are lovely, mostly. Heartfelt and kind and honestly, the specifics of what is written seem to matter far less than the fact that it was written, and that it was shared, with love.
Really the only thing that people say that isn’t landing well (and its ok if you’ve ever said this, of course, or felt it, I still understand it all with love) is any mention of how unfair her death is. Unfair in that it was her, specifically: someone who took care of her body so well for so long, who did so much good in the world, loved and was loved by so many people. Unfair in that it was too soon, for her and for us.
I feel it as unfair sometimes too, of course I do. But the comment still isn’t landing well because the next question becomes: what death is fair? Particularly after this year of massive, massive loss, is that death over there of that other person’s beloved fair? Can I both insist that every person is beloved and still name any death as fair?
It’s a false question, it must be. Fairness and death, deserving and death, should never be linked. This culture (the over culture, the one we can’t escape from completely no matter how poorly it serves us) assumes that they are, I think. It certainly enshrines that they’re linked in its systems. It reenforces it constantly in how we respond to those who have caused harm: punishment, relentless punishment, which is to say prolonged or immediate death. Our medical system does its part to link them too: it tells us health is about choice, and that to be healthy is to be good. I could tell a million and one stories to disprove that, but here is my most personal: Mom, whose doctors always said she was so good, who ate nourishing food and moved her body and did all the right things, who smoked for maybe a year out of her life out of 64, still had some cells in her lungs that decided to start mutating and grew cancerous. So of course, health ≠ choice. And, anyway: would her death have been fair, deserved somehow, if she has smoked the way her dad did? Was his death (of a stroke in the end too, layered by the long shadow of tobacco and alcohol addiction) then fair and right, in contrast?
There can be tragedy in death, yes, and there’s certainly injustice. There can be deep injustice and tragedy and heartbreak and all the other things that are at the core of what people mean when they say any death is ‘unfair,’ I think. But I don’t believe there can be any fairness, one way or the other.
The distinctions between these framing might seem small but I do feel they matter, knowing both how they live in our systems and how they live in us.
Which is to say, really: I can’t bare the feeling that my mom’s death was unfair. It gets it the way of my ability to love her and this world she loved as completely as I need to now, to keep going now. It twists the loving connections I need hang on to (connections with her friends and elders in my life, at a start) into toxic comparisons, a game of how much more I want my mom here with us than any other person (which I can’t help but feel I do, in moments, just as much as I feel the wrongness of that idea as soon as I land in it). If I get stuck in unfairness I miss the life that is left, and the way Mom still fills it with love and blessings and wisdom, actively, right now.
And even if that weren’t all true, I need to unpair fairness and death, deserving and death, because I think my mom shed that framing a long time ago. (The first death she knew was her older sister’s when she was just eight. If you’re stuck of questions of fairness after something so close and so painful, how could you ever move forward?)
When her cancer diagnosis came in with resounding shock she told us she was sorry (sorry to be the barer of bad news, sorry to put us all through something so hard). We chided her for it a bit — this was happening to her, not us, after all — but I think now it may have been her way of not wasting time in the unfairness of it. She accepted its reality and moved forward as best she could, with all the grace and resolve that she could. That’s not at all to say that she accepted it as some kind of death sentence (it wasn’t, we thought); she simply didn’t get caught in anger that this was her the path in front of her, despite all the ways she had been so good. She took care of her body as well as she could in life because all the wellness that was possible enriched the life she was living, not because she was obsessed with avoiding death. She was as good as she was in life because she knew that rich relationships and connections and work make a good life, a life that anyone would be grateful to have lived, even if (when) it’s cut short before you’re ready.
I can’t bare to think Mom’s death was unfair because the thought leaves me with pain and anger where I want and need there to only be love. I want and need there only to be the complete, complete love that I felt and knew through her final moments, when I would not ever have asked her to hang on past what her body was able to bare. That is: love and overwhelming gratitude to have the gift of this life, this specific life in which she was (is) our mom, even if her early death had to be part of that life.
So it wasn’t unfair, you see. It wasn’t unfair because we still got her, and we belong to each other both in life and in death (the belonging looks different in death but it is still there, I’m sure of it). And I’ll take on the enormous pain of this moment with love and gratitude because there is no other way, there is simply no other way.