Death March

“I want to vanish,
This is my fondest wish” (Elvis Costello, “I want to vanish”)

There’s a funeral wake next door. My childhood friend’s mother, all of 81, performs yet another biological imperative. Frequenting the hospital in the last 2 months, her organs shut down one by one, signing off cell after cell.

There is nothing certain in this life except death, probably the only lesson in Biology that endures. Everything that breathes, hops, and gallops runs into fatigue and ultimately stops, terminates, ends. This is the tyranny of nature without the tiniest, slimmest window of escape for its stewards.

I feast on gangster movies where the sanctity of life is an outrage. To paraphrase the infamous Oliver North of the equally infamous Contra-scandal, I would stand on my head or get a lobotomy just to be part of Tony Soprano’s crew, my favorite fictional Mafioso. I can’t keep tabs on the casualties in Scorsese’s or Tarantino’s violence-fest.

Death has somehow become a gargantuan fiction that when it does happen, specially to someone close or someone you know, this most ancient and natural biological destiny still manages to astound, affect, numb.

I lost my own mother 7 months ago so the faint scent of death still teases. Of course, you try to be philosophical and courageous about it but as my friend Ali perceptively says, “no one is too old to lose a parent.”

Sad but true.