The dead apparently cannot lament over the lives they've left; they have no memories. So why do we view dying with such anxiety? Enjoy life while you can, there are many delicious aspects, many freedoms that come with old age. I only worry about dying 60% to 80% of the time now.
I’m only (!) 77, but found working on my trust oddly cheerful - who will get what, lots of charitable goals since I have no kids or spouse or nieces/nephews. I have decided on a natural burial in the wooded part of Rosendale Cemetery. I want to be reincarnated as a tree. And I hope for another 15 years, even with my various health challenges and minor disability - I’ve found out I’m resilient, which is nice to know.
Thank you for this moving and honest piece, Joyce. I'm 85 now and include a piece here about my reflections on my death and it's cereonial accompaniment. It's from The Kicthen is Closed: And Other Benefits of Being old.
Forever After
Several months ago, there was a minor earthquake, a not uncommon phenomena given that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The brief but terrifying experience of feeling the ground trembling beneath my feet left me with strengthened resolve to finally get my earthquake kit together. I had lived through the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, standing in the doorway as instructed, arms pressed against the door jamb looking like a terrified Samson holding up the temple. Now my procrastination had to end.
I printed out all the government-approved lists of the necessary items, compared them, made a master list and began my preparations, comforted by the concreteness of this process, precautions I can take that may, just may affect the outcome of a catastrophic earthquake. Flashlights. Whistles. First aid kit. Sturdy shoes. I can do this.
I gathered pliers, duct tape, toothbrushes and toothpaste (like an s and m dungeon, but with good oral hygiene) for my emergency grab and go bag.
But I can’t prepare for the specific big one. My personal earthquake. I don’t know if it will come with a bang (hopefully in my sleep), in a trickle (with declining physical or mental capacities), or with a serious disease, requiring me, in the military language of illness, to decide whether to do “battle” with whatever it is.
Nevertheless, even with counting my steps, flossing my teeth and eating more kale than I ever wanted, there is the bigger decision that all this masks. I want to be able to determine the circumstances under which I continue my life. But the decision to be or not to be is not simply my own. Or at least not legally anyway. When I was young, any woman wanting to access a legal abortion needed both her husband and doctor to approve the procedure. Life is sacred, our opponents bellowed. Our Bodies, Ourselves! we roared back. The rules grew up around our lives. And abortion was possible only in the first trimester, for women who could afford to pay for the procedure.
Now, in the dishearteningly similar conversation about who makes decisions about women’s bodies is echoed in debates about end of life choices. We need to confirm that we are near the end of our lives, or too impaired to function without help that we often can’t afford to get, or not simply depressed, the combination of sorrow and old age considered an insufficient reason to end ones’ life. There is an underground, of course. Just as there was in the l960s, providing women who wanted abortions the ability to access them. There will always be an underground. But that’s simply a first step of resistance, not an end point, which would be a respectful policy.
The father of my two daughters, an intrepid old man, has lived too long. He is 98 now and confessed to me that he awakens in the morning with another day stretching out before him, one in which he can no longer walk, breathe without oxygen, remember much, or drink anything but Ensure (and an occasional vodka martini), needing to give himself a good pep talk so he can move into the day with the best spirits possible. He’s lovely that way. But I’m not. I don’t want to live too long. I want to be in charge of when enough is simply enough.
My death will be hard on my daughters no matter how it comes. Not on me. They would manage the loss of me more easily if I had a slow tender decline before I popped off. That way they could have all the anticipatory conversations, review all the tender memories, offer the small, kind acts of love—everything they are both doing now that allow them to release their dying father. It’s working for them, but I’m not at all sure it’s working for him.
Then there is the me who is now dead. That will require a decision about what is formally defined as, “the disposition of the body.” I have to decide about my body’s disposition or leave that complex task for my daughters. When they asked their dad how he wanted his remains to be remaindered, his response was a brusque,
“Dead is dead. Do whatever you want.”
While I certainly agree with him that dead is dead, I need to give this a bit more thought. I have spent decades thinking about how I want to inhabit my political and spiritual Jewish self, but as nontraditional as many of my choices have been, I suspect there may be a comfort in being disposed of the way Jews have traditionally handled this process over the centuries.
I’m a congregant in a small synagogue that has just the right blend of erudition, spontaneity, music and politics to make Jewish sense to me, and there is, in this as in most congregations, a small group of volunteers called the Chevra Kadisha that ensure that the departed (that would be me) is ritually cleansed, shrouded, and prepared for traditional Jewish burial.
The process is embedded in the belief that the human body is sacred and holy, and that even when the body is deceased, it’s still compared to an impaired Torah scroll which while no longer useable, still retains its holiness.
I don’t think about my body as a holy vessel. Well, I did once when I practiced yoga, meditation and did colonic cleanses. That was a mercifully brief period, very long ago and there is no need to go into it now. But I like the image of myself as an impaired scroll, my body akin to Torah, even when I won’t be in it anymore because I’ll be dead. And naked. I’ll be washed, all my crevices thoroughly cleansed, rinsed three times and dressed in traditional burial clothing. Often there is music or chanting going on while moving through each stage. That seems lovely.
My eldest daughter has asked to be a part of the ritual, called taharah, or at least be allowed to be a witness to it. My younger is a bit more like her Dad; ritual doesn’t provide a significant source of comfort and she’ll probably demur. But once I’m ceremonially cleansed and wrapped in white linen, the next hurdle presents itself. Am I going into the ground or into the furnace?
When he dies, my daughters have decided to cremate their father as a way of respecting his lifelong nihilism. My parents and younger brother are in lot N row 4 in a large cemetery across the country, but in the intervening decades since their deaths, I’ve never flown east to stand before their markers. Not even once. That is not to say that each of them and our unique relationships remain alive within me. My mother especially. Super close. I hear her, nearly twenty years after her death, more than I even want to. But there is still something comforting about her voice, even though it’s still telling me the same things she told me fifty years ago. Stand up straight. Don’t fill up on bread and water before the main course even arrives. Make me proud. Make yourself proud. Varied bossy stuff like that. The same kind of stuff I still say to my daughters.
A lot of institutionally affiliated Jews have a very hard time, understandably so, with the choice of cremation. I feel a bit uneasy about being burned up, especially given that the Holocaust was a central historic reality of my lifetime. But I do like the idea of ashes, of something tangible left of me. My eldest daughter might want an ornate urn with some me in it. My youngest will probably opt for a teary scattering someplace, preferring framed pictures to an accumulation of leftover me. But there is no place that contains my history, holds memory, and represents a sense of continuity. Thirty-two years ago, when my beloved died, she was cremated and scattered in our back yard, where mourners came with small plants to mix with her ashes in the fertile soil. That felt perfect. Generative. Respectful. We marked both the ending of her, and the beginning of new life. But it’s thirty-two years later and I’m not there anymore. I live in a condominium and am surrounded by an emotionally neutral landscape. There are places that matter to my daughters though, and I suppose they will agree on where to scatter the part of me that is not resting comfortably in a decorative urn.
Sometimes in synagogue during the recitation of the kaddish, a time when mourners say the name of a beloved who has died, I whisper my name -- just to hear how it sounds folded into the names of the dead filling the sanctuary. Because there will be such a day. I am preparing to become an ancestor. And it will be sooner rather than later.
I’m certain my daughters will continue to hear my voice for as long as they can hear. And that’s what I want. To be heard. Maybe deciding to place my remains in a specific spot they can visit will provide them some comfort. Or having an urn and some scattering. Either way is OK, just so long as my voice continues to ring in their ears. Permanently.
I love this! You are speaking for me. I'm a bit younger-79--and still able to walk pretty quickly on my own, so don't have the arthritic pains you have or the walker. And I'm not widowed yet. I've always studied up on projects I wanted to begin. I study Torah weekly and have done so since the 1990's, and over the last 15 years or so always with a partner or group. And I've accepted the need to practice and learn how to do most new things I've every done, teaching, telling stories for money (that was my paid work for decades) and teaching poetry writing in schools. And it occurred to me about a month ago, after witnessing many of my brother. and multiple friends become ill and/or die (quickly or after great suffering) that I don't know how to get ready for physical decline and dying. So thank you for this. Thank you especially for describing what you did with the boxes of your photoes and past writings. I've begun doing this in a haphazard way, but what you write gives me courage and therefore hope.
Susan, thank you. As you know, sometimes when you write it seems like you're expressing your own idiosyncratic experience. It feels good to know that telling your truth can reverberate with others.
Dear Joyce, What a beautiful piece. Thank you thank you.
There are no words. No doubt you know how many people that your beautiful musings describe.
We all long for...what? More, less? Life is so scary and then it is no more. Thank you for eloquently putting this down and sharing it.
Thank you for letting me know I reached others.
An exquisite meditation. Thank you
Thank you.
The dead apparently cannot lament over the lives they've left; they have no memories. So why do we view dying with such anxiety? Enjoy life while you can, there are many delicious aspects, many freedoms that come with old age. I only worry about dying 60% to 80% of the time now.
A big smile!
I’m only (!) 77, but found working on my trust oddly cheerful - who will get what, lots of charitable goals since I have no kids or spouse or nieces/nephews. I have decided on a natural burial in the wooded part of Rosendale Cemetery. I want to be reincarnated as a tree. And I hope for another 15 years, even with my various health challenges and minor disability - I’ve found out I’m resilient, which is nice to know.
Thank you for this moving and honest piece, Joyce. I'm 85 now and include a piece here about my reflections on my death and it's cereonial accompaniment. It's from The Kicthen is Closed: And Other Benefits of Being old.
Forever After
Several months ago, there was a minor earthquake, a not uncommon phenomena given that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The brief but terrifying experience of feeling the ground trembling beneath my feet left me with strengthened resolve to finally get my earthquake kit together. I had lived through the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, standing in the doorway as instructed, arms pressed against the door jamb looking like a terrified Samson holding up the temple. Now my procrastination had to end.
I printed out all the government-approved lists of the necessary items, compared them, made a master list and began my preparations, comforted by the concreteness of this process, precautions I can take that may, just may affect the outcome of a catastrophic earthquake. Flashlights. Whistles. First aid kit. Sturdy shoes. I can do this.
I gathered pliers, duct tape, toothbrushes and toothpaste (like an s and m dungeon, but with good oral hygiene) for my emergency grab and go bag.
But I can’t prepare for the specific big one. My personal earthquake. I don’t know if it will come with a bang (hopefully in my sleep), in a trickle (with declining physical or mental capacities), or with a serious disease, requiring me, in the military language of illness, to decide whether to do “battle” with whatever it is.
Nevertheless, even with counting my steps, flossing my teeth and eating more kale than I ever wanted, there is the bigger decision that all this masks. I want to be able to determine the circumstances under which I continue my life. But the decision to be or not to be is not simply my own. Or at least not legally anyway. When I was young, any woman wanting to access a legal abortion needed both her husband and doctor to approve the procedure. Life is sacred, our opponents bellowed. Our Bodies, Ourselves! we roared back. The rules grew up around our lives. And abortion was possible only in the first trimester, for women who could afford to pay for the procedure.
Now, in the dishearteningly similar conversation about who makes decisions about women’s bodies is echoed in debates about end of life choices. We need to confirm that we are near the end of our lives, or too impaired to function without help that we often can’t afford to get, or not simply depressed, the combination of sorrow and old age considered an insufficient reason to end ones’ life. There is an underground, of course. Just as there was in the l960s, providing women who wanted abortions the ability to access them. There will always be an underground. But that’s simply a first step of resistance, not an end point, which would be a respectful policy.
The father of my two daughters, an intrepid old man, has lived too long. He is 98 now and confessed to me that he awakens in the morning with another day stretching out before him, one in which he can no longer walk, breathe without oxygen, remember much, or drink anything but Ensure (and an occasional vodka martini), needing to give himself a good pep talk so he can move into the day with the best spirits possible. He’s lovely that way. But I’m not. I don’t want to live too long. I want to be in charge of when enough is simply enough.
My death will be hard on my daughters no matter how it comes. Not on me. They would manage the loss of me more easily if I had a slow tender decline before I popped off. That way they could have all the anticipatory conversations, review all the tender memories, offer the small, kind acts of love—everything they are both doing now that allow them to release their dying father. It’s working for them, but I’m not at all sure it’s working for him.
Then there is the me who is now dead. That will require a decision about what is formally defined as, “the disposition of the body.” I have to decide about my body’s disposition or leave that complex task for my daughters. When they asked their dad how he wanted his remains to be remaindered, his response was a brusque,
“Dead is dead. Do whatever you want.”
While I certainly agree with him that dead is dead, I need to give this a bit more thought. I have spent decades thinking about how I want to inhabit my political and spiritual Jewish self, but as nontraditional as many of my choices have been, I suspect there may be a comfort in being disposed of the way Jews have traditionally handled this process over the centuries.
I’m a congregant in a small synagogue that has just the right blend of erudition, spontaneity, music and politics to make Jewish sense to me, and there is, in this as in most congregations, a small group of volunteers called the Chevra Kadisha that ensure that the departed (that would be me) is ritually cleansed, shrouded, and prepared for traditional Jewish burial.
The process is embedded in the belief that the human body is sacred and holy, and that even when the body is deceased, it’s still compared to an impaired Torah scroll which while no longer useable, still retains its holiness.
I don’t think about my body as a holy vessel. Well, I did once when I practiced yoga, meditation and did colonic cleanses. That was a mercifully brief period, very long ago and there is no need to go into it now. But I like the image of myself as an impaired scroll, my body akin to Torah, even when I won’t be in it anymore because I’ll be dead. And naked. I’ll be washed, all my crevices thoroughly cleansed, rinsed three times and dressed in traditional burial clothing. Often there is music or chanting going on while moving through each stage. That seems lovely.
My eldest daughter has asked to be a part of the ritual, called taharah, or at least be allowed to be a witness to it. My younger is a bit more like her Dad; ritual doesn’t provide a significant source of comfort and she’ll probably demur. But once I’m ceremonially cleansed and wrapped in white linen, the next hurdle presents itself. Am I going into the ground or into the furnace?
When he dies, my daughters have decided to cremate their father as a way of respecting his lifelong nihilism. My parents and younger brother are in lot N row 4 in a large cemetery across the country, but in the intervening decades since their deaths, I’ve never flown east to stand before their markers. Not even once. That is not to say that each of them and our unique relationships remain alive within me. My mother especially. Super close. I hear her, nearly twenty years after her death, more than I even want to. But there is still something comforting about her voice, even though it’s still telling me the same things she told me fifty years ago. Stand up straight. Don’t fill up on bread and water before the main course even arrives. Make me proud. Make yourself proud. Varied bossy stuff like that. The same kind of stuff I still say to my daughters.
A lot of institutionally affiliated Jews have a very hard time, understandably so, with the choice of cremation. I feel a bit uneasy about being burned up, especially given that the Holocaust was a central historic reality of my lifetime. But I do like the idea of ashes, of something tangible left of me. My eldest daughter might want an ornate urn with some me in it. My youngest will probably opt for a teary scattering someplace, preferring framed pictures to an accumulation of leftover me. But there is no place that contains my history, holds memory, and represents a sense of continuity. Thirty-two years ago, when my beloved died, she was cremated and scattered in our back yard, where mourners came with small plants to mix with her ashes in the fertile soil. That felt perfect. Generative. Respectful. We marked both the ending of her, and the beginning of new life. But it’s thirty-two years later and I’m not there anymore. I live in a condominium and am surrounded by an emotionally neutral landscape. There are places that matter to my daughters though, and I suppose they will agree on where to scatter the part of me that is not resting comfortably in a decorative urn.
Sometimes in synagogue during the recitation of the kaddish, a time when mourners say the name of a beloved who has died, I whisper my name -- just to hear how it sounds folded into the names of the dead filling the sanctuary. Because there will be such a day. I am preparing to become an ancestor. And it will be sooner rather than later.
I’m certain my daughters will continue to hear my voice for as long as they can hear. And that’s what I want. To be heard. Maybe deciding to place my remains in a specific spot they can visit will provide them some comfort. Or having an urn and some scattering. Either way is OK, just so long as my voice continues to ring in their ears. Permanently.
Thank you for sharing this, Sandra.
Dear Joyce:
Yes.
It feels good to hear that.
Tough one i know too
Hope you make it those 15 years
Thank you.
At 78 I relate!! So poignant and beautifully expressed.
Thank you. I'm so glad it spoke to you, too,
I love this! You are speaking for me. I'm a bit younger-79--and still able to walk pretty quickly on my own, so don't have the arthritic pains you have or the walker. And I'm not widowed yet. I've always studied up on projects I wanted to begin. I study Torah weekly and have done so since the 1990's, and over the last 15 years or so always with a partner or group. And I've accepted the need to practice and learn how to do most new things I've every done, teaching, telling stories for money (that was my paid work for decades) and teaching poetry writing in schools. And it occurred to me about a month ago, after witnessing many of my brother. and multiple friends become ill and/or die (quickly or after great suffering) that I don't know how to get ready for physical decline and dying. So thank you for this. Thank you especially for describing what you did with the boxes of your photoes and past writings. I've begun doing this in a haphazard way, but what you write gives me courage and therefore hope.
Susan, thank you. As you know, sometimes when you write it seems like you're expressing your own idiosyncratic experience. It feels good to know that telling your truth can reverberate with others.
A remarkable piece of writing! Loved it, related to it, will recommend it to others.
Thank you.