Thinking about Dying

Joyce Greenberg Lott

When I was young, I thought about my Bat Mitzvah, my Sweet Sixteen, my wedding, my first baby.  I thought about these occasions because I knew they would happen.  I studied teen magazines and listened to my mother’s stories.  I dressed dolls, even my cousin’s bride doll.  Now I’m thinking about dying and there’s no one to tell me about it – no way to play “Dying” the way I used to play “House”.

I fill out the required form each time I go to the doctor.  I don’t lie: I have friends; I don’t think about taking my life; I’m not bored or unhappy.  In fact, it’s a relatively easy time for me.  Aside from a botched hip operation and arthritis, with its limiting and sometimes painful effects, causing me to walk with a walker, I lead a comfortable stress-free life in an apartment I like near my family.  But I turned eighty-four six months ago and I would be foolish not to think about dying.

My father died at eighty-nine.  I sat by his side in a Florida hospice.  My husband died at sixty-eight.  Following his bladder cancer closely, I became too intimate with dying.  My mother died at ninety-seven.  She was ready - she stopped eating.  My final partner died four years ago from a stroke.  I haven’t mentioned my grandparents or more recently my friends – or even my younger sister who died from pancreatic cancer, because this little essay isn’t about my losses.  It’s about life for those of us who survive into old age, who no longer experience the excitement of growth; but instead, the dismay of deterioration – those of us who start to let go a little instead of grasping for more.  

When I was young and immortal, when my grandmother made soup and my grandfather smoked cigars, before my father even got me a canary named Honey, I didn’t think about death.  We lived by the ocean and my mother told me if I stayed on the beach and a thunder storm happened, I would get struck by lightning and die.  She also said that if I went out in the ocean over my head I would drown.  I listened to my mother, but when I played on the beach and swam in the ocean I didn’t think about dying.

Several years after my husband died of bladder cancer, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  The protocol made me bald and skinny, but I didn’t think about dying.  I accepted the fact that cancer could kill me but that’s different than thinking in the future I will die.

When I lived with my last partner, my appendix burst.  Doctors put a tube down my nose into my stomach.  They cut open my stomach down the middle and didn’t stitch it back together. I was miserable.  I couldn’t fit into my clothes.  But I felt as though the doctors had saved my life.  I didn’t think about dying.

But now I do.  The night after my daughter, her husband and a friend celebrated my 84^th birthday, I couldn’t sleep.  Instead, I lay in bed and watched a rerun of my life.  Hardly an Academy Award winner.  A bit dated but okay to watch late at night. Family, adventures, parties, lovers.  The sound of new cans of tennis balls popping open, the smell of barbeques sizzling.  I watched students learn and saw sentences and lines of poetry appear from my fingertips.  I’d done so much – right and wrong, but as someone who had studied the structure of literature and film, it was easy for me to see that I was almost at the end.  

My granddaughter Claire, who is twenty-five, is somewhat of a celebrity on Tic Tok.  She has 56.8k followers.  Her persona is one of a girl in her twenties who moved to New York City.  Here’s what she posted for her fans recently:

So many of your happiest days haven’t happed yet.  There are people you’re going to love, people who are going to love you that you haven’t met yet.  Places you haven’t been that you’re going to go.  You have so much life ahead.

Unlike Claire and her fans, I don’t have so much life ahead.  I think about dying.  How should I play out my life now?  How should I approach my death?

More than seven years ago, I moved across the country into mypresent apartment near my daughter and her family.  I took very little with me.  Maybe because I’m not attached to stuff. Or, maybe because my mother made me clean out my drawers twice a year when I was growing up.

What I did keep – photographs, some things my children had sent me, my published writings, I put in boxes in the storage closet in the hallway next to my apartment, along with extra toilet paper and bottles of water.  In the weeks following that sleepless night after my 84^th birthday, I took out the boxes one by one and began to look at my life.  It was almost like going to my own funeral.  I don’t remember doing this, or wow I did that, I thought.

This period of reflection took several months because I still needed to cook my meals in the present, wash my dishes, answer my cellphone and keep my appointments.  I enjoyed the overflow of living in the past as well as the present.

When I completed that activity and put the boxes back in the storage closet, I decided to organize my poems.  Some were on my computer.  Some not.  I’d been writing for more than fifty years, so I’d forgotten some poems the way you forget friends you once knew but with whom you don’t share much in common anymore.  I’d published two chapbooks but thoughtthat now I’d get all my work together in three sections – like my long-term relationships – into a hardbound book.  I worked steadily and completed this task until I got to the third section.

For me, this final section is difficult.  When do I stop writing, stop reflecting on my life, and feel satisfied the way my book ends?

I’ve made my will, left instructions to be cremated and have my ashes scattered on the ocean.  But can I think about my death the way I used to think about my wedding or dressing my first baby?  In some ways, my death is more inevitable than those occasions.  Yet I can’t quite fantasize how it’s going to happen.  I try not to fall and I eat healthy food.  That’s about it.  

I have fifteen years at the most to live and probably a lot less, but dying is an occasion I still can’t choreograph, even in my imagination.  Yet, I think about it.