Does Death Transform Life?

I think so. I'm sure the perspective I have on my own life is only possible because Maia's death last May forced me from old ruts of complacency. But I would never have been ready for her message had not my Uncle Wally preceded her in death just before his own birthday, in August 2007. He also left too early for me.

As those who loved him in Germany and in New York struggled to get him across the Atlantic Ocean to New York, my mom intervened, from her castle on the hill, objecting to every effort made by others. She could not be dissuaded from rying to pull strings from thousands of miles away. She made Uncle Wally’s death more of an emotional challenge than any of us needed. But she was exactly in her appointed role as the constant example of what not to be.

I've always needed honesty and transparency-- more than other people, I think. That’s why it seemed so contraindicated that my mom used her early knowledge of my uncle's illness to lie to me, all over again. And my uncle agreed to this, perhaps because of my so-called psychiatric vulnerability. My mother and her dying brother were going to keep his dying a secret. The past hadn't changed; and the future was land mined as they both tried to make it a family pact that everyone would keep me in the dark. I would be one of the few cousins (besides my brother and my uncle's only son) to be kept from the truth of his health dilemma. Fortunately my closest aunt, who is like a sister to me, shared the news as soon as she was able. The price for her was that she was made out to be evil incarnate for her loving disclosure.

I loved my uncle, and I had amends to make with him that I never got to communicate completely. I think I was too afraid, and I didn’t dare speak urgently, for fear that he would think I had given up faith in him. I never expected him to die so early, before he turned 70.

With Uncle Wally gone, too quickly for closure, all my uncle’s six remaining siblings got to face that they too would die. One of my aunts decided to prepare her future gravesite and that of her husband, as a gift to her children.

My own sense of immortality was rapidly being deconstructed. Still, it did not prepare me for the death of someone my own age. Now I know I am on that old cliché of “borrowed time”. But we all are.

I should have known that already, as another cousin of mine died in 2001, while spending Thanksgiving night at her parent’s home. She was 37.

Dear Maia was 49 when she passed last May, leaving her parents, Jack and Natalie, stunned at their loss. Suddenly, I realized death could come any time, for any of us. I could die before my parents. I needed to find my peace inside me. Fifty myself, I’d lost my hormones early, and suddenly the girl inside me that had known Maia in puberty, knew she was alone. Maia would never be able to help me remember the past.

Not long after my uncle's death and the ensuing lessons from my mother, I finally realized that the voice in my head was not simply internalized from her. While I had actually divorced myself of many of her judgments. I’d made them a part of me. The voice I hear and the mirror I use to look at myself were given to me during my "PhD in the school of hard knocks.”

It had taken me eight years to finally admit I could not live with him, marry him or ever have children with him. I loved the man, but never learned to value myself... as much as he valued his commitment to me. Even at the end I saw myself at the short end of the stick, not measuring up to his abilities.

Until the day that he wrenched my right shoulder.

To this day, I do not remember him choosing to take responsibility for that injury. Instead, I was blamed for answering a phone that had wakened me that morning. I may not have allowed him the opportunity to apologize, because by then I knew it was too late; he was never going to change his way of dealing with his emotions. Even more, I felt the fool because I had stayed with him that long to find out. When he refused counseling after my gentle attempts to assert the issue, I knew that leaving was my only option.

Even though I am happily married now to a man with a different PhD, I kept this loyalty to my mathematician, the man who witnessed my life until the mid-point of my graduate work.

I took his judgmental voice with me, kept it with me allowing it to foster a harsh inner critic, this past two decades.

What was worse was in remembering Seattle’s bank robber, Scott Scurlock, this winter. The Scott I knew had witnessed my return to college years before. His death, however, seemed to cast shadows over me that no amount of study could illuminate. True crime stories, like those of Ann Rule, are really not my genre!

For a few weeks there, I lost self-respect and tried to find answers in looking at sordid things that were really none of my business. I could see my vulnerability and feel compassion, but my trail of intimacies, which only narrowly avoided one with Scotty, left me feeling only shame. Trying to reconstruct my life when I knew Scotty, I saw I’d left part of myself behind. Looking back over that time in my young womanhood brought up so many questions I could not answer.