die in der zwischenzeit.

You don't have to be Cassandra in October to get a sense of foreboding these days, these months, and these years of the dying parents.



Five in a row. The one who didn't accept "losing" someone. The one who drowned in her own fluids, alone in the chair on the telephone. The one who left her children to go to Mexico. The one who had moved so far, all the way to Alaska. And the one who recognized the faces (and the voices!), even after dementia had usurped her mind and the cancer had spread to her intestines. You are allowed to let go now and leave us alone.

Because they were the ones for whom rituals hold little comfort, who questioned the powers "that be," who challenged the sanctified rules of behavior -- and the ones who did not live they way you are supposed to. This is what happens because.

How did we say goodbye to you today: a haphazard assembly, with men and women in separate rooms, and rows and rows of strangers innocuously distancing all of us from what remains of you. Then, instructed by the Imam, your only child and your second husband lift your awkward body, shrouded in white, and struggle to guarantee that it will forever face Eastward, just as the jet planes crisscross the clear-blue, cloudless skies above and groundskeeper Anthony's walkie-talkie is squelching. "Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the funeral services," speaks the earnest young white man. "You are welcome to stay, but we will have to move in the machinery."

Your long physical journey from Baghdad has ended in a Brooklyn cemetery, but, if the divine comedy is real, you are now reunited with your sister, rejoicing together in the fact that, for as long as she stands, the Statue of Liberty will be staring at your bum.

“This mortality thing is bad news,” said a sage who did not believe in death.

There are no habits and protocols in place for those who die askance. There is no easy solace for the ones without custom, in temporary homes, struggling in the places between. What hears our pleas, yet "refuses to take the other within oneself, as in the tomb of some narcissism?" So it goes, as they shall besmirch the steadfast wisdom of the loved ones who have muddled to live virtuously elsewhere and otherwise.


Notes:

There are, of course, other ways to think about it: "il faudra lui montrer des granges pleines de moissons, et de fleurs dont les formes et les couleurs gagnent le suffrage des Anges." Also: "Blum und Jugend lacht und Sang erklingt."

For the tomb of narcissism, see:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/remembering_jd/letter_list.htm

For the bad news about mortality, see:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/arts/design/20arakawa.html

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