I'll Be Dead
When I first moved to my house thirty-five years ago, I would stroll my baby twins in their carriage almost every day on a loop that led past the Accord Rural Cemetery. The graveyard sign misspelled the word as “Cemetary,” and I would say to myself, I could never be buried here.
Ten years later, the sign was changed, with the spelling corrected. Now I have a plot there, and my in-laws’ ashes are buried there.
I know that I’m going to die, but I don’t yet know from what. I feel good; I’m lighter and leaner than I’ve been in about twenty years, because we adopted a Newfoundland puppy during the pandemic and she has me walking at least two miles every day (often past the “cemetary”). Still, I know that I’m going to die because two out of the five members of my old writers’ group died this year, and another friend’s husband (in a marriage longer than I am old) died last month, and two other friends have been afflicted with Parkinson’s, and yet another friend is guessing that he has Parkinson’s, and another friend has a wait-and-watch case of prostate cancer, and another friend has bladder cancer, and my parents and grandmother and my Cousin Lou and everyone in my family who was older than 90 are now gone.
I’m trying, these days, to better practice the mitsves of visiting the sick and comforting the bereaved — even if only by telephone — because it’s the most useful thing I can do for most of the people I know. And maybe someone will do it for me.
As the Talmud says, “All the calculated dates of redemption have passed, and now the matter depends upon repentance and good deeds.”
Sometimes it feels that I will die not by dying but by fading away. I don’t do Facebook. I don’t do Instagram. I don’t have any favorite hip hop artists. I don’t read Jacobin or N+1. I don’t care about any of it, and none of it cares about me. My relevance is transmuting into legacy. My beauty is transmuting into invisibility. It’s wonderful, static-free. The stuff I do get worked up about — like whether there will still be blue whales living in the ocean and elephants living in Africa when my twins visit my gravesite in Accord — doesn’t seem nearly as important to most of my fellow Americans as whether the government will permit them to store their leftovers in plastic and whether they have leftovers at all. Who can blame them? Most of them don’t get out on the ocean or visit Africa or my gravesite in Accord. Life is lived locally.
So by the time I disappear, I will be lighter and leaner than I was at age 2. Meanwhile, I just taught my 3-year-old grandson how to play Go Fish. That’s what I call culture.
The theme for the next issue of ALTE is going to be THE FUTURE. As soon as we decided upon it, I thought of an artwork for it:
I mean suffering in the Buddhist sense, but maybe it’ll be worse than that. I still hope that’s not the case, but by now I know better.
—Lawrence Bush for ALTE: Getting Old Together