Departures and disappearances

I'd sworn I would keep it light. Give all (2 0r 3) of you a break. Give myself a break for that matter... but I'm thinking about choice. Specifically, choosing to stay in the world or leave. And how we do either. Whether we're allowed to choose the latter.

On the weekend, I had a long talk with a friend who is experiencing escalating symptoms of serious illness. He's scared - not so much about whether he lives, but about how he lives for whatever time he's got. He wants to decide for himself whether to begin another round of tests and doctors. The options he's been given, if things progress as they've predicated, don't amount to his idea of a satisfactory life.

And today, at 5:00 a.m. I'm up and listening to the news and this piece about a disappearance aired on CBC morning news. On Saturday, A fit, healthy 70 year old woman, who'd been on the job for 18 years, was reported missing from her post at an Athabaska fire lookout tower. Gone from her cabin are pillows, a sheet and a duvet - and her father's watch. The watch is only, CBC reported this morning, of sentimental value.

Police are treating the disappearance as "suspicious," but when I heard the story I immediately thought of the lyrics to David Bowie's, "Space Oddity."

Though I'm past
one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows
which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much
she knows

The radio reporter said "it's so quiet there, you can hear a Raven's wing's beat." And I wondered if so much solitary time in deep woods has the same effect as being in space. I wondered, in fact, if she had simply walked away into the woods. Cut the line to the spaceship.
I know that's crazy.

Perhaps it resulted from the weekend conversation and hearing another story aired during the same five minute news break, launching further speculation about choices. This story concerned a murder/suicide that I have trouble thinking of as either "murder" or "suicide," at least in the sense we usually use the words. A 77 year old man visited his 80 year old wife, who was in her nursing home. They had just been told she was to ill to stay and she was to be transferred to a long-term care facility.

He visits, is friendly with the nurses as usual, loving and affectionate to his wife, as usual. When the nurse leaves, he shoots her and himself. Newspapers are using the word, "violent" to describe the deaths.

I cried when my father finally went to "long-term care." When I first saw the place, I made it to the elevator before I started sobbing, but only barely. It was not a bad "home" as these places go. But it was what it was.

He missed his jeans (too difficult for the nurses to help him dress). He missed having money of his own (it was always stolen). His art supplies were locked in the closet and he had to have permission to paint. He missed dignity and self-sufficiency. The staff were good to him - but there were too few, with too little time. It was a place where people waited to die. And so he did, very shortly, as I knew he would as soon as he went there.

While he was there, I kept remembering that years before, when my grandmother went into a nursing home, after he visited he said to me, "Please. If I ever get that way, shoot me."

I feel great tenderness towards that elderly couple. I don't believe they chose to die violently. I think they were cornered - and it just wasn't worth it anymore. I think they were brave. It was the only way they could decide for themselves without the well-intentioned interference of other people.

As far as Stephanie Stewart goes...I hope that she's safe and at peace...somewhere where it's quiet enough to hear the beat of a bird's wings. Frail as the chances are, I hope she chose.

Forgive me if this seems depressing. I don't find it so. For me it breaks through to the "genuine heart of sadness" Pema Chodron speaks of...and that is a very different thing. It cracks the shell of separateness. That kind of sadness is worthwhile, shared and human - a reminder of how paradoxically fragile and eternal we all are. It softens instead of hardening.

Perhaps I'll have something lighter for you by the long weekend. Meanwhile, I send you my love.

LJ