Death was somewhat present during my childhood. As a family, we occasionally attended a wake. My mother called wakes “viewing the body,” a phrase which was too direct and more a reminder of a police procedural than a part of family life. The process of dying, however, was never present. Generally, a call would come after the death occurred.
I first experienced death’s process in my 20s. I had worked at a bookstore with Donna, a positive and energetic woman loved by everyone. When she left work to help her mother care for her father, the assistant manager said, “Everyone is nicer here for having known Donna.” This loveliest of tributes was true. She could make everything better with her unabashed honesty and her kindness.
I visited Donna and her mother not long after. Her father, a former welterweight boxer, had had a double organ transplant, heart and liver. Donna and her mother were exhausted. They were pale and drawn, with circles under their eyes.
But they still made tea and served homemade cranberry bread, and we sat around the table, talking. Donna’s father, in his pajamas and robe, joined us. Despite his labored speech, he seemed happy for the company. I leaned forward to listen as he struggled with one sentence. His caretakers were silent, until Donna laughed. Then her mother said, “He made a joke!” Both were surprised and relieved.
I realized then how he was trying, not necessarily to appear well, but to be normal, to return to the outgoing, personable man he had been.
Later, a neighbor I did not know well, despite our daughters being classmates, tapped me on the shoulder while I was shopping. I turned, and my reaction to her drawn and aged face was normal, but embarrassing. We talked for a few minutes. After her death, when her husband spoke of her at the Unitarian Church, he addressed the ways in which she had tried to stay involved with her community and her family. She, too, was trying to maintain normalcy in the face of death.
When Mary, my closest friend in New England, called unexpectedly while I was at work, she said, “I am going to be direct because there is no other way to say it. I have cancer.” She then said she would hang up and we could talk later.
I visited her while she was still in the hospital after surgery. She looked surprisingly well. Her color was good. She was energetic. She told me she was glad I hadn’t come the day before when she was still connected to tubes. Over the next year and a half, Mary and I did the things we always did together. We went out for lunch, we took walks, we visited art museums. “I’m going to beat this,” she would say.
Like Donna’s father, like my neighbor, Mary was trying to be normal.
When my daughter went to Spain for her junior year, Mary, who was also close to her, asked if she could take Emily to the airport. They went to breakfast, then took the subway to the airport, where Mary sat talking to Emily until her plane boarded.
That spring, Mary held a party, to which she invited all of her women friends. “I want all of you to get to know each other,” she said and toasted with white wine.
It wasn’t until after she died that I knew both gestures were goodbyes and that she was trying to make her passage easier for those close to her. After we left her funeral service at Boston’s Old South Church, my daughter and I walked to the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum to look at John Singer Sargent’s “El Jaleo,” a painting of a Spanish dancer that meant so much to the three of us. It was fitting salute to Mary.
Another friend has long fought cancer, which briefly disappeared. However, in July, her daughters’ concern over her exhaustion caused them to call her oncologist, who began a more vigorous regimen for the cancer, now in a new place. We had attended a lecture together in mid-August. Her movements were stiff, but her face was still beautiful, and she spoke of buying a new car. She even suggested cheerfully that she could leave the car to her granddaughter who is 15. Then on the first Sunday in September, while at a garden party, I heard her call my name. I turned. She was very pale. “Would you help me walk back to my car?” she asked. I walked alongside her, holding her hand.
She is no longer pretending to be normal. She is now facing her end.
And that is the process of dying. It is the attempt to continue to be not just one’s self, but one’s best self. Interested. Alert. Able to hide the pain. More concerned about giving love than receiving it.
A native of Michigan, Susan Wozniak belongs to three alumni associations with at least one other woman named Susan Wozniak in each. She is not related to Steve.