I thought I should write about death.
The trouble is, I'm not entirely sure what to say about it. I have some experience with the subject matter, but I have learned that if experience does indeed bring wisdom, it is sneaky about it. Wisdom does not ring the doorbell. It just slides in quietly, pours itself a cold drink and settles in on the couch.
But once it is there, it is in for the long hall.
The kind of wisdom I am talking about is that which allows us to cope with loss. For myself, wisdom has never been a talkative guest, just a reassuring presence. It has helped me cope with death, which has been on my mind a lot this semester.
In February 2007, my friend Marilyn died. She was 47 years old and she died in hospice of peritoneal mesothelioma, which is the cancer caused by asbestos. She left behind three almost-grown children, an ex-husband and a sad-eyed coon hound named Max.
And me and dozens of other friends.
I can't say Marilyn was one of those people everyone loved. She could be quite prickly at times. I didn't like her myself when we first met seven years earlier. I was just turning 20, she was just turning 40, and we were both changing in strange and unexpected ways, taking our lives in different directions. We were friends.
I miss her.
I was glad she died. We all were.
We were not glad of the cancer, never that. She fought the good fight, but everyone knew, including her, that it was a losing battle. Mesothelioma is terminal. She had time to make peace - or to find a measure of peace, anyway. She was in pain. By the time she died, we were glad for it.
I miss talking to her. She would talk to me about her divorce, and I would talk to her about being chronically single and neither of us would offer advice because we neither had experience of the other.
She's been gone more than a year now.
At the same time I was remembering her passing - February of this year - we were visiting my father's mother in Valentine. She looked like the way Marilyn had looked, thin and frail, shaking and not really there anymore. She too had cancer, a weak heart and suffered from 84 years of life.
A month later she died.
People say "passed away." It is a euphemism for death, as if euphemisms can somehow make it more palatable, make it not hurt.
Grandma Elaine's passing was hard on her family - hard on her surviving siblings, her many older brothers, and hard on my father and his brother. They kept going over the "what ifs" and "if onlys."
"What if she had been diagnosed sooner?
If only she had moved to the assisted living sooner. Maybe she would have liked it and not become depressed."
I listened to them go around and around and saw only the pain they were causing themselves.
While we were there for Grandma Elaine's funeral, we drove over to Hay Springs to see my great-grandmother, "Grandma Pete," on my mother's side. She was 96.
"God took me up on a cloud the other day," she told us. "He showed me what heaven was like. It was so lovely and nice. I'm waiting for him to come take me. It will be wonderful to go home."
A month later, her five children, 17 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren and five great-great grandchildren gathered again in Hay Springs for her funeral. It was something of a party, catching up with relatives, some of whom had never met before and swapping stories. We all agreed we would miss the gold toe socks Grandma Pete always sent for Christmas. We had all spoken to Grandma in the last few weeks and knew she was happy to go.
The one thing I have that helps me cope with death in my life is not faith or family or hope. It is acceptance. Death is. Just like life is. Neither is good nor bad - they just are.
My understanding of acceptance is being in a situation without a desire to change that situation. It gets a bad rap in Western culture. People think it is passive, defeatist.
I have found acceptance to be a positive force in my life, something that demands great courage and personal commitment. It is easy to struggle, to fight against life when it doesn't go our way, to find blame. I have a stubborn nature, as anyone who knows me will attest to, and pushing back against the world comes easy.
Acceptance is hard. I am not a Christian, or a theist of any kind. I do not console myself with faith in an afterlife of any sort. Yet when Grandma Pete said she was going to heaven, I believed her. I accepted that she knew it to be true.
Acceptance is what makes it OK. I accept death. I accept grief, sadness, pain, regret and loss. Those are all OK, too. It means we loved and we cared. What could be more OK than that?
Norman Fischer, a Buddhist teacher, once wrote, "To be alive is to have a terminal illness."
Because I can accept that, I don't have to struggle against it, and as a result can go about living my terminal illness, go about being alive, spending every minute loving all these other people with terminal illnesses.
It's OK.
Monica Sanford is a graduate student in architecture and community and regional planning.
Reach her at monicasanford@dailynebraskan.com.
