Yesterday, we went to the cemetery to my brother's gravesite and today we went to visit Ellen, who is dying. As we waited our turn at Ellen's bedside, I noticed a brochure on the dining room table. The brochure was for coffins, handmade, wood. Ruth and Ellen have been talking about Ellen's burial for months, and they long ago decided on a simple wooden coffin and a simple burial site where Ellen can, over time, become worm food. The coffin has been ordered, Ruth told us, and when it comes there'll be a chance for everyone to sign it, almost like a cast for a broken bone or like a school yearbook.
The last time I sat with Ellen, just the two of us, I thought about William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying." Have you read it? Just outside the window of the room where the woman is dying, her coffin is being built--by her husband, isn't it? Here's something I didn't know until I went online looking for information about the novel:
The title derives from Book XI of Homer's The Odyssey, wherein Agamemnon speaks to Odysseus: "As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades."Do you remember how Agamemnon died? It wasn't in The Odyssey. He was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra after he returns home from the Trojan War with Cassandra on his arm. I was fascinated by the Oresteia when I first read it and was thrilled when, in a class on ancient literature, I was assigned to read the part of Clytemnestra. Like so many women in Greek literature, she was monstrous and unrepentant--or perhaps she was monstrous because she was so unrepentant. That was a very powerful idea to a nineteen-year-old me.
Oh, but see how far I'm getting from what I wanted to write about?
Today we went to see Ellen and she had just had some pain meds and was drifting in and out. Dave and I hugged and kissed her and then I sat on the bed and held her sister's computer while Ellen and her sister spoke via Skype to yet another sister, the problematic sister. (If I held it, they could both be on the video-cam while they spoke.)
Writing that made me remember when my step-brother James was dying in a hospital in San Francisco, God, years ago. He had AIDS, which had weakened his immune system to the point that he was succumbing to an avian virus that a healthy immune system would have easily cleared. I called the hospital to check on his condition and the nurse said, "Oh, I was just in there. He's awake. Do you want to talk to him?" and I, a coward, said, "No, thank you." For years, I kicked myself for not saying a few words to him, but at the time I didn't know what I could have possibly said.
James was twenty-three years old, by the way, when he made the decision to stop all treatments, and he died not too many days after that. It was the one decision that he ever made that impressed me.
James's death was in November--God, what year though? 1996? 1997? Was it really that long ago? It was a horrible winter: A month after James died, my grandmother went in to wake my uncle Floyd on Christmas morning and found him dead on the floor beside the bed that he had shared with his then four- or five-year-old son.
I remember that my uncle, too, was buried in a plain wood coffin. I was a pallbearer at his funeral and I helped to carry it down the aisle of the church. The night before his funeral, Dave and I slept in the bedroom he died in, and I couldn't sleep for a long time, and when I finally did, I dreamed about him. I didn't cry until the next morning, as I was standing in the church, waiting to carry his body down the aisle. I didn't cry until they began to ring the church bell.
When I am dead, I don't care anything about a church service, but I will miss the smell of the frankincense that is used in the service. That is the one thing that I will be sorry to miss at my own funeral.
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