There is No Such Thing as Funeral Mascara

I laugh now when I think of how cavalier my attitude used to be about death when I was younger.  In my teens and 20s I would tell people that I wasn't afraid of death, because there was no point in fearing it.  I had never experienced death, so why be afraid of it.  I used to spout all the usual cliches; 'When your number is up, your number is up.', 'It's better to burn out than fade away.', and my favorite, 'Death is just another door.'

All of these cliches are true, but they seem more worth pondering now that I've hit the halfway mark.  Statistically, my life is halfway over, and in the ramp up to my 40th birthday, this was on my mind quite a bit.  One of the bummers about life in your 40s is that death seems to be everywhere.  All of the old guard in the family starts to go, every other day you see a Facebook post from a friend who has lost someone, and you start noticing it on the news.  To top it off, you see a band you always loved for the first time in years and realize that most of the members are now in their late 50s/early 60s.  Time is no longer your friend.

I lost half of my parents before the age of 40, but it seemed less distressing than when I lose someone now.  I guess I was so young that I could contrast their loss with all of the time I still had left, and in my head, it made the situation better.  The thing about death is that we all assume we are going to live long lives, despite the fact that no one gets a guarantee.

A little over a year ago, one of my lifelong friends buried her 21 year old son after he died in a car accident.  I held this boy when he was nine hours old, and the pain of his loss was tremendous.  I mourned, not only losing him, but the loss of the life that he could have had.  This is why a young person's death is so tragic, it's a double loss.  When my husband's grandmother passed away at 101.5, there was a void, but not a whole lot of sadness.  She had been asking for death for about two years, because her life was at the suck point.  She couldn't walk, she needed someone with her when she went out and going out was a hassle, she couldn't enjoy good food or drink due to meds and general stomach intolerance, and her razor-sharp memory and mind had began slipping.  I always say that no one was happier to wake up dead that Sunday morning than Grandma Ethel.

I don't think I'm alone in hoping that I will enjoy a long life, and say "farewell" before it gets to that suck point, but there are no guarantees, which is one of the reasons our culture seems so fearful and fascinated by death.  Death is something we can't control at all, no matter how advanced we make our technology.  We can keep a body incubated and functioning, but having seen someone being kept "alive" by machines, I can tell you that all of the most brilliant minds in medicine can't keep someone alive.  At this point, my cavalier attitude about death is gone, and I've come to respect it.

I'm not a great fan of aging.  I don't like the way my skin seems to be hanging off my bones differently now than how it used to.  I don't like it when the guy who does my hair describes the texture as "fine".  I despise being mistaken for a member of the venue staff at a concert, because I'm middle-aged, and I freakin' hate describing myself as middle-aged even though I am.  However, I am grateful that I'm here to have the days I have, even the crappy ones, because it's a gift, and the alternative is a bit scary.

I don't know if God exists in the form that religion suggests or if God is just the collective energy of the life that exists outside of the world we see when we wake up in the morning.  I don't believe in the devil or Hell.  I'm not a big fan of the idea of purgatory.  However, I refuse to believe all of that wonderful spark and energy just goes away once the human encasement we live in ceases to function.

I went to the funeral today of a woman whose smile I saw just two weeks ago.  Her journey to the grave began Tuesday night and ended Friday afternoon.  A close friend described her telling stories in ICU as her "final curtain call".  I was sad, because she was not an old woman, and there was so much more I'm sure she wanted to see and do before leaving this life, but we don't get to make that choice.

I hope, in the end, I will have done everything I wanted to do, seen everything I wanted to see, and can leave a legacy that someone can be proud of.  Despite the halfway mark, I still don't fear death, but I'm not ready for it.  My goal is to live to be old enough to see my girls become amazing women, and see their children develop into good, productive people.  I want to live long enough to complete nearly all of my bucket list, and mostly, I want to live to the point where everything negative and crude I say is automatically dismissed, because I'm old.  After all, in her final few years, Grandma Ethel was never so entertaining as when she'd let it fly about one or two particular family members that were pissing her off at the time, and I enjoyed every minute of it.