(A) Void

Some of the beautiful flowers near my borther's site

     There's a song by the late Olivia Newton John which went: Don't worry about my recovery...you won't recover me.  As many of you likely already know, even with documents and such in place (trusts, wills, lists at home, joint ownership, etc.), the actual job of getting a person "removed" from data storage of any sort can be overwhelming once you dive into the waters.  A sibling such as my brother made the task much easier for me back when my mother passed away, he being that second set of eyes, that second person to help with decisions about what to keep and what to discard, and the order in which to do so: notify Social Security, government retirements, bank accounts, credit cards, and on and on.  In today's world of DocuSign-ing documents and authorizations, scammers and identity thieves have started to use artificial intelligence to mimic voices and alter photos, making navigating through the process more difficult since your brain is already muddled with the shock and puzzlement of your spouse or parent or close friend passing unexpectedly. a Bodmin moor of your mind where you feel trapped and so desperate to escape.  For me, that's when I began to see things...

     First off, what I was "seeing" wasn't hallucinations or ghosts or any of that sort of thing.  Rather, it was articles or shows or song lyrics that all seemed to take on a different hue: the new book from the London Review that was a collection of "writing about siblings;" the piece in Discover that was titled: ...The Research That's Redefining Death; the piece in The Week about "turning bodies into soil;" the piece in LRB about poet Diane Suess that what fascinated her "was not the soul gone missing, but the body left behind;" the other article in Discover that talked about the polyamines in our bodies (Within our bodies, polyamines are ubiquitous, involved in almost all cellular processes, including growth and differentiation.  Some research has linked their dysregulation to a heightened risk of cancer.  Another study suggests that when polyamines are functioning normally, they may protect people from neurological disorders like epilepsy and mental illness.  But if there aren’t enough of them, or they aren’t functioning normally, the risk of both increases...what??.); and another piece in the same magazine that started with this: His sickly skin color, poor appetite and significant weight loss all screamed pancreatic cancer.  What else could it be?

The wild swings in my brother's blood pressure

     I think such "sightings" are common when major events happen in one's life, your focus seems to shift and you notice things more.  Have a baby and suddenly baby items and babies themselves appear everywhere; your knee begins acting up and suddenly you find neighbors and friends are telling you about their knee replacements.  Still, I can't imagine relating to that feeling of peering out of the window of the train as it rounds the bend and seeing that the station where I get off is just ahead.  It's the train ride of life, end of the line, and something whicht we all will eventually face.  But when you begin to hear your name called as "next," it's that cold-water reality rudely snapping you out of the fantasy that your "time" was still far down the toad.  As Kermit sang: Have you been half asleep, and have you heard voices?  I've heard them calling my name.  Jane Miller wrote in the LRB: I think quite a lot about dying and death, but I have very little to report on the subject, or at least nothing that my age could be said to have revealed to me.  I find it impossible to believe that I will be dead fairly soon and not there to comment on the fact.  That’s not because I fear it, but because I simply can’t imagine the world I know without me in it.  Author Miller is 90.

    The process of "eliminating" our physical selves is difficult to comprehend, for what will happen to our thoughts, our feelings, our loves and accomplishments?  As the London Review wrote: What is a coffin for?  To give the living the comforting fiction of the dead being 'laid to rest'.  To contain.  To prevent odour, to forestall decomposition, entropy.  To make the encounter between the living and the dead tolerable, legible -- to do so by keeping the dead from view.  Of course, burials as such are in steep decline, from 90% in 1980 to just 37% a few years ago.  My brother was part of that decline since he was cremated and not buried, a trend increasing so much that the vaporized mercury in our fillings now account for 16% of all the toxic mercury being sent in the air, according to the UN.  It's a startling fact to have to ask yourself, just how many people are dying?  In Hawaii, the wait for a cremation was 2 weeks, the wait to schedule a service even longer; "official" death certificates (both doctor and the state medical examiner have to sign off) was 8 weeks out.  Eight weeks!  And none of this was cheap (the lowest price we found for a simple, basic cremation --picking up the body, cremating it, and presenting the ashes back to you in a plastic container-- was nearly $1200).  When my sister-in-law requested a Saturday service so that more of the family could attend, the fee was an additional $1200 (we didn't dare ask about what a Sunday service would cost)...keep in mind that this was to be a simple service, a few chairs, a canopy, and an allotted time of 45 minutes; booking the chapel or asking for more than the 12 chairs would cost extra.

     When WIRED asked Margaret Atwood "That reminds me of one of the first questions I was going to ask you," she quickly interrupted: What's it like to be really, really old?  No, replied the interviewer, but Atwood continued: It's more fun than you think.  As long as you're not dying or having dementia, you have a lot less to lose.  You can color a lot further outside the lines, especially compared to young people these days, in an age of anxiety.  People are afraid of being beaten up on social media.  They haven't been hardened in the fire.  If you have been hardened, you can just let it rip.  The question for me, as I helped clear out a few books and such from my brother's place, was how much do we know a person, even someone quite close to us.  "What's my favorite song?" my wife asked (I guessed incorrectly and she has still never told me).  I bring that up because one of the recorded CDs in my brother's vast pile (most, like mine, long past their days of being played over and over) was one titled  "auntie's songs."  She was quite the singer, we were told, winning several local contests, and yet we had never heard her sing.  I put on the disc (there were only two songs) and listened to the Brother Iz version of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  Originally written as a poem by Jane Taylor, it went: As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveler in the dark, Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.  I didn't know my brother's favorite song, only that I found that the majority of his discs were classical...who knew?  In all my years, we had never talked about that, nor had I ever heard him playing such music.  Kermit's song posed another question: Who said that every wish would be heard and answered when wished on the morning star?  Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it; look what it's done so far.

     What I will miss with my brother will be our long talks, rambling conversations that went on for hours, interrupted only with laughter as we refined and polished our brotherly humor.  Here's how author Maureen Stanton put it in The Sun when she had such talks with her mother: She starts up gently, like the Amazon River, whose source in the Andes is not a spring, but clouds.  Thoughts and observations solidify and trickle down; she meanders, exploring tributaries that divide and branch into smaller story-streams.  Then she backpaddles upstream to the main plot line, only to get pulled by a side current into a mangrove swamp, a tangled alleyway of thought.   And if I didn't know my brother's music, how could I pretend to know his thoughts in those final minutes and hours, a question that haunted me after seeing this in Discover about two patients who were monitored in their final moments: Gamma waves surged in the brain and passed through an important “hot zone” on the back of the brain, the junction of the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes.  The temporo-parieto-occipital junction is believed to play a role in several modes of consciousness, including waking, dreaming and psychedelic states. Could it also light up during so-called NDEs,* which can be intensely spiritual in nature?

     It's back to life's "game" of letting you in on a secret, telling you what happens in the end; of course you can't tell anyone.  Said the review about poet Diane Suess: This book is a response to death, a way of living in knowledge of death’s privations, and in recognition, too, of the future that the death of everyone now alive will bring.  ‘I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening,’ the final sonnet in the book begins.  ‘I want enough time to say oh so this is how I’ll go and smirk at that last rhyme.’  I suppose the rhyme she has in mind here is the one between ‘oh’ and ‘go’.  But that rhyme is embedded within another, between ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’.  What Seuss is hoping for is an extended enough death to allow for a witty recognition of the shape it is imposing on the life it ends.  Beyond that, though, what she wants is enough life to make her death into a kind of ‘last rhyme’, a sound that radiates both into the past and into the future, where it might make contact with your body, or mine.

The resting spot of Brother Iz

     The site where my brother's ashes will rest are quite near those of Brother Iz.  His resting plaque is much larger, but I had a chance to read what must have been Iz's thoughts: Facing future I see hope, hope that we will survive, hope that we will prosper, hope that once again we will reap the blessings of this magical land, for without hope I cannot live.  Remember the past, but do not dwell there.  Face the future.  Here all our hopes stand.  So, now there's a void for me, a gouge in my being that will likely heal at some point for I am not alone in losing someone close.  The "voids" in space can be equally massive,  more than we can imagine (they are thought to make up a large chunk of the universe), emptiness and vast distances in between, distances we simply are unable to comprehend; indeed our Milky Way galaxy is thought to be in such a void (if you need a comparison, watch this short video about just how large such voids are).  But the void in our imaginations, and our hearts, and our lives, can be equally large.  

     Brother Iz was famous for his version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow (admittedly, we prefer the rendition by Eva Cassidy, perhaps because she knew that her cancer was not responding to treatment; she died at 33).  That said, the Kermit song asked: Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and what's on the other side.  Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide.  At the end, my eulogy to my brother said: I do believe that Bob wouldn't want us to consider this a goodbye to him, but rather a brief interlude, that we should instead say "until we meet again."  He was a gift we all had for far too short a time...let us treasure the times we knew and spent with him.  Looking back on those words, I think we should do that with all those we love, even ourselves...treasure the times we have now.  I have yet to have a dream of my brother, but one very vivid dream had me looking at two small ceramic dishes, each open and neatly filled wtth ashes.  I don't remember anything before or after the dream, only that during that moment a voice in my dream told me, "Now you are beginning to understand."

 

*Near-death experiences...