Celebrating My Birthday With Mr. Death

When I was about seven, an elderly neighbor, a Seventh Day Adventist who had been driven out of Nazi Germany, taught me the Lord's Prayer.  Even at that age, its King James cadence and exotic "shall" and "thou" and the image of god as a shepherd were thrilling and comforting.  Not so thrilling or comforting were her descriptions of the Nazi death camps, particularly a story about a female guard who made lamp shades out of Jewish skin. As a sop to the stories, she described Heaven as a noiseless, bland place made of gold, which inexplicably made her feel better in spite of that terrible knowledge.  It did nothing for me. About the same time, our school officials treated us with movies of the atom bomb going off in huge mushroom clouds. Hiding underneath our tiny maple desks during "duck and cover" exercises was about as reassuring as the gold plated Paradise. So by the time I was eight, I had discovered the inevitability of death and the void of non-being, and that the adults in the world were of no help at all.  (I believe that the intensity of the feminist movement rests on our early knowledge that guys were not going to protect us or our babies any more. In fact, they were out to get us.) Mr. Death became my annoying and more or less constant companion from then on.

So, I not only established a nightly Lord's Prayer, but to bolster its effects I tacked on two extra sections. The second part was a litany of fears: "Please don't make me die of polio, diphtheria, or diabetes.  Please make everyone live, our goats, our cats, our dog, Mom, Dad, my brother, my sisters", and, to play it safe "all my friends and relatives". (I left out our chickens.)  I later added a plea that god would make me forget about the "horrible man" and "horrible woman."  The former was the Phantom of the Opera, whose burn-scarred face appeared in a Classic Comic (ironically, the only comics we were allowed to read).  The horrible woman was the Nazi guard. Sometimes I was so sleepy that I caught myself repeating part 2, which, in my little OCD brain, I thought might negate the effects of my many critical prayer requests, so as a fail safe, I ended this section with "Please answer all my prayers whether I said them three times or not." 

The third part of my prayer was a conversation with god himself, a short chubby balding elderly man, who wore glasses. He vaguely resembled my grandfather. I have no idea why god showed up in my mind looking like this, but it must have been a powerful avatar, because he performed years later in a couple significant adult dreams.  Although a good Methodist child, I gave up Jesus when I was about eight, after my Catholic friend repeated a nun's story about a little girl with diabetes, who saw Jesus appearing before her while she was in bed and died the next day.  That night I apologized to Jesus and told him I had to pray directly to god from then on and to "please, please, don't visit me."

I produced this three-part prayer every night, even after my Dad turned from the Methodist to the Unitarian Church when I was thirteen and the family gods became Emerson and Jefferson.  Nevertheless, until I was eighteen, I repeated my DIY beadless rosary, hoping for some kind of spiritual experience, some god-pat-on-the-head that would muffle the ever-present thought that some day I would Cease to Be.  Nothing like that happened. In fact, during that time my cats, my dog, my goats all passed way.  My real grandfather died. I continued to think about the horrible woman, although the horrible man's effect lessened.  On the positive side, those nightly talks with Grandpa God did provide some comforting closure to the day.

When I left home for college, however, I finally gave up my talks with the Ur-Gramps. My freshman year, right before Christmas my childhood best friend died in a fire in her prep school dorm.  She was overweight and had played Santa Clause that night for her classmates.  The Christmas tree was under her room and caught fire. It was my first Other Death. I had no idea how to grieve or deal with her loss. I read Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Dostoyevsky, to make myself feel worse, and if I prayed at all, it was that I wouldn't die a virgin. I renounced Grandpa God, who hadn't been helpful at all, to have sex with boys my own age.  That prayer was answered, probably too enthusiastically. My Holy Grail became the Hunt for True Love, enabled by the sixties, when Love was not just cheap but Free. 

The following decade was noisy with war, babies, sex, protests, and my first marriage breaking on the shoals of Viet Nam.  It wasn't until I was 28, living in Bayonne, New Jersey, with two toddlers less than a year apart, that I started looking again for spiritual context.  Because this time my Death Fear now also included those small beings I had forced out into Life, and, so eventually, Not Life. I needed a spiritual fix to pass on to them, but Jesus and Grandpa had been out of the equation for years.  So, I looked West toward Esalen and Buddhism. I began my life-long erratic and haphazard meditation habit, sitting cross-legged and badgering my brain with Alan Watts, transcendental meditation, Krishnamurti, various yoga instructors, basically picking up anything that fell off the Great Spiritual Babble Truck as it traveled coast to coast.

Also to assuage Mr. Death, during these years I discovered my perfect career. I learned about medicine, disease by disease, writing them up as mysteries and updating them with biologic or pharmacologic clues, which I hoped would some day solve these murderous or painful cases.  I knew for sure my work was just a stopgap measure against the ultimate end, but satisfying nonetheless. 

So now I have left behind this career, my childrearing, my sexual falls to come North, to my roots, to build a house and, eventually, to sleep.  My birthday this week recalculates once again the increasingly smaller percentage of my remaining average life span.  When Michael and I get together with our same-age friends, the conversation often drifts to how we might off ourselves at the end if we get really, really stupid.  I talk agreement, but I probably won't do it.  I love my life.  I've loved it since I was in the womb.  I am going to be very sad when it's over and I probably will be inanely eager to see what happens next as I get really really stupid. 

Meditation is annoying and very hard,  but it is the only broom I have that can sweep the brain clean. Although most of the time, it's listening to words rattling like bones in a spiritual desert, every once in a great while Something Happens. On the land that we bought here is a ridge, more like a big rock hump, which has a long view of the Catskills to the west.  Because of the easement we established, no one can ever build a house on that rock, including us, but they can meditate on it, or pray to Grandpa God, or just sit.  

I've stopped looking for spiritual reassurances, either from the West or the East.  It's just me on the hill now, cross-legged, and sitting there with Mr. Death. On occasion, when the mind clears out something wordless shrugs me into a space of overwhelming Niceness, which, at that moment, includes everything: me, the birds, the rocks, the trees, every creature, human or not, alive or dead, whom I've loved and not loved, whom I failed to protect.  This is followed by the delusional notion that the adventure may not be over.  I stand up and walk down the hill, the noisy brain immediately reinstalled, and I am once again arm and arm with the inscrutable Mr. Death. However, increasingly, after such meditations, I notice he's getting pudgy, his hair is thinning, he may need reading glasses, and we are beginning to converse.