This will sound strange, but I found comfort last week in the death of actress Natasha Richardson because she died of a close head trauma just like my Mom did. Ms. Richardson was taking taking beginner ski lessons and fell on the bunny hill. My Mom was getting out of a friend's car to go to her job at Sally’s Beauty Supply at a strip mall in my hometown eight years ago. Neither activity is fraught with life-threatening risk, but both women were dealt a fatal blow, suddenly, without warning. "Life changes. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends" is what Joan Didion said about how suddenly death can come to someone we love in The Year of Magical Thinking
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The comfort to me is that someone else died from a closed head injury. After my Mom died, over and over I kept hearing stories about people who survived closed head injuries. I know it can't be true, but they all seemed to survive and do well. The news anchor Bob Woodruff was badly injury in Iraq by a roadside bomb explosion, but after a lengthy rehab he eventually recovered enough to return to work for ABC. My Mom lived three days after her accident, and then I had to have the life support removed that was keeping her alive. Ms. Richardson went from a local hospital near the ski resort to Montreal and on to New York in about a single day, a journey of a thousand miles to the finest doctors and medical staff one could hope for. But she still didn't make it. Sometimes the blow, as unlikely as it may come, is fatal. Happily ever after fails. The miracle never materializes. The mountain is not removed. The rest are left to retrace their steps and figure out what they could have done differently to have changed the outcome. I've done this many times. For some reason, the burden seems a little lighter now that I finally found someone else who lost a similar battle. I understand how it feels, the shock, the guilt, the sorrow, the lunging, lurching grief process that is unpredictable and unending for those left behind. Some people die unelegantly, clumsily. My Mom was one of them. Eight years later, I still remember the gray drizzle of that day like it was yesterday. I still remember.
Today is one of those gray days, chilly and cold. A day where every hurt aches a little more because it is so like the other day, the bad one. I don't consciously choose to think about the day my Mom died. I just happens. It comes over me. Today, I was in the cafeteria at work on a break. I was looking through the window at the drizzle outside, my back to the TV with CNN on. I was trying to block out the noise and journal my thoughts on a steno pad. I usually ignore the banality of daytime CNN, but today I couldn't resist turning around to see the story about Ms. Richardson. You expect someone who falls down taking beginner ski lessons to live. You expect your mother to die of cancer or old age, something rational. Death is supposed to be rational; we cannot go on here forever. Death is the most rational thing in the world, but it still takes you by surprise when you get a call that your mother, who took time to send you a birthday card that is still unopened four days after your birthday, is critical and on her way to St. Louis in an ambulance. Why? Because she was accidentally knocked down by the car door as she was getting out to go to work when the driver bumped the car in reverse accidentally reaching out to pat my Mom on the arm while saying bye. How ridiculous! How unlikely! But soon, you start to realize that your last goodbye was unplanned. No one told you it could ever end this way, and if they had you would have said it was the cruelest thing in the world. Then it does happen, and you repeat it--still the cruelest thing in the world, but now it is no longer in the subjunctive, the tense of uncertainty or doubt: "If something should ever happen." It is now present tense: "something did happen."
"It's bad," my father-in-law said when he finally got through to tell me the news. I had been at a local library drafting an introduction to a Sunday School lesson on the book of Job when he was trying to contact me and couldn’t. I didn't have a cell phone eight years ago. I finally drove back to work through the gray September 26 drizzle to be greeted by a co-worker who gave me the news. One minute I was writing about Job. An hour later I was Job.
I took Greek in seminary and learned about the aorist tense. My professor said the aorist referred to a past event that had continuing results, and there were many theological examples of how this worked. I never really thought about it in the rest of my non-religious life, but now eight years after my Mom's death, the aorist tense is unrelenting on days like this. "Past event with continuing results" I keep hearing in my head today. Mostly, my Mom's death is in the past tense, but sometimes on a gray, drizzly day, the aorist tense returns and I keep feeling it, the “continuing results.” Writing about it helps, but I never know whether to use the past or present tense. Usually I use both. If I had the aorist tense in English right now, I would use it.
.The comfort to me is that someone else died from a closed head injury. After my Mom died, over and over I kept hearing stories about people who survived closed head injuries. I know it can't be true, but they all seemed to survive and do well. The news anchor Bob Woodruff was badly injury in Iraq by a roadside bomb explosion, but after a lengthy rehab he eventually recovered enough to return to work for ABC. My Mom lived three days after her accident, and then I had to have the life support removed that was keeping her alive. Ms. Richardson went from a local hospital near the ski resort to Montreal and on to New York in about a single day, a journey of a thousand miles to the finest doctors and medical staff one could hope for. But she still didn't make it. Sometimes the blow, as unlikely as it may come, is fatal. Happily ever after fails. The miracle never materializes. The mountain is not removed. The rest are left to retrace their steps and figure out what they could have done differently to have changed the outcome. I've done this many times. For some reason, the burden seems a little lighter now that I finally found someone else who lost a similar battle. I understand how it feels, the shock, the guilt, the sorrow, the lunging, lurching grief process that is unpredictable and unending for those left behind. Some people die unelegantly, clumsily. My Mom was one of them. Eight years later, I still remember the gray drizzle of that day like it was yesterday. I still remember.
Today is one of those gray days, chilly and cold. A day where every hurt aches a little more because it is so like the other day, the bad one. I don't consciously choose to think about the day my Mom died. I just happens. It comes over me. Today, I was in the cafeteria at work on a break. I was looking through the window at the drizzle outside, my back to the TV with CNN on. I was trying to block out the noise and journal my thoughts on a steno pad. I usually ignore the banality of daytime CNN, but today I couldn't resist turning around to see the story about Ms. Richardson. You expect someone who falls down taking beginner ski lessons to live. You expect your mother to die of cancer or old age, something rational. Death is supposed to be rational; we cannot go on here forever. Death is the most rational thing in the world, but it still takes you by surprise when you get a call that your mother, who took time to send you a birthday card that is still unopened four days after your birthday, is critical and on her way to St. Louis in an ambulance. Why? Because she was accidentally knocked down by the car door as she was getting out to go to work when the driver bumped the car in reverse accidentally reaching out to pat my Mom on the arm while saying bye. How ridiculous! How unlikely! But soon, you start to realize that your last goodbye was unplanned. No one told you it could ever end this way, and if they had you would have said it was the cruelest thing in the world. Then it does happen, and you repeat it--still the cruelest thing in the world, but now it is no longer in the subjunctive, the tense of uncertainty or doubt: "If something should ever happen." It is now present tense: "something did happen."
"It's bad," my father-in-law said when he finally got through to tell me the news. I had been at a local library drafting an introduction to a Sunday School lesson on the book of Job when he was trying to contact me and couldn’t. I didn't have a cell phone eight years ago. I finally drove back to work through the gray September 26 drizzle to be greeted by a co-worker who gave me the news. One minute I was writing about Job. An hour later I was Job.
I took Greek in seminary and learned about the aorist tense. My professor said the aorist referred to a past event that had continuing results, and there were many theological examples of how this worked. I never really thought about it in the rest of my non-religious life, but now eight years after my Mom's death, the aorist tense is unrelenting on days like this. "Past event with continuing results" I keep hearing in my head today. Mostly, my Mom's death is in the past tense, but sometimes on a gray, drizzly day, the aorist tense returns and I keep feeling it, the “continuing results.” Writing about it helps, but I never know whether to use the past or present tense. Usually I use both. If I had the aorist tense in English right now, I would use it.