September was for dying.
In nine days there were three. At the back end of your forties you start to lose the people with bad luck or bad habits. And you lose parents. Or parents of friends. And so there’s a season of dying that comes to us. A first wave. On the other side a sense of mortality lingers. It’s a sort of training; training for when life really starts taking much more than it gives.
I’m not there yet. I won’t be for a while. But September was for dying. And so October was for remembering. And I can really only put it to bed the way I do. To write.
If you go off to war you see death. It comes in batches. It can be a sort of grizzly scenery. A stage setting. Death is the product of war. But it’s not real. If you let it be real you could never do it. Until one day the make believe world of war death comes for a friend. And then you’ll never look at it the same again. The romance is gone. It’s just a meat grinder. You can find solace in their ascendance into martyrdom. Or you can just get angry and bitter. I’ve never put much value in martyrs. And so a little bitter and a little angry forever it is.
Death is bitter.
My mother died when I was too young to really understand what I would miss from her passing. I wasn’t a child. But I wasn’t a man. I hadn’t had much figured out yet. She died one of those terrible slow and exhausting deaths. ALS ate away at her. It took her voice first. Then her body. She wrote two things down after she lost her ability to speak. She wrote lots of things down really but there are two things that are the sort of things one gets to say when they know it’s going to be over soon. She got her money’s worth:
When I was alone with her, she told me never to leave my wife. And alone with my wife she told her that she wasn’t afraid to go any more. Because she knew who would take care of her boys. Linda Jean Frey then Hughes then Babcock, AKA Mom, was something. Until she wasn’t.
Death is terrible and beautiful.
Her ALS broke her husband; my stepfather. They’d been together since I was six. He was the only man I ever saw hold my mother’s hand. The only man I ever saw her kiss. He taught me about music and art. He taught me about clamming the back bays of South Jersey. He was a physical giant. He was an art teacher. He drew a picture of himself with his giant hands when he first met my mother when she complained she had no pictures of him. He could draw likenesses in pencil that you would think were photographs. He died in September.
He’d been a shut-in for most of the last fifteen years since my mother passed. The picture he drew her was at the memorial. No one there knew where it came from. Or if he once looked like that. He did. And I knew where it came from. It came from the guy who I’d never given a fair shake to. The guy I would resent for who he wasn’t. Stepfathers…Jesus Christ what is this world about?
Death is cruel.
But so is life.
I don’t know where we go when we’re gone. I know the rules of what my faith teaches me but not the mechanics. There is no law of conservation of consciousness. So I’m left with Roy Batty to watch the teardrops in the rain. That’s not Batty’s best quote by the way. It’s good. But not the best.
“If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.” is the one.
You can’t though. It may be somewhere. But it’s not for us. And so it’s gone. And all I have left at the end of a month thinking too hard about death is a few lines from an obscure Lord Huron song that I can’t shake.
I tried to warn you when you were a child
I told you not to get lost in the wild
I sent omens and all kinds of signs
I taught you melodies, poems, and rhymesOh, you fool, there are rules, I am coming for you
(You can run but you can't escape)
Darkness brings evil things, oh, the reckoning begins
(You will open the yawning grave)
Death is a reckoning.
September was for dying.