Dear Maila,
My mom called me this morning and told me that you had passed away. I felt relief, because I knew someone as vibrant as you hated life stuck in a nursing home and dealing with MS in your late 30's. I felt anger all over again, remembering the last time I saw you a few years ago when I was home--it was Homecoming, and our whole small Midwestern town turned out for the parade of tractors, girl scout troops, veterans, and the high school band. You were in a wheelchair by then, and I could see the injustice and worry in your eyes. I remembered you as a little girl when you were friends with my older sister--you were the weird sorta hippie girl on the block. I remembered you when you were my English teacher in high school, still sorta weird and hippie. You pretended not to notice when Julie and I would take hours to bring back film from the store for journalism class, knowing we were just doing normal high school skipping stuff. Then you came to do my observations when I student taught, five years later. Oddly, that's my job now, that's what I'm doing. I thought about how you did it. You had a walker-type thing by then, and you bravely smiled your crazy smile as we took the elevator up to my classroom, and I didn't know what to say. After I moved away, I'd hear about you from time to time, my mom worked in the same school your daughter goes to. Your husband wasn't the most well-thought-of person in town--you know how small towns are. I wondered how often your financial worries crowded your thoughts, how your family would be ok without you, even as your body continued to imprison you. I hope the last days weren't too hard for you--you never deserved any of this. You were only 39 fucking years old. I wonder what you could have done if MS had never knocked at your door and forced its slow way in. Great things, I know. I got you.
I am so sorry.
Update: Mom's email from today:
I just had to tell you what just happened. I was talking to Maila’s daughter, Roane, and she told me about her mom dying on Tuesday. So I told her that her mom had helped my daughter be a teacher, and Roane said that her mom is still teaching. (Maila had her body donated for research.) She said she was going to Iowa City, and maybe she would help people find a cure for MS.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Seeing with Sylvia
You could say I had a soul sandwich today. I woke up early this morning and half-asleepedly accepted a subbing job at the middle school I used to teach at, pre-graduate school. Then I tried to cancel, realize this would mean I couldn’t sleep and goof off all day, but it was too late. Bah. I need the money anyway, I told myself as I drank my orange juice. Gladys Knight sang Midnight Train to Georgia and Stevie Wonder sang As on Sirius 53--Soultown on the way to school. That seemed to be a good sign.
The morning was uneventful. Benchmark testing. Make kids sit for 4 hours and not talk while they do math. Fucking torture. At lunch I went home, slapped together a sandwich, and sat down to watch Montel. He had Sylvia Brown as a guest today, a gravelly-voiced, psychic toad with bleach blond hair, who looked either bored out of her mind or stoned out of her gourd. I don’t say that in a mean way. Just how she looked. If you don’t know, Sylvia Brown is an internationally known psychic and fraud. I began keeping a tally of her responses to questions from one wavering, wondering, teary guest after another about their recently departed friends and family members.
To add that special Montel spice, there was even a voicemail from beyond the grave and a photograph featuring a translucent figure for old Sylvia to decipher. Other inquiries included “who should I marry?” uttered by a normal-enough-looking young woman. I waited for Sylvia to tell her, “No one, if you go asking questions like that to psychics on lame daytime TV shows,” but instead she paused ever so slightly, then said, “Anthony.” Although it was clear she didn’t know any Anthonys, the lady sat down, satisfied. The frustration of keeping silence for the last four hours slipping away, I marveled at how she lobbed vague, ambiguous answers up to the serious and neurotic questions being asked. Was that my dead husband who left that voicemail? Yes. Are my dead parents disappointed in me? No. What should I do with my life? Medicine. What college should I go do? It doesn’t really matter, you’ll do well wherever. Am I going to have any more children? A boy. Is my dead mother-in-law watching over my child? Yes. Sylvia was on a goddamn roll, nonchalantly discussing the why’s and how’s of the afterlife, the difference between ghosts and spirits, and the difficulty of crossing over. It was like she had, floating somewhere above her head and whispering in her ear, every dead person related to an audience member, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There wasn’t even an interested hum when a Mexican lady stood up and said her son had been killed 2 weeks ago and she didn’t know who murdered him. Sylvia said he had been out of his mind when it happened and for Mom to not worry about it. They lapped up each answer, nodding and wiping away tears as if some real answers had been given. Even when Sylvia interrupted a grieving widow to ask abruptly, “Who’s Reba?” (McIntyre? I thought), who stared blankly in response, no one questioned that she was on the up-and-up. Insecurity must be stronger than common sense, I guess—the need to know must be satisfied, even if it’s with trite, pithy pronouncements that could apply to anybody.
The devil you say? See you yourself:
I’m not saying I don’t believe in “that stuff,” I think it’s sort of fascinating—the unanswered questions about life and death, the questions that are unanswerable in the here and now. I read my horoscope on occasion. I don’t know how people know the things they know sometimes. One weekend, I asked David what time we were leaving for the beach, although he hadn’t said anything yet about the plan for some friends to go to the coast. I swear sometimes I feel it when my phone is about to ring, it feels like a little whoosh of energy about two seconds before someone calls. I don’t know what that means.
They call people like Sylvia “seers,” and I don’t mean to disrespect them—seers were common in many cultures and eras and only recently have had to compete with science and the age of reason. I’m sure some of them aren’t even frauds. But here’s what threw me for a loop: returning to school, the benchmark testing was over and I was to read The Lightning Thief with the class (who weren’t exactly calm after hours of testing). See for yourself:
(from Chapter 19)
Imagine the largest concert crowd you’ve ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.
Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beachball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has just happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.
Annabeth, Grover, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghosts. I couldn’t help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can’t understand them, they frown and move away.
The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.
We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:
JUDGEMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!
The morning was uneventful. Benchmark testing. Make kids sit for 4 hours and not talk while they do math. Fucking torture. At lunch I went home, slapped together a sandwich, and sat down to watch Montel. He had Sylvia Brown as a guest today, a gravelly-voiced, psychic toad with bleach blond hair, who looked either bored out of her mind or stoned out of her gourd. I don’t say that in a mean way. Just how she looked. If you don’t know, Sylvia Brown is an internationally known psychic and fraud. I began keeping a tally of her responses to questions from one wavering, wondering, teary guest after another about their recently departed friends and family members.
To add that special Montel spice, there was even a voicemail from beyond the grave and a photograph featuring a translucent figure for old Sylvia to decipher. Other inquiries included “who should I marry?” uttered by a normal-enough-looking young woman. I waited for Sylvia to tell her, “No one, if you go asking questions like that to psychics on lame daytime TV shows,” but instead she paused ever so slightly, then said, “Anthony.” Although it was clear she didn’t know any Anthonys, the lady sat down, satisfied. The frustration of keeping silence for the last four hours slipping away, I marveled at how she lobbed vague, ambiguous answers up to the serious and neurotic questions being asked. Was that my dead husband who left that voicemail? Yes. Are my dead parents disappointed in me? No. What should I do with my life? Medicine. What college should I go do? It doesn’t really matter, you’ll do well wherever. Am I going to have any more children? A boy. Is my dead mother-in-law watching over my child? Yes. Sylvia was on a goddamn roll, nonchalantly discussing the why’s and how’s of the afterlife, the difference between ghosts and spirits, and the difficulty of crossing over. It was like she had, floating somewhere above her head and whispering in her ear, every dead person related to an audience member, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There wasn’t even an interested hum when a Mexican lady stood up and said her son had been killed 2 weeks ago and she didn’t know who murdered him. Sylvia said he had been out of his mind when it happened and for Mom to not worry about it. They lapped up each answer, nodding and wiping away tears as if some real answers had been given. Even when Sylvia interrupted a grieving widow to ask abruptly, “Who’s Reba?” (McIntyre? I thought), who stared blankly in response, no one questioned that she was on the up-and-up. Insecurity must be stronger than common sense, I guess—the need to know must be satisfied, even if it’s with trite, pithy pronouncements that could apply to anybody.
The devil you say? See you yourself:
I’m not saying I don’t believe in “that stuff,” I think it’s sort of fascinating—the unanswered questions about life and death, the questions that are unanswerable in the here and now. I read my horoscope on occasion. I don’t know how people know the things they know sometimes. One weekend, I asked David what time we were leaving for the beach, although he hadn’t said anything yet about the plan for some friends to go to the coast. I swear sometimes I feel it when my phone is about to ring, it feels like a little whoosh of energy about two seconds before someone calls. I don’t know what that means.
They call people like Sylvia “seers,” and I don’t mean to disrespect them—seers were common in many cultures and eras and only recently have had to compete with science and the age of reason. I’m sure some of them aren’t even frauds. But here’s what threw me for a loop: returning to school, the benchmark testing was over and I was to read The Lightning Thief with the class (who weren’t exactly calm after hours of testing). See for yourself:
(from Chapter 19)
Imagine the largest concert crowd you’ve ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.
Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beachball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has just happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.
Annabeth, Grover, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghosts. I couldn’t help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can’t understand them, they frown and move away.
The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.
We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:
JUDGEMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
in absentia
I've never been emo or goth, but I have always had what I consider to be a healthy fascination with death. I'm hooked on Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State. It worries my mom. I won't touch a ouiji board, but the question of what happens to us, really, when we die, and even what dying itself is, is very interesting to me. Religion seems wholely based on living so that you don't go to hell. A great uncle of mine died at age 16 because of a freak and mysterious hunting accident, and said "it's so beautiful," looking around before he breathed his last. As I get older, it becomes clearer that birth and death are the truly uncontrollable things we go through--maybe that's why they are so strange. I read somewhere that the body is 3/4ths of an ounce lighter upon death--soulweight. The only thing that really distinguishes death from life, an element totally immeasurable and inescapable.
This was all weighing heavily on my mind when I took a walk through the cemetery (morbid? maybe), bored out of my skull after being home for nearly a week. The twilight of 4:30 and the monstrous hill where our Fulton dead rest, some stones hundreds of years old, became beautiful to me. I read the inscriptions, the only stories left--the oldest stones didn't even have names, just "mother," "father." The important things, birth date and departure date. My cousin had a baby Christmas day. I think about that girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash. I think about the hundreds and thousands of people killed daily, mere blips in the newspaper, dead because of the soullessness of others. I don't necessarily see death as something to be afraid of--I think reincarnation...yeah, maybe reincarnation makes sense.
Sorry to be so heavy. Still figuring this one out.
Pictures. The one is my uncle's grave, born and dead on the same day.
This was all weighing heavily on my mind when I took a walk through the cemetery (morbid? maybe), bored out of my skull after being home for nearly a week. The twilight of 4:30 and the monstrous hill where our Fulton dead rest, some stones hundreds of years old, became beautiful to me. I read the inscriptions, the only stories left--the oldest stones didn't even have names, just "mother," "father." The important things, birth date and departure date. My cousin had a baby Christmas day. I think about that girl, the sole survivor of a plane crash. I think about the hundreds and thousands of people killed daily, mere blips in the newspaper, dead because of the soullessness of others. I don't necessarily see death as something to be afraid of--I think reincarnation...yeah, maybe reincarnation makes sense.
Sorry to be so heavy. Still figuring this one out.
Pictures. The one is my uncle's grave, born and dead on the same day.
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