As Mom is “living in the evening” of her life, which the Yoruba describe as Irole Aye, I am attentive to mortality and death and the last chapter of this current life. As is the case in much of my luddite quality of life, I return to books as guides, a source and a sort of reassurance, curiosity, and an empathy bridge connecting me with the magnanimously intense, sometimes abhorrent, experiences that others know or have lived through and survived.
When I ponder the handful of books that are touchstones for the death of a beloved, I recall these books, which I’ve come to know and read over the last decade:
- On Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
- A Year to Live, by Stephen Levine
- Advice for Future Corpses, and those who love them: a practical perspective on death and dying by Sally Tisdale
- Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
- Final Gifts: understanding the special awareness, needs, and communications of the dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley
As a teenager, I remember a category of email forwards — which we understood as a chain letter in terms of what we knew — that was a compilation of people’s last wishes:
- to have spent more time with their children,
- to not have worked so much,
- gardened more,
- apologized to somebody they had pushed away.
In hindsight, I wonder whether these were actually the final thoughts that people in their last days or months actually said, or if it was fiction that someone decided was a great context to write how people were dying with regrets that they had spent too much time working, not spent enough time with their children and their friends, that they had not told the people they love that they loved them as much as they did.
But, whether they were a typed up summary of nonfiction or a fictional creation is immaterial. I have lived for 30 years influenced by those stories of clarity and regret. I took those anecdotes as guidance to adhere to and remember what I cherish.
Earlier this week, an old friend called me. We spoke for 53 minutes as he drove on a highway after he had listened to an invocation from the day before that I shared with him. Before hanging up, he expressed how he wanted to talk with me again soon, to ask what I was practicing and how I was moving through the world because he wanted to learn more about the “admirable lifestyle” that I live (his phrase).
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 