mother thinks you are. 

I don't know how I'd ever live up to that, because she loved me, loved all of us, so unconditionally.

And she loves you, very, very much. She told me you were the prettiest baby she'd ever seen. (Don't tell your cousins.)

But now I sit here with you in this room and her in a bed just a few feet away, you at the start of this whole journey and she at the very end of hers. It makes my heart hurt. A lot. And it hurts even more when I think of your brother that she will never meet.

I'll tell you this monkey: it goes real fast. Before you turn your head, the ones you thought would be there forever are gone from you. Try to live your life with that knowledge. Love your own mother as much as I love mine, because yours is beautiful and brilliant, too. Read and learn about everything you can, and you will honor her memory. When you eat the cherry pie we make or a piece of cornbread, know that those are tastes that have been brought to you through generations. And sing your song, because you have a song for this world.

I love you very, very much.

Daddy