CAT/cat scan

One day, when she was young, my cat Leona disappeared.

B and I looked everywhere in the house. She was nowhere. We searched under beds and couches, in corners and behind bookshelves. It was impossible to imagine where she could have gone. After an hour we worried as we looked at open-enough windows that perhaps she'd been young and graceless enough to fall to the ground from the third story.

We walked the perimeter of the house, looking at neighbors to see if they had seen anything unusual like a cat falling from the sky. We searched the backyard and the backyards of the houses that connected to ours. We walked down the dirty alley and out to the side street half a block down. The cat was nowhere. And as such, we began to despair.

We sat in our living room that night negotiating her absence. I would sit and try and concentrate on something else, then feel terrible for not feeling terrible enough about the thought of her sad and cold little body out in the streets. We held each others' hands and talked about how scared she must be and what we could do, which was nothing really, and how much we hoped we would find her.

It was about 9 at night when I looked up from the couch and saw a small furry creature sitting simply and still at the top of the stairs. I leapt up and ran to her and picked her up. I sat her between us and we both gave her pets and held her face and asked her where it was that she'd gotten to. After 30 minutes of adrenaline relief I asked B if she seemed a little "off."

"No," he said. "She's fine."

But I couldn't help watching her and sensing something sluggish. She didn't eat much when we opened the can of food. Her normally voracious gulping had been replaced by uninterested sniffs.

"Something is weird," I said. "She's not acting normal."

We resolved to check it out in the morning.

Early the next morning I got up and walked to the third floor and found green vomit spread across the floor like a Pollack painting. She'd been a nervous vomit-er since we'd gotten her, we'd thought little about the color in the days previous (I dunno, it's cat puke, maybe she ate a plant?) but now it seemed like an obvious warning sign we'd ignored.

She lay in the middle of the floor panting shallowly and looked up at me as if to signal that she was ready to feel better now. As I moved to pick her up she lay her head back down as if that was all the effort she had to spare.

Later when we searched the upstairs we concluded that she'd been inside the wall all that time we'd searched for her. We'd assumed she couldn't be in ear shot because when we'd opened the can of food she normally would tear ass to get there as fast as possible. With the pain in her belly, however, she'd decided it better just to lay in the dark and rest. This same moment later it occurred to me that she could have decided that company was never a comforting option and that she might have died in that wall and we'd have never known.

The emergency vet told us that because it was Saturday she'd have to send the cat to another clinic in the suburbs. We asked how much and she answered that if it was what she thought most likely the bill would land us in the thousands.

"Is there any chance she could get better?" I asked.

"Well, as I said, these little cats eat a piece of string while they're playing and their intestines are small and it gets caught. Right now all that bile is backing up inside her. That's why she's vomiting green. It's possible, I suppose, that it could pass on it's own. But there's only so much time before the intestinal tissue that's blocked begins to die. It's very painful, as you can see."

In the end we opted to send her for the cat CAT scans and the cat PET scans and the cat X Ray. They confirm the vet's suspicions, something is found unmistakably stopping up the inner gastrointestinal track. The cost for this already in our minds we beg to just wait a little to see if it might pass without surgical intervention.

"Possible, but I wouldn't count on it," the vet tells us with a sidelong glance that makes clear we are feelingless.

At hope we watch her vomit more and lay and get sicker and sicker. She is so small and soft and we pet her and whisper, "Please get better."

It is such an astronomical amount of money to spend on a cat. "There are people in the world who do not have access to this surgery," I think. "Are we really going to drop several months worth of income for this animal?" Leona, who we bought on impulse from a person at the SPCA holding her out to me, looks up from the bed and sighs. She was so calm the first time I held her. In the middle of a crowd she snuggled into my arms and purred as I scratched her head.

B and I pick up the credit card form, a loan designed specifically for this purpose, and begin filling it out. He calls his mother for help and I call other vets to see if there is anywhere else that can do the surgery for less than what we've been quoted. I cry on the phone with our regular vet as I try to explain that we literally just don't have the money.

A day later Leona is transferred and given a cat IV and cat anesthesia and undergoes cat surgery to remove the foreign body making her so sick. We have been here before, less than two years ago, which seems crazy as we tried to see if the suspicious mass on our previous cat could be removed. That surgery, far less expensive, was given such a positive prognosis that we assumed it was an obvious choice. When the tumors returned in force just months later we felt betrayed at both the vet and the universe.

It is not a string but a bit of exercise mat that is handed to us two days later in a small clear plastic bag. "Leona" it reads with my last name following hers. "She's really mine now," I think. "They've given her my last name." And we take her home with her shaved fore-leg where the IV was taped and a cone around her neck and a huge gash down her middle. She hates the morphine, presumably because it makes her feel weird, but we force her to take it because it's the only way she'll stop banging the cone against the crate we need to keep her in at night so she doesn't exert herself too much because she is not allowed to run or jump until the scars have healed. I watch her little eyes dilate as the drugs take effect and she looks at me confused and wobbly.

Several days later when we are able to let her out of the crate overnight she pees in the laundry basket.

Now, I sometimes I pick her up and look her in the face and tell her she has golden insides. I think about how she would, without question, be dead but for our expensive intervention. I think about how hard it was to consider anything but the fullest of options with this little cat and how impossible such decisions would be with a human sitting in the room with you. Leona wanted the pain to stop but it was I who decided that she shouldn't die. It feels like a crazy amount of responsibility.

She runs past me as I sit at my desk and knocks several books off the shelf she jumps up onto.

"What the hell?!" I scream. "You are the worst. You would have died if it wasn't for me."

Not that she understands this.

Not that I do either, really.

The cause of death that scares me

I’m currently working on my second play this year that ends in a suicide. Three of my closest friends have recently gone through or are currently going through crippling bouts of depression and anxiety, and one of their sisters attempted suicide a few years ago.

So it’s something that’s impossible not to think of when we’re exploring ideas about death. Suicide scares me perhaps more than any other cause of death, both for myself and others, probably because even the idea of it leave me feeling completely helpless.  

I have no history of mental illness at this point, which I feel very blessed and fortunate about given my ever-increasing awareness of its prevalence. But I know there’s no guarantee of it staying that way, that it’s not a childhood risk that you grow out of. I know my family has a history of depression, and I know there’s no reason why something won’t be triggered in me. So when I’m upset or anxious about something, it’s always compounded by a fear that they’re not everyday emotions but the start of something more uncontrollable and lasting. I value my mind and my self-control, my self-motivation and resilience, more than almost anything. The mere idea that I could become unable to convince myself to get out of bed, or throw up or have physical panic attacks from anxiety, or feel with total certainty that life is not worth living, is completely terrifying.  I’ve never felt that way, but I have spent enough time with people who have that I know how much it can change people at its worst. I am strong and tough, but I don’t know how that would change in the face of something I don’t have control over. I don’t know what would happen if I was convinced I would be better off dead. That’s one battle I pray I’ll never have to fight.

But as much as I’m scared of losing myself to mental illness, I’m even more concerned about suicide for those closest to me. Depression is as real an illness as cancer, and while it may not kill you directly, it’s the root cause as much or more than any overdose. One of my friends spent a couple weeks checked into a behavioral health hospital this winter because her suicidal thoughts were so serious. Another is seeing three different kinds of doctors and almost took a term off school in response to the strength of his returning anxiety; his parents will take any measure to combat his mental illness after his sister's suicide attempt. So as impossible as it feels that these people – who are often in good places when I see them, either cheered up by the presence of a loved one or just putting on a good face in a social setting – might kill themselves, I know it’s a very real possibility.

And I just… I don’t know what I would do with that. My instinct is to help, support, to offer a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on, and a nudge toward professional help when not already in use. I can do those things, but I don’t have any real power. I know rationally that even if I didn’t do those things and someone I love were to kill himself or herself, it wouldn’t be my fault… But they would be gone. Ripped from the world forever. And there’s nothing I can do to stop that desire in them. Nothing I can do to help. 

9/11

The fourteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was last week.

These are the kinds of deaths people aren’t afraid to talk about. The roughly three thousand people who died in the terrorist attacks are called to mind at memorials throughout the country (and world) and all over media (social and otherwise) on the anniversary. These deaths are ones we can all agree were too soon, unfair, horrifying, a tragedy. No American would argue that the 9/11 victims (from plane passengers to civilians to first responders) died by natural causes or were “ready to go.” The unified outrage we know we all feel lets us react to the deaths very publicly.

The 9/11 attacks caused a massive ripple effect, both in terms of big obvious events like the War on Terror, and smaller things that continue to affect civilians, like increased airport security. But more than anything, 9/11 has become a key moment, a symbol of our time. Everyone has a memory of where they were when they heard the news, who they contacted first, how it affected their day. These are the stories they tell on Facebook, often including a picture – always of the World Trade Center, the most visually impacting target – and closing with #neverforget.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. I am not disputing the tragedy, or that we should honor our dead and those that died saving others. But I didn’t know anybody who died on 9/11, and neither did my family or friends at the time. I wonder sometimes about those who did.  What is it like to have lost a brother, or sister, or parent, or child, or spouse, or best friend, not in a quiet private way, but in an international event that people bring up again year after year? Is it helpful to know that their deaths have not been forgotten, that people continue to memorialize the attacks? Or does it rid one of the opportunity to mourn privately? Does it mean people think of your person as a “victim of 9/11,” and assume they know everything about what that means? Does looking at photo after photo of the New York skyline in your newsfeed just make you relive the loss again and again, in a way that is painful rather than honorable?

We can think and talk about those who died in 9/11, because for so many of us it’s abstract, something far off in the landscape that we know exactly how to feel about, without having to deal with individualized pain. But for thousands, those attacks aren’t abstract; they’re not just a quick post on social media. They’re very very personal.

And it’s when you let it get personal that death becomes hard to talk about.

Everything that has ever lived has died

Everything that has ever lived has died, unless it hasn't died... yet.

This is a true statement.

It also feels impertinent somehow.

It feels morbid.

But I was thinking about this fact this morning and it seems impossible. That I am walking around, looking at things, experiencing stuff, that all around me seems a world teeming with life, and that all of this life will die in the not too distant future. That I will die. That I will be gone. That all these things will be gone. That my cats will be gone. That the plant on my window sill will be gone. That my neighbors will be gone. That the alley cat who lives in back of my house and the weeds that grow in the backyard and the birds that sit on the electric wires and the cockroaches that sometimes emerge from behind this sink... That every single one of these things will die and disappear one day and that this is just the tiniest fraction of imagination of the enormity of it all.

It seems crazy, really. That we aren't all thinking about it and pulling our hair out, losing our minds, freaking the fuck out about the incomprehensible loss.

I was thinking about this fact this morning and thinking about an article I read that said that 55 million people die every year and that this is the equivalent of all of England. I was thinking, "Where will they all go?" How can we keep burying the entire country of England. They can't all get special treatment. They can't all get a headstone with a name and a date that is taken care of and looked after. Eventually, there won't be any room left. 

I was thinking about graveyards. I was thinking about a book I read by Bill Bryson where he talked about how the ground around very old churches in England is so much higher than it was hundreds of years ago because there are so many people buried over top of each other. I was thinking about how they found King Richard III under a parking lot.

I was thinking about how crazy an idea a graveyard is. I was thinking about those ads on TV that tell you that we have to fight cancer or heart disease or diabetes. I was thinking about how those same ads yell that thousands of people die every year of preventable diseases like these. I kept thinking, but in the end... it has to be something. I mean, we all know that eventually it has to be something that kills us.

I was thinking about what would happen if we manage, somehow, to prevent all the preventable diseases. I was wondering about what happens beyond this. If we don't die in our houses from heart attacks like we used to, if we don't die from cancer in a slow and painful way, will there be something beyond this, some non-preventable disease that is even worse? Are we making our lives worse because we cannot come to terms with them ending?

Or maybe we will graduate to completely preventable endings. Perhaps we will decide that when the unpreventable is upon us it will be time to find something preventable but pleasurable in its place. I heard about an art project called the Euthanasia Roller Coaster the other day. First I was shocked. Then I was kind of upset at the maker. Then I thought, "Well... If it really is nice and you're in a lot of pain and you're going to die soon anyway... Maybe that's better than falling on your bed in a heap or sitting in a hospital room or being on a surgery table." I wondered if we're really parsing minutes or days or months... I don't know. Maybe it's better to have some last thing to look forward to.

I don't know. It's not something I think about a lot.

And it's hard to know what to do with such thoughts when you begin to...

Thought Vignettes

Similar to when you learn a new word and suddenly feel like you hear it everywhere, I notice mentions of and topics relating to death all the time now. I'm hyper-aware of references to death or dying anywhere all the time, and they just keep popping up. For example, earlier today I was annoyed because I was stuck behind a big truck on a narrow one-way road for a long time, and then I read the back of it and realized it was for a hospice.

***

I want to feel like I've been living more presently, worrying less, and seeing more silver linings in situations, and I started writing something to the effect that I was, and then I realized that it was completely false and it was only in retrospect that I was feeling better about all the things I was using as examples, and that in the moment I'd rated/complained/panicked about them as much as ever.

***

People don't normally talk about death because no one ever brings it up. But with all the time I've been spending writing/thinking/talking about it, it's become a natural thing for me to want to bring up in conversation with people I'm close to, and I've had a number of fulfilling death/mortality-related conversations just because I was willing to raise the subject.

***

I keep being in circumstances, particularly when reading Cross Pollination applications and meeting the selected artists, where I feel incredibly humbled and reminded of how young I am and how much life I have ahead of me. There's a nagging fear that I'll never be nearly that awesome myself, but much more overpowering is the sense of how fortunate I am to get to be around such incredible people in all different artistic fields. I feel a little bit like I'm orbiting a bunch of bright suns and hoping that I'll soak up a little of all their different kinds of light and converge it all to figure out what I want/need to create myself. We talked about fear of not accomplishing something or mattering, and I wish I could impart to the artists I'm interacting with how wowed I am by them and the lives they've carved out for themselves, and how much they matter to me, how inspiring it is for the next generation of "emerging artists."

***

I'm a lot more afraid of getting old than I am of dying. I feel like if I constantly live a good and fulfilling life, I could die whenever and it wouldn't bother me all that much. Much greater is my concern that I'll be fortunate enough to stay in the arts world and continue to be fulfilled by that, but not have the financial ability to develop a proper retirement plan, and that I'll suddenly reach old age and realize I have literally nothing to live on. The idea of living in the present backfiring later is absolutely terrifying. I try not to think about it because I don't want to be ruled by fear or make career choices that are governed by that, but at the same time it is a genuine concern that I can't ignore forever.

Catacombs

In 2008 I spent several months in Paris studying with the Roy Hart folks that have a certification program there.

One of the non-class experiences I remember well there was going to visit the Catacombs, an underground treasury of skeletons. There are apparently over 6 million bodies in this underground maze. I remember understanding intellectually what I was doing when I decided to go, but when I actually went in I remember feeling like I was sinking, like this place was too much to comprehend. It was a moment that I really remember feeling like I had to just look at all these bones and just contemplate the fact that I was no more special than any person here.

I think what was the worst were the bones in massive piles. Somehow the shape of the fancy designs abstracted them in a way that was tolerable, but just piles and piles of bones, realizing those were people and that no one would know about them, that the bodies of people will just keep building up really flipped me that day.

I found my journal from that period (the only time I've actually kept one with any consistency) and though I'd see what I said then:

I also went to the catacombs today. I thought I would like it a lot - creepy, death, etc - but I ended up really uncomfortable. I starting thinking about dying and then trying to stop myself from thinking about dying. In my head I had two thoughts that kept bouncing around: 

1) that I had no consciousness before I was born so I won't after I die. And if that's true, either we have no souls, no afterlife, or the religions of reincarnation must be the true ones, because we cycle around and around and that other plane is where they waylay. But then the math of people evolving and growing massive numbers and the size of the universe kept growing in my head. I just felt very small and pointless. I kept thinking how sad B must be but doesn't show it [now that his father is gone.] Or hasn't dealt with it because losing someone who meant so much must be so enormous. 

And then 2) That really knowing death should make you seize life. But then I didn't know what that meant. Does seizing life mean ignoring the wants of others because in the end you can't live your life for them and so why stop yourself from living and doing your ream dreams? Ie - why hold yourself back in fear - OR - should you care for and help all people because life is about connection, work is fleeting and each life should be the best it can. 

I really was struggling between what version of life-grabbing I should be epiphanizing on as I had this intense meditation of death. I felt both that I was doing neither and that I could move closer to either. It felt like palpable fear. Mostly, I just wanted to leave. To think of something interesting to say about it (a real skill and crossbones, SO MANY FEMURS!) in case asked but I want so much to be out and away. I simultaneously wanted to be close to B, to hug him, mesh into him, to prove we are in life and vital and alive and life seizing and at the same time throw away everything, that relationship, all of it, and find something more REAL, to embrace and confront any doubt I've ever had and know that I'd feel more secure having done so.

But at the same moment I know there was far too much and I would never do that, at least not unless something drastic happened.

And then again I felt like I had embraced neither attitude and was on my way to a meek and unfulfilled life.  I started going over my choice not to cash in the metro orange ticket earlier because I didn't exactly understand why I needed a new one or what would happen without do so and I didn't want to try and sort that out in another language. I kept thinking of the questions I asked myself: Why would they sell me this if I couldn't use it? Why make a fuss if you made out alright? Why bother with potential conflict? 

All these questions were examples of my fear and my holding myself back. It was a stupid small thing. But it was also my inability to get past my fear and embrace life. And the questions started bouncing off the skulls and the bones and the walls and all of it was making my heart race. The air felt clammy and cold and I just wanted to get out. I made a promise not to relax with a game or radio until I'd taken action on my life - accomplished things I should - stop drinking, work out, stop sitting around, etc...

And I've done many of the things but not all.  I listened to the radio and played my stupid game. And now I'm calm and fed and confident. And not too behind.

Not really behind much at all...

Feeling Alive

While I was studying abroad, I spent one weekend holed up in a cabin in the middle-of-nowhere, Wales for an adventure sports weekend with a bunch of other students. The activity we were all most excited about was coasteering: getting fully suited up in a multi-layered wetsuit, water shoes, and life vest, and swimming out into the freezing cold choppy waters off the rocky coast of Wales. We swam into underwater caves, jumped and dived off cliffs, climbed rocky outcroppings, and swam against rebellious waves that pushed our life vests up to our chins and made it hard to breathe.

The final part of the coasteering adventure was supposed to see us linking into a chain and swimming across a fifty yard open expanse of water to a 30 feet high cliff to jump into the water. But by that time, the light breeze that’d been there when we started had picked up into gusty winds, and the waves were pushing us astray so strongly that our guides quickly realized there was no way we’d make it across the open water. Just as we’d decided to call it and swim back to shore, the sky opened up and buckets of water fell down.

We found ourselves at the furthest point out from shore planned for the event, straining against the current, barely able to see through the water coming at us from every direction, with the rocks that sometimes came up beside us as dangerous to walk on as the water was to swim in given how treacherously slippery they’d become. Many people looked angry or upset, and one of my friends was having a full on panic attack; when we got back to shore and she got wrapped in a towel, she couldn’t stop sobbing for half an hour.

Through it all, I couldn’t shake a giddy smile and the thought that I’d never felt so alive.

There’s something about being forced into being so physically present in a moment that it’s impossible to think about anything else that makes me feel inescapably human. I don’t think it’s a “near-death experience” thing – though the storm was scary, we were still life-jacketed and accompanied by experienced guides, and I don’t think any of us would have ever come to real harm. It wasn’t a sense of living on the edge that made me feel alive, but the sheer adrenaline from the assault on all my physical senses in every direction.

I spend a lot of time working towards intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual development – these are things that come up a lot in my personal life and in my work. But since I haven’t been a performer for some years now, I don’t often think of “physical development” in the same plane of importance. I actually often think of running (my primary and currently only form of physical activity) more as a means to the other ends – an opportunity to think things through uninterrupted; to relieve stress, anxiety and other negative emotions; and even to get some reading time in, since I listen to audiobooks when I run.

But if I try to think of a moment when I felt as alive as I did coasteering in Wales, it’s running marathons. When I train, even on my longest runs I’m doing it for the aforementioned reasons. But you’re not “supposed” to run more than 20-22 miles before a marathon, and there’s something about the final added distance and the monumental nature of the event that makes the marathon itself completely different. I’ve run two so far, and though I was far more mentally empowered and happy throughout the first than the second, I hit a point in both of them where the physical act was all that mattered. I realized around mile 20 of the Vermont City Marathon that I hadn’t processed a word of my audiobook over the last half hour, because all I was focused on was a constant evaluation of the soreness of my muscles, my parched throat no matter how much water I grabbed from aid stations, and the physical weightiness of pounding the pavement with every step. I couldn’t use my book as a distraction, because I was so present in the physical moment of how my body felt. In other words, I was paying attention to it in a way I never normally allow myself time to.

Maybe that’s why I keep signing up for marathons, when I could just as easily run shorter distances and reap the same health benefits, or run long distances for the emotional and mental relief it gives without spending the money on a big event. But in addition to my general life need to always have a goal, I think subconsciously I’m also addicted to marathons for that added element of feeling so alive that I untap at that distance, which I so rarely feel elsewhere.

Because I can tell you one thing: running isn't about weight loss/management or even "maintaining a healthy lifestyle." If I knew I was going to die in a month, I wouldn't stop running. And that's how I know that for me, it's an essential part of living.

If I Was a Teenage Puritan, I Would NOT Have Survived The Salem Witch Trials.

Today is my 35th birthday, so pretty much half way there unless i get hit by a bus. But actually I think thats the way Im gonna go, so Im probably more than half way there.  My loved ones cringe at that one. Its not a pretty picture, but I think we all know its a real possibility. I spare no detail in the reports of my cycling near-misses on a weekly basis. I've been known to fall off ladders, step into the street without looking both ways, and cut the tips of my fingers off.  I drink pretty much every day, take surf vacations off the grid in foreign countries, and have friends who like to drive really fast and do drugs. I have tattoos and unprotected sex. I have a "expect the worst and hope for the best" outlook. Its a very "fuck it, we are all just lucky to be here anyway" mentality. Not cute, not one for the grandparents, but I like it. Its not that I have forsaken any hope of growing old, or have disproportionately large self-destructive tendencies. Its not that I lack optimism, fear or a sense self-preservation. I am incredibly moral and pretty well-adjusted, I just like to do things that are a little scary and dangerous sometimes. Its brings you closer to death, which is where a lot of a sweet spots in life reside. Thrilling, perspective-altering, learning, sweating, working, failing, crying, and trying harder. Dancing so long that you can't walk, play-fighting so hard that it becomes a real fight. Sitting on top of a powerful wave, trying to ride it gracefully to the shore. Mostly wiping out, but when you nail it, it erodes all the fear, doubt, and pain that preceded it.

I don't pat myself on the back for this behavior, but the thing that i DO pat myself on the back for is that my life is pretty fucking fun, and I've been hard at work for a long time making sure thats how its all goes down. Im pretty sure that when I will die (either tomorrow or  35-50 years from now), I will die with very few regrets.  Maybe I will regret that I didn't tell my friends and family I loved them enough, but that seems pretty standard. None of that "I wished I travelled more", "I wished I cared less about money and material things" or "I wish I had pursued my passion instead of that steady job" Nope nope nope. Reading this back to myself I sound like Patrick Swayze in Point Break.. corny.  But I stand by it. I think the big sum up is that I don't think my life is unique or PRECIOUS. No scrap books. My body is not a temple, its the whole world. Its a dying universe.

Its possible that my lifestyle was not a choice.  Maybe I was born this way. I was the only one who wanted to ride on the "Ring of Fire" at the  Fair on my 7th birthday. I am the daughter of a former intravenous drug user and a catholic school girl turned atheist.  Its also maybe relevant that were in not for modern medicine, I probably wouldn't be alive. I have thyroid disease. When i developed it, they didn't catch it for a while, so i experienced pretty bad pain, and lots of depression as a young teenager. Since then, and every day when I take that pill, its a reminder that Im living on borrowed time that the 20th century lent me.  I was born with crossed eyes which surgery fixed. I'm pretty sure I would not have survived the Salem witch trials if I was a teenage puritan without access to sex, drugs and psychedelic music.  Anyway. Ok- I think thats all i have for now. XOM

I guess I'm just nothing

Thinking about what happens after you die somewhat inevitably leads to the question of faith.

I don't talk a lot about this.

Perhaps that's why it's difficult to get started writing this.

There are a good number of people in my life for whom religious practice is very important. I like these people and perhaps the reason why I don't talk about this is that I don't want to come off as condescending or dismissive.

Still really hard to talk about.

If I am honest, I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't think I "know" this. I don't get up in people's face about it. I can't definitively say I have proof to show my viewpoint is true because one can't prove a negative. But I've never been given a reason to believe otherwise. I've never had any experience that has given me a reason to think anything other than what seems to be an end, well... is.

This is a sad thing, I guess. But it's hard to miss something that doesn't seem to you to exist, something that is an idea that has never appeared to take any form in your presence. Like elves or fairies, like telepathy or magic or other fantastic ideas I've encountered, these forces exists only in some theoretical way that has no impact on my daily experience. Even writing that last sentence it feels like I'm making a jab. I don't mean to. I just don't know how else to talk about it.

Sometimes religion feels like China. It's this massive and complicated place. There's a huge number of people over there on what feels like the other side of the world. They have this wholely other cultural experience. They live with an incredibly different perspective. They probably believe really different things about the world because of it. I don't think ill of them, though I do understand that I don't know them very well. I wonder about them and I wonder about their difference from me. I think about what it would be like to go and visit. I think it could be interesting and useful to get a sense of who they are and how they see the world. But fundamentally I sense that I could never really be one of them. I sense that perhaps you have to be born this way. That one must have a context, a Chinese family, that brings them into this way of seeing the world or else there will always be a fundamental schism in perspective.

My mother's parents were ostensibly some version of Protestant. They talked vague about church, though mostly in reference to when my mother was younger and the church was the center of the town social sphere. The times I can remember being in a church with them include various weddings, sundry funerals, their 50th anniversary (the party was in the basement) and that's about it. I have literally no recollection of being with them in a sacred building for a religious purpose.

Which I think makes sense giving what I learned from religion about my mother. This was my primary parent, the person who I can say gave me my core values, she was the one that instilled my sense of moral ethics. But these were not ordained in any way, they were hers. I understood from a young age that our sense of duty and purpose as her children were important. I knew that we should work hard and not lie and treat each other fairly and that loving each other is unconditional because we are all that we have in this world. I remember being 5, shortly after my parents divorced, sitting in the tiny high rise apartment my mother had rented after she moved out of my father's house. It was a studio - living room, bedroom, and kitchen all in one with the massive windows overlooking Lake Michigan. I remember a thunderstorm starting while my mother had run out for something (the drugstore perhaps?) and my sister terrified of the lightning, I remember first provoking Dale to greater terror, because I like all 5 year olds are essentially little psychopaths, and then getting nervous that I'd whipped her into a tizzy. When my mom came home I remember seeing her so concerned about Dale. She hugged and rocked her and told her it was just a storm. She shut the windows so Dale couldn't see. I didn't get punished, my mother clearly felt blame for the emotions that had sprung up in her absence however unavoidable the absence might have been.

I watched my mother and my sister and I understood that this was what there was in the world - the storm and our ability to care for each other in its midst.

I do not remember church before my parents divorce. I know that I was baptized Catholic. My father's mother, my grandma Ursuline, made sure of this. The story went that this was a battle. My mom (I think) the one putting up the fight. In the end, I suppose, they relented because she cared a lot and they cared little. My godparents are my Aunt Kim and someone else I do not remember. My sister's are our babysitter Pat McGraw and another person I do not remember. As far as I remember we never went to church as a family. As far as I remember my parents never talked about God in our house.

After the divorce there are a few scattered moments. Weddings. Christmas at Grandma Ursie's. My mother, very briefly, taking us to a Lutheran church near our house a few intermittent Sundays. I remember the pastor wore white and had a long green scarf-y thing with yellow trim. I remember he had dark hair and a round face and glasses. He looked like the neighbor in Dennis the Menace but nice. I know I went to Sunday school a couple times but almost nothing about it. After my father remarried I went to his house on weekends and it put the nail in that coffin. I remember my mom saying it was his job to take us if he felt like religion was something we should have. He didn't, I guess, and so we didn't.

I used to really want to have some kind of faith practice. I was jealous of friends growing up who seemed to have some kind of special secret, a kind of club where something happened that was a little mysterious. I can hear myself in high school giving horribly pretentious answers about this question, talking about how I had been given the enlightened position of being able to choose my religion and listing of names of different ones that I was considering.

My memories of going into houses of worship always have this tinge of outsider-ness. I always sense myself an interloper, a faker, a person who might be exposed. I am not bothered by these ceremonies. I just feel like an anthropologist watching them with an othered perspective. They are fascinating and strange simultaneously. I wonder if these things really give people comfort. I wonder if hearing words about God and his divine light make people feel better when the person they loved is dead and lying in front of them.

To me they are just words. They feel very empty.

I used to really wish I had this kind of comfort. It seemed like it would make life easier if you really believed in it. It seemed like it would provide such a lovely context for existence, such a soothing sense of purpose and meaning. I really really wanted that for a long time.

It seemed to me the way that people invest in fictional worlds. I mean this in the best sense. I mean in the way that people read and re-read and delve and mine for meaning. I mean in the way that characters become solid in people's minds. I mean the way that people know every inch of a story. I mean the way that they let it integreate and infiltrate their lives to such a degree that the story seems so real, that their minds are so able to picture and feel the narratives that they seem as if they must must must must must exist somewhere, somewhere in the universe.

I see people want to believe in these kinds of things. Feel them to take up shape and space and give a kind of meaning in their lives. I think this is what drew me to theater. The need to make people feel something so fully that it seems that it must be real, even if it is so fantastic that it is impossible to believe. 

In the end though, I understood that it was something you had to believe for it to really offer the comfort. You had to buy in to it or it would just keep feeling empty. I felt like I wasn't capable of making myself feel something to be true. It seemed like I would be lying to myself. So I just let it go. Now those thoughts take almost no space in my life. I don't know that I'd call myself an atheist, per se. I think to be an atheist you have to be an -ist, you have to have some thought and structure about what you think. I don't. Agnostic if you need a word for it, in the sense that I don't have definitive "I know that there's nothing at all and I need to make a statement about it." I have even less than this. I feel like I can't say anything about it because it's impossible. Like trying to understand the feeling of the big bang. It's simultaneously infinitesimal in duration and cataclysmically large in magnitude. Our tiny bodies are not design to tangibly understand.

I guess I'm just nothing.

A

Words of Wisdom

I’ve always been a huge Harry Potter fan. When I was a kid, I was obsessed. I read the first four books at seven and went to midnight releases for the rest, and reread them all again and again and again. I listened to podcasts, read fanfiction, wrote for an online role playing site, and listened to wizard rock music. Easily some of my favorite experiences when I spent four months in the UK were visiting Harry Potter-related sites. I’ve read the books and seen the movies so many times I’ve lost count, and I can probably still answer just about any trivia question you might throw at me. (Just in case, major spoiler alert for the whole series in the rest of this post.)

Death is a major player in Harry Potter. Not literally, except in “The Tale of the Three Brothers” in Tales of Beedle the Bard, but thematically. Harry’s whole story started because Voldemort murdered his parents. He proceeds to lose his godfather two short ears after finding him, his greatest mentor and teacher, the pet that symbolizes his childhood and innocence, the most loyal creature friend in yet another act of sacrifice, and so many more.

And it all happens because Voldemort is afraid of death. Because he heard a prophecy once that told him, “Neither can live while the other survives.” Because as a young child, he became obsessed with the idea of being the most powerful wizard in the world and of living forever, to the extent that he was not alienated by the idea of murdering others to cast the curse that would split his soul to protect him.

Dumbledore always told Harry that Voldemort’s greatest weakness was that he was so afraid to die, and that this obsessive fear is what led him to so much evil. Dumbledore said Harry need not be afraid of death, that “To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

I didn’t have to look up that quote to remember it. It’s one of the better known ones of the books, but more importantly, it’s always resonated with me. I know in this world, being afraid of death couldn’t corrupt me into using a curse to split my soul, but regardless, based on the evidence of the books, I’ve always wholeheartedly agreed with Dumbledore that life is much more enjoyable if you aren’t trying to run from the inevitable, and instead can accept that it’s coming, and maybe even that it’s not so bad after all.

Harry visits his parents’ grave in the final book, and on their shared tombstone he sees the Scripture quote, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” He worries for a moment that this means his parents are trying to “defeat” death the way Voldemort is, trying to conquer it and live forever. But really, it means that death is coming for everyone, and it’s the last obstacle you have to face before you’re free. Alternatively, it also means that it’s the last fear you have to put to rest, one of the hardest ideas to come to terms with as you try to build yourself a well-organized mind.

The words of JK Rowling were so ingrained into my consciousness as a kid that it’s no wonder that I convinced myself early on not to be afraid of death. I didn’t lose sight of its horribleness and emotional resonance – I still cannot make it through any of the last three books without weeping, for example. But being upset by someone dying and being afraid of it are two different things. Somehow, Dumbledore’s words took root in me as a personal goal and philosophy, one that sticks with me even now.

Heaven

One day when I was in second or third grade, my Sunday school catechism teacher matter-of-factly told us that pets didn’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls. One of my friends burst into tears and cried so hard and so uncontrollably about the idea of never seeing her pets again when she died that she had to be taken out of the room for a while to get calmed down.

This is one of the things I struggle with in Catholicism. I have been a pet owner my entire life, and I’ve known and loved my pets for far longer than most people in my life. I understand conceptually what my teacher saying. We were given free will and the ability to choose to follow God because we were created in His image. This comes in the form of a soul, and it’s what separates us on a fundamental level from even the most intelligent animals; having the ability to act on something more than instinct.  Souls are the part of us that have life after death. (I don’t think any Christians are arguing against the validity of decomposition of the body, at least not within the doctrine of any denomination I know.) People who don’t believe in life after death also tend not to believe in the concept of a soul; the two go hand-in-hand.

But if heaven is paradise, how can my pets not be there? There’s little that makes me happier than fuzz therapy, a lazy afternoon playing with my cat or cuddling with my dog. Then again, how can I even begin to imagine what heaven is like? If it’s all it’s cracked up to me, I’m sure I won’t even miss animals.

…I don’t like that option very much either though.

(I thought I was here to write about pets, but I think maybe I’m here to write about heaven instead.)

I mean, the idea of heaven is absolute paradise, right? By definition, it’s one of those godly things that are so infinite and vast that humankind can’t begin to grasp what it’d be like to be in such total bliss.

I’m sitting here thinking about that and knowing that that’s supposed to be comforting, that that’s always been what kept me from being afraid of death – knowing that there’s something far better to come – but I’m realizing it’s actually pretty terrifying.

I like to know things. I hate feeling like there’s a concept I can’t grasp, to the extent where I get surly and lash out at people when they’re not explaining something in a way I feel like I can understand. Of course, accepting things you don’t know everything about is a natural part of faith. But there’s a difference between believing something after a lot of self-reflection and exploration about it, and thinking about a big empty future that we know nothing about other than its theoretical perfection.

There will be no pain, no suffering, no inequality, no poverty, no illness. None of the tragedies that plague our world in ways that seem eternal and unsolvable. But though I think I’m supposed to be excited by the idea that I’d never have to feel pain, it sort of bothers me a little bit. It’s only been in the last year or so of my life that I’ve started pushing myself to feel feelings, both in the form of being willing to talk about them with other people (and thus acknowledge that they exist), and of just letting myself cry or scream or rant or skip with joy, because I’m allowed to feel. And though I can drown in the gut-wrenching-ness of bad emotions, they also make me feel human and very alive. And when I come out on the other side, everything else feels that much sweeter.

I don’t think I like the idea of being somewhere where feelings may not exist. I want to live in a world without evil or suffering, absolutely. But I’m not quite ready to think about stopping feeling, when I’ve only just begun.

But maybe that’s just part of being young.

I think about the idea of not being human anymore, of just existing in some unknown form, of not having a mind that struggles with interpersonal relationships or insecurities or anxieties or world problems, but instead of just being ethereal and eternally peaceful and loving. I think of all time existing simultaneously in such a way that I can exist forever without ever getting bored or feeling like time is wasted.

That certainly doesn’t seem like a bad thing.

But I’m not ready yet – and that’s good. It’s terrifying that the future is unknowable. But whatever it is, if I have faith – and I do – I have to trust that it’s better than I can begin to imagine. But I don’t have to rush to get there. It’s good – healthy even - to have a little fear of it, I think. Because I want to stay here and feel feelings first. I want to laugh and cry and fall in love and have my heart broken and lose someone I love and change someone’s life and maybe have a kid someday and explore everything else out there that’s part of living.

I don’t think I’m scared of death, not really. But that doesn’t mean I’m in any hurry to get there, either. I’ve got a lot more being human to do first.

More on the pet question later.

Expressing Grief

We Scandinavians are not known for our emotive sides. I've seen my Norwegian and Finnish relatives from the Midwest in a bunch of funeral settings now and I'm always struck by how quiet it is. We don't talk. We don't wail loudly. We sit with tightly wrapped bodies and and cry politely. A lot of times I sit there wondering why I don't feel much, why it feels hollow or empty. I feel bad that I don't feel as bad as it seems I should feel.

The people that are loud or messy are generally not in control of themselves. They are the random uncle who has a serious drinking problem and shows up far enough gone that things get sloppy. It's my grandfather with serious dementia who literally can't remember what's happening and sees his own wife and falls to the ground in a cry because the experience was so surprising and sudden and horrible. It feels like we excuse these instances because they are anachronisms, because these people simple don't know or can't do better. But for those of us with sound mind and body I feel an unspoken assumption that this is gaudy. It feels self-indulgent to scream one's grief into the room. It feels weird and awkward and rude somehow. No one has ever said this to me. It just seems like I shouldn't bother anyone. It seems like things are hard enough already and we all know it's a sad time. It seems like one doesn't need to go broadcasting it to the world because it makes it about you. It seems as if unless you are so overcome with grief and emotion that you literally can't control yourself then you ought to and just process that shit internally on your own time.

That's weird, I think. 

Right? 

What is a funeral for but that moment of expressing grief and starting the process of processing? But it really feels rude somehow to get up and make a lot of noise. I remember being at a funeral for B's grandmother, a sweet and flinty woman who I met a few times, and feeling bad for crying. I thought, "Who are you to cry for this person. They aren't crying and they really knew her. Stop making this about you." 

This is possibly, nay probably, some part my own neuroses at work. And still... Why would ANYONE care if I felt sad? Why would I think anyone would judge me for feeling the loss of a person special to my special person? Thinking about it now, I cried more because those people around me - B, his mom, grandfather and sister - who I saw in pain. I cried for them because I could see that they were suffering and I because I loved them I was sad that they were feeling this way.

In this instance, it's not my place to tell people how they should express themselves (though this is sort of my job in the rest of my life). If you don't want to cry, of COURSE, you don't have to. You don't have to feel anything. But I'm betting if I feel this awkwardness about expressing sadness there are others who feel this way too. What is it about our culture that invisibly tells us that we shouldn't express these things publicly? Why do these visible emotions make us so freaked out? Isn't the whole point of a funeral to give us a ritual space to do this in?

I found this video series recently called "Ask a Mortician" and in it she talks about exactly this subject. Ironically, there's an early questions that she reads from a viewer about a co-worker who loses a baby to miscarriage and then says nothing because she doesn't want to say the wrong thing. I have had EXACTLY this experience and did EXACTLY the same thing. It was interesting to hear the advice and think about if I could follow it myself in the real world. 

I went and looked up the "professional mourner" that the video mentions. I also found a bit of video of one of these ceremonies.

As I was watching this with its unabashed theatricality and heightened emotional performativity all I could think of was theater. We go to plays, we watch movies, we read books, we listen to music that are insanely depressing and epic in their description and experience of grief. We love a Romeo and Juliet tragedy and the intentionally overwrought emotions it gives us. Perhaps we crave exactly this kind of weeping and wailing in our lives because it gives us permission to feel intensely in this way. Culturally we are allowed to wallow in the depth of a romantic break up (at least for a little while). There is so much music and pop culture devoted to the intensity of this feeling. Is it possible that having an outlet for an experience so much more intense might also need such a freeing outlet? Might it help us get through the experience by having a moment to really dive in and let out those feelings rather that keeping them tightly held and able to fester?

I love this idea in spirit. I wonder if I would be able to do it in practice....

Things to chew on.

Right-to-Die

A couple days ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a very close friend about assisted suicide. He expressed very adamantly and deliberately that he believes that if people don’t want to live, they should have the right to choose to die.

This hit me so much by surprise that I didn’t even know how to answer at first. I’ve had a couple friends who have come very close to suicide due to depression, and the idea that it’s okay for people to just end their lives seemed totally alien.

But no, that’s not what B meant. In some places/countries, he explained, there are assisted suicide programs where people can go through counseling and, if they are declared mentally sane/stable and want to die, they are issued a drug cocktail allowing them to do so. It’s wrong to murder and to end someone else’s life, but if you want to die, he says, you should be able to make that choice for yourself. And, he argued, it’s better to kill yourself with the aid of counseling to make sure it’s what you want with your family knowing and understanding your decision-making process, than to shoot yourself in the head.

Still. It feels fundamentally wrong to me on every level that anyone should take their own life. It feels like playing God to just eject yourself from the world because you no longer enjoy your presence there. I wholeheartedly believe in free will and individual rights, but there’s something about an action that extinguishes your very lifeblood… People can try to get pregnant, but they cannot actively control the creation of life, and to me it feels like the opposite bookend of that should be true too.

But I have no reason to believe, that I’d ever want to end my own life (assuming freedom from mental illness). B, on the other hand, has muscular dystrophy. He used to be an excellent piano player, and now has so little control of his fingers that he carries a tool to help him open soda/beer cans. Multiple times he has broken a foot and barely even noticed, because he can’t feel it. The older he gets, the more his body will deteriorate. He’ll likely be confined to a wheelchair before long, and eventually maybe be unable to move at all. He’s had friends die at twelve years old because of more extreme forms of his disease. He’s seen relationships in his family be torn apart from the strain of one spouse being so completely dependent on the other for care.

He’s happy now, enjoying life, still able to do many things that he loves and to lead a relatively normal life. But he never plans to get married, because he doesn’t want to end up in a broken relationship that makes someone suffer the burden of taking care of him every day of their lives. And he can easily imagine a time in his 40s or 50s when he would rather die than continue living a life of constant pain, unable to carry out many jobs (regardless of disability laws), and completely reliant on other people to function.

I can’t imagine wanting to die. But I also can’t imagine a life knowing that that’s my future. And it’s hard to argue with someone who has no other future to consider.

I couldn’t help doing a little research about the whole assisted suicide concept, because I had no idea it was even an option in some places. In the US, there are five states where terminally ill, mentally competent patients with less than six months to live can request a prescription for life-ending medication. Other countries have even looser laws, permitting not just assisted suicide but euthanasia. In Belgium, doctors can help patients end their lives when they “freely express a wish to die because they are suffering intractable and unbearable pain.”

Even where it’s illegal, right-to-die groups still offer ways to carry out assisted suicide. Organizations such as Compassion & Choices and Final Exit Network let people sign up for suicide cocktails by mail. They are sent exactly what they will need, with specific instructions for how to use it – including orders for family members to destroy the instructions after the plan has been carried out.

Even thinking about this makes my breathing uneven and my heart beat out of rhythm. I watched a video clip from a PBS documentary of a family member matter-of-factly explaining the pills her relative was taking – first anti-anxiety and anti-nausea ones in preparation for diving into the lethal dose of 60 pills in fifteen minutes. She was so calm and matter-of-fact about the idea of someone she loved just ending her life.

I could barely breathe.

I’m blessed to be physically and mentally healthy. Maybe being resistant to death is a sign of that, and maybe that makes it sort of a good sign that society as a whole is as afraid of death as most people are. Because the opposite of a fear of death is even more alarming - hearing B talk with complete ease about wanting to die in what we usually consider middle age, “the prime of life,” before his disease gets to be too much to bear. I guess if life means something different to you, death does too.

Anesthesia

The closest thing to death I can imagine is the experience of going under in an anesthesia induced sleep.

My senior year of high school I got my wisdom teeth taken out. I don't think it was ever an option to stay awake through the surgery but I imagine that even if it was I would have opted to go under. At the time I couldn't imagine anything worse than being conscious through some horrific ordeal where I felt - however out of it - some aspect of someone cutting into my body to remove something.

I remember the oral surgeon's chair. I remember the giant smock they place over top of me. I vaguely remember a mask, I think it was a mask, and being told to count backwards towards one. I remember thinking that I would have no idea what to do when I got to one. I remember thinking about how I would get there soon.

And then.

I woke up.

But when I say I woke up it's hard to convey the way in which this was different than any other kind of waking up I've ever experienced. I rose out of the deepest kind of darkness. It felt like coming into being. It felt like my brain had to realize what consciousness was as if for the very first time. I cannot say for sure, because of course I don't know, but I imagine this is what it would be like to come back from the dead.

I didn't know before having this experience that sleep is not actually dead to the world. I didn't realize that even when we slip away at night so much of our body's sensors are still whirring and purring and quietly feeding us information. When we sleep some part of us senses the passage of time. Some inner compass gives us a bit of info about the placement of our body. Somewhere deep inside our dreaming brains that sense of "I" still floats around.

But I know all that now and I know it because the one thing that I fully remember about that experience was what it was like to wake up having lost every one of those things. My body had been moved and I was in a new place but I had no sense of having traversed space. I spent a full minute just trying to understand the space around me, so total was my sense of still remaining just where my consciousness had left off. Normally when I think of the shift from dream to awake I sense my mind coming from one kind of place and into another. When I woke up from surgery I came from a kind of darkness that was total. No dreams. No sense of self. Nothing.

Upon waking I "was" again.

But I also now understood what it would be like if I wasn't. 

In that surgery sleep I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't aware anymore. I was no where. It felt like I hadn't been alive.

And ever since then I've assumed that this must be what death is like. It isn't some horrible dark and scary place. It isn't anything. It's just a lack. It's just nothing.

So in one way, there's nothing to be scared of.  Death is not me thinking about a lack of consciousness. There's no me to think. There's no thinking to occur. There's only that lack. There's only that nothing. But since that experience I am far more afraid of dying. Soon after having my wisdom teeth out I developed an intense fear of flying. Stepping onto a plane somehow brought me close to that feeling of nothing. As if the only thing separating me from the nothing was miles of air.

Rationally, I know this is a silly and useless fear. I understand that I am far more likely to die in a car or from heart disease. But when I am forced to sit still and contemplate the space between me and the ground I start to panic. When a possible path towards the nothing is so obvious, when human brazenness is so brash that I realize it has caused me to hurtle through space in a metal box high in the sky, I have a hard time telling those voices to quiet. When the memory of how quickly one can lose everything they know to be themselves has nowhere to go it can claw its way up the edges of the rational self. When the memory finds a home in my mind and my heart and my gut it laughs and reminds me that the nothing can swallow me.

So instead I try to distract myself with books and music. I try to breathe and feel my body living in the seat I occupy. I tell myself that today is not the day I will lose myself.

And I try not to remember the feeling of feeling nothing at all.

The Santa Claus effect

My parents and I aren’t the best at talking to each other.

I love them. They are hard-working and driven and fun and goofy and supportive and generous, in different times and in different measures. We fight sometimes, especially my dad and me, but never anything serious or lasting.

I’ve always seen the good and the bad in them, even as a child. I’ve always known my dad was overworked and overtired and took his stress out on us with his bad moods, constantly on the verge of shouting. I’ve also always known that when we visit a bookstore, it takes next-to-convincing on my part for him to offer to buy me the stack of books I show up carrying two hours later after I dive in full-throttle to browse my favorite sections. I’ve gotten frustrated with my mom for never fully grasping what I do in theatre even when I’ve explained it to her a hundred times, but I also know she supports me anyway, as she came to see every production I worked on, even when she didn’t really understand what I’d done for it.

But we don’t talk about our feelings. I didn’t tell my mom when my friends subtly edged me out of their group in sixth grade, and my dad didn’t get to tease me about crushes I never told him I had. I have trouble picking out Hallmark cards for holidays because even someone else’s words feel too cheesy and syrupy for us. Now, every once in a blue moon, my mom sends me a Facebook message with a cute saying about how much her daughter means to her. I appreciate the gesture, and I know she means every word, but for some reason it puts me on edge.

I like it better when she sends me videos of hedgehogs.

We’ve discussed it occasionally. How impressed I was when I realized how open and communicative my sister is, when the rest of us tend to keep things pretty tight to ourselves. How my mom wishes I shared more with her, but how I don’t really know how to when for so many years she didn’t ask me about what was troubling me – not because she didn’t care or notice, I know now, but because she didn’t know how to and hoped I’d talk about it myself. Instead, in most cases we learned to show our feelings and our moods through our actions, and that was plenty for me.

All of which is to say that the idea of talking to my parents about their deaths is not only uncomfortable and upsetting, but downright terrifying verging on impossible.

I have a pretty specific idea of what it would mean for me to die, or (perhaps bizarrely) even to lose my closest friends. But while my parents’ deaths are theoretically more imminent, assuming we all die of old age (or age-related illness), the idea of their steady presence being gone is unthinkable.

I don’t know what they want. I don’t know if they’d sign a DNR in the hospital, if they’d want to be in nursing homes or cared for at home, if they want to buried or cremated. I could take a pretty solid guess, because I’ve known them my whole life. But I’ve never asked.

It’s like how we all continue to say our Christmas gifts come from Santa Claus, so I can maintain the magic of Christmas and feel like a child again… If I don’t talk to my parents about dying, they never will.

Of course this is absurd and untrue and I know rationally that I should know the answers to the death questions, that they deserve that my siblings and I have the knowledge to take care of them as they would want.

But Naomi’s the oldest, and she’s always been more open to tough conversations. Can’t she just ask all the questions?

Observation: I’m having trouble getting my thoughts organized enough to write this, much more so than usual. I keep feeling like I’m pulled in a lot of different directions, like there’s so much to say or explain and no way to say it. After writing the last sentence above, I feel like the “right thing to do” is realize that letting someone else take responsibility is childish and immature. But at the same time, I actually think it’s very practical – my sister is more family-oriented and much older (fourteen years) and wiser to the ways of the world than I am. If anything were to happen to our parents, even though I live the closest, she’d probably be the one to organize everything that had to be done. Or at least, she would know what had to be done, and she would tell me what I need to know to make it happen logistically.

In most areas of my life, I work hard to be a “real adult,” to convince other people (and more importantly, myself) that I know what I’m doing and I can handle everything.

But if you ask me to have an adult conversation with my parents about their deaths, I might just throw a temper tantrum.

We’ve always been “actions speak louder than words” type people.

That’s okay, right? Right?

Legacy

A couple years ago, my friend and I found an old-fashioned wooden blanket trunk at a flea market, which my friend was immediately excited about purchasing for her room. When we opened it to see if there was anything inside, I was even more fascinated by the contents: layers upon layers of photographs, letters, drawings, and documents, all of which looked old and faded.

We rifled through the documents, quickly ascertaining that they belonged to no one we’d ever heard of. But we went ahead and purchased the trunk together with its contents and lugged the hefty forty-pound trunk the two miles back to my apartment, from Clark Park, in the rain.

Later that night, after a performance of our show, we found ourselves back in my living room, digging through the magical box of history. We organized it by type of artifact, and then used the captions and text to start putting pieces together, following the trail of relationships, family members, and timelines. We hopped on the computer and searched recurring names to see if we could find the people today to return things too. Eve was obsessed with the idea of making a reddit to see if the internet hive mind could hunt people down, but I didn’t care much about that part – I just wanted to understand people’s stories, as much as I could from these small windows into their lives.

Birth announcement, Baptism announcement, and young adulthood of Carol Ann Darnell

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when, two years later, I ended up following a similar course for my undergraduate senior project in creating an archival history of the Drexel Players. I spent many long hours reading old newspaper articles, rifling through a delicate scrapbooks from decades past, scouring playbills for names and juicy director’s notes, and taking notes on every college yearbook ever published, all to frame a story that had been largely lost from memory in the intervening years.

I’ve never been able to explain why projects like these draw me in so much. With the Players, it was easy to use the excuse that learning about our history might inspire ideas for us for the future. But with the trunk I had no such excuse. And in both cases, it was more for my own interests than for any such lofty reason; I was fascinated by finding the same names again and again, by charting the course of individuals through time and in learning something of who they were and what they did.

I think, if I’m honest with myself, I’m drawn to other people’s histories because I hope someone else will be drawn to mine.

I try my best to make it easy for them. I’ve scrapbooked for years, created photobooks of trips and special events, and saved the programs and posters of every show or project I’ve worked on. I religiously ensure that someone, whether it’s me or not, is taking photos of important events. When I carefully upload, tag, and caption all my photos on Facebook, it’s not in hopes that I’ll get hundreds of “likes” to create a shiny happy picture of my life; it’s to create a detailed catalog of my life. I love handwritten letters, and I still print hard copies of photos so there’s physical evidence of my story too.

I like to think that doing these things is just the right trail of breadcrumbs for someone to follow in the future. Ideally, of course, my family and friends will keep and treasure these memories. But even if they don’t,  I have a romantic vision that no matter who I am or become, someone somewhere will find a bin of my belongings at a flea market someday and think it’s worth staying up til 3 in the morning trying to piece together who I am, or who I was. I like to think even if I’m not famous or well-known, that my legacy will live on somewhere, somehow.