Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

I was reading a light-hearted book yesterday that had some silly characters opening a disinterred casket, which (surprise!) didn’t have the body in it.  It sent me off into a not so light-hearted memory of Jeanie’s funeral. 

I had forgotten, until the phrase “closed casket” showed up in this book, how excruciating it was to watch the casket wheeled into the room from the left for the service, and then at the close of the service, wheeled out of the room to the right.  It was gravely poetic, and unbearably poignant, almost cruel, to have the finality of her passage out of our lives enacted by that slow, gentle movement in from the left, and out to the right.  Here:  We bring her to you one last time, but we’ve taken her one more step away from you because now we’ve closed the casket so you can’t see her, ever again.  You can have her with you a little while longer, for these few minutes of her funeral.  And then we are taking her away forever. 

She was 57.  Her funeral was also the last time I saw my other remaining sister, Martha, until she herself was very close to death, a year and a half later, at age 60.  Lois had already died 13 years earlier, at age 39.  Very soon, if nothing happens to me, I will be older than all three of them ever got to be.  This is probably why I live without the comfortable expectation that I have years of life ahead of me, even though I am only 58.  Statistics don’t matter; the people I am most identified with died by the time they were around my age.  Right about now is the end of the line. 

It’s a strange way to live.  The gift in it is the immediacy of each moment and the aliveness I feel; the way I cherish my ordinary experiences, which I’ve written about in previous posts.  What I struggle with is the continuous sense of uncertainty about my future.  That is, of course, the reality for all of us, but it’s concretely real for me in a way that it would not be if my sisters were still alive. 

What would that be like, to have them all alive?  My life would have another dimension to it – the “Sisters” dimension that includes their stories, our relationships, childhood memories, and so much more.  I would feel more in the middle of living, instead of feeling like I am at the teetering edge of life all the time, where anything can happen, and death is always at the door.  Having my sisters still around would buffer me.  I’m living a full, normal life, but there’s a chasm right over there, that appeared rather suddenly when the last one died.  The finality of the end of their personal stories is what has left me stranded and unprotected.  I realize the feeling of buffering and protection is an illusion, but I would love to be able to fall happily into that illusion.

All this reflection on how their early deaths have increased my awareness of the uncertainty of my life.  But what I really want to say is this:  I miss Lois.  I miss Jeanie.  I miss Martha.  Goddamn it.