Carpe Diem, Part 1

'Tis better to buy a small bouquet
And give to your friend this very day,
Than a bushel of roses white and red
To lay on his coffin after he's dead.~Author Unknown

Present your family and friends with their eulogies now - they won't be able to hear how much you love them and appreciate them from inside the coffin. ~Anonymous

I was present at the moment of my mother’s and my father’s last breath, and it changed my attitude towards life and those I love. I come from a family of “long-livers.” There was a huge span of time when not one close relative had died, and I had managed to never see a dead body until at the age of forty-nine when I went to a viewing of the mother of my husband’s friend. Still, it is not the same as losing someone close to you. For the longest time I was able to put off thinking about mortality, my own and others’. The evening that my mother died, my first day of retirement, I was 53 years old. My older brother had just died two months before of an invasive cerebral tumor whose name I had barely learned before he died. A glioblastoma multiformae decimated my brother’s brain thirty days after diagnosis. He was gone at 64, a brief life for someone in my family. He died in a nursing facility in the city where I lived, and I felt fortunate to be able to visit him at least three times a day during that time and also fortunate to be able to say goodbye. I was fortunate to have had a close relationship with him. I know that this was because of him. No matter where he had lived, or the breadth of time from the last I had seen him, he always had an authentically warm, loving smile on his face that made me feel that neither time nor space had ever passed between us. For many years previous to this, we had always spoken on the phone frequently, no matter where he was. Then, as he got older, he came to spend more time with me staying at my house, and also with my parents during the coldest part of the Colorado winters. When he was diagnosed, both of my parents were catapulted into their final days. My mother 88, died first, only three months later. Many say she died of a broken heart. I feel that may be true. Just after her passing, my father said, “Sixty-eight years of love and devotion, the end of an era.” And, as is frequently true with a loving couple that has been together many years, my father followed her only 10 months later, dead at the age of 92. It didn’t help when people said to me, “He lived a long life,” because I had had so many relatives that had lived a longer life. My grandfather died at 100, my great grandfather at 108, and a great grand-aunt at 116. I felt cheated, believing that each of them -- my brother, mother and father -- had died too young. At the time I vacillated between being an exhausted automaton and an emotionally numb zombie. I was the only relative in town, so my husband and I had been the only ones there to take care of my brother and my parents. There was a job to be done, so my husband and I had run from one place to another, one hospital to another, maintaining my parents’ ranchette as well as our house -- in a state of emotional numbness, doing what had to be done, only arriving at our house to sleep a few hours before we had to get up again and go to work. It’s unbelievable how fast the dominoes fell. My brother fell in the bathtub, breaking several ribs and was hospitalized, my dad was hospitalized 6 days after my brother was diagnosed, went home two weeks later and relapsed in less than twenty four hours, reentering the hospital. My mom was also hospitalized at this time. My brother died while they both were in the hospital, and we had a memorial for my brother on the day my parents were transferred to a nursing facility. My husband and I then had four weeks to get everything in order for my parents to help them move to the same city as my sister. My mother died two months after that. We had to sell my parents’ house for them, and prepare our own house for sale as my husband and I were retiring and moving to Mexico. We spent a great deal of time in the months that followed at my sister’s house, seeing my mom off, spending time with my dad, and then spending time with my dad in the hospital before we saw him off. I will be forever indebted to my older sister for all the time she put up with us living in her home, and, most of all for her agreeing to look after Mom and Dad in the assisted living apartment close to her house for two months for Mom and for that last year for Dad when we were retiring and moving. It has changed our relationship forever. I feel closer to her than ever before.

It took a while to recover emotionally – I had lost three loved ones in twelve and a half months. Then, finally after my father’s memorial service, I had a moment to begin healing. Before, I had mostly been in a state of numbness and I was unable to reflect on anything. It had all happened so quickly, and I had so much to tend to. Now, a year and a half beyond my father’s death, I’m able to see more clearly. I’ve come to realize how fortunate I had been to know these three family members for so long. Not everyone is as fortunate. I had the good fortune of having 53 years to love my brother, 53 years to love my mother, and 54 years to love my father. Most people do not have all that time to learn to love a close family member. My hand was on my mother’s chest as she drew her last breath, and I stood beside my father as he drew his last breath. I was able to let each of the three know how much I loved them, and to thank them for all they did for me. As hard as it was to say goodbye to each of them, still, it was okay. And I told each of them that very thing – that it was okay for them to go, that I would miss them, and always love them, but that it was okay. In the end, that is what we must all do, for our loved ones and, mostly, for ourselves – tell them we love them, thank them, and release our loved ones from their earthly bindings by letting them know it will be okay. When we are young we believe that we will live forever, feeling invincible. But, it is a certainty that a certain percentage of young people will die before their time. It is also a certainty that we will all die at some age. This means our parents and older siblings will most likely die before us.

“Carpe diem” is a phrase applied to many situations in life. In this case, I would think it means, we never know how long we have to make things right with people. We must seize the day because we never know if this may be the last opportunity to say “I’m sorry” (and mean it.) We never know if this is our last chance to make things right, to speak the truth in a loving way. It’s hard, sometimes, to evaluate if we are estranged from a family member because of ego, or because there is real justification. The unwritten laws of society say that we must honor our parents, be loyal to family. I understand that sometimes this is not possible (or healthy) with “toxic” parents or relatives. In cases of “toxicity,” we’re sometimes made to feel guilty for estrangement, when it’s really healthier to maintain safe and sane boundaries from relatives that are manipulative, full of rage, that are dangerous or unhealthy due to mental instability. But this was not my case. I can remember the tiffs I had with my parents, feeling that they were being unreasonable, or dysfunctional at the time. What is essential, though, is to ask yourself the question, “Can this estrangement be remedied with an apology?” or the question, “Can we agree to disagree here, and still be loving to each other?” By the time my mother and father and brother died, I had worked out everything with them. When I said goodbye to them, I had no regrets, and I was able to let them know that before they died. I was lucky. If you are a child estranged from a parent or parents purely because of ego -- because you need to apologize -- you don’t know how long you will have to make things right. Carpe diem. “When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” (Maurice Maeterlinck) Carpe diem. “The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.” (Harriet Beecher Stowe) Carpe diem. “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” (Rabindranath Tagore)

Carpe diem, before your dominoes fall.