Death is the least understood part of life. We know it's inevitable, but we're seldom prepared for it.
My mother, however, was. She died recently, during an operation intended to prolong her life.
She was 82, stylish, vivacious and mentally adept. She lived alone, as she had since the death of my father in May. But she felt herself slipping, she told me. Although my sister and I had made arrangements for mom to move into a nursing home to recover from her operation and then into a high-end assisted living facility, and she enthusiastically endorsed all our plans, she was never really comfortable with them. She would prefer, she said with her characteristic brutal honesty, to die on the operating table; to sleep and never wake.
And so she did.
My family took the news of her death in stride. We've always been pragmatic about death, at least when it comes in what we consider to be its proper time and manner. My mother obviously felt that her proper time had come and she died in a manner that caused her friends and family the least amount of trouble. That was mom.
I am able to accept her loss without overwhelming grief because it follows the natural order of life as I understand it and expect it to be. Tragedy to me is a death that is out of place or time. When I was a child, the unexpected death of someone I knew would have been traumatic because of its incomprehensible randomness; as I grew older, the deaths of school friends in car crashes or farm accidents shocked me for the same reason. After that, it disturbed me when someone near my own age died because it didn't seem that his time — or, by implication, mine — should be at hand.
Now that I am a husband and a parent, the death of my wife or one of my sons is what I fear most. The unnaturalness of the death of a child is especially cruel and goes against all reason; parents should depart this life before their children. And in our household, my wife is the foundation on which our family rests, which is why I should go before she does. It's a matter of practicality as well as organization.
But I view my mother's death as part of an orderly process and, because she was able to enjoy living right up to the time she died, almost a blessing. She did not descend into the mental, physical or financial deterioration that rob so many people of their dignity. She wasn't warehoused in a soulless nursing home or left to wallow in despair over a fate she didn't deserve, and she didn't outlive her children.
I always wanted what was best for my mother and I can accept that what she felt was best for herself — and everyone else — was to choose, in her own way, when she would die. I know that she lived for as long as she wanted to and I believe that she willed herself into the afterlife. Because of that, I regard her death as a decision, a very personal one that she made because she felt the time was right.
It's a choice we should all be lucky enough to have.
Bill Federman is a Times Union editor. His email address is bfederman@timesunion.com.
