My Aunt Carol died on Tuesday, December 16 in the late afternoon.
On Wednesday, December 17 at 8:19am, my father emailed me this one-line message:
"Could be life on Mars, just methane for now."
He was indirectly referencing a NY Times article that had just been written on the subject. There was no direct mention of the article in his email but I knew what he was talking about.
And then at 9:23am he emailed again to say:
"Sorry to tell you that Carol died yesterday."
Basic communication follows a very strange path on my father's side of the family but this example actually explains more than I could in a fifty-page tome. Saddled with the emotional weight of his sister's death, my father was reluctant to dredge up the feelings that would inevitably be stirred by writing me an email on the subject. I understood. Forty-one years of communicating with my father made me understand. The Mars email was a warm-up of sorts. A dabbing of the big toe in the water, if you will, to test his emotional temperature. And once he had successfully pulled that off, he moved on to the Carol email.
Despite my understanding, however, I can't deny that there is still something bizarre about the delicate tip-toeing here. After all, what's the reluctance to jump right in? Fear of being overwhelmed by emotion? Of losing control? Of exposing oneself? It is a quality (perhaps the quality) that has shaped, defined, and molded so much about my father's side of the family. And in the worst possible way, it is the quality that defined Carol.
There are an infinite number of ways to live a life. And no matter the hand we're dealt, everyone has choices they must make. Carol chose comfort and safety. She chose to spend her life within the guarded walls of her parents house, eschewing adventure and love and danger. That was her choice and, in the end, it was her undoing.
The doctors were apparently unable to provide a cause of death for Carol. When the aide in her assisted living facility opened the door to her room to check on her, she was on the floor, unconscious. They were unable to resuscitate her.
There is a famous quote by the writer Anais Nin:
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage".
In Carol's case I think her life had shrunk to such an infinitesimally small size that one afternoon it just vanished. Her heart and her muscles and her soul had atrophied to such a tiny, weakened state, that whatever life-force was left within her just withered up and blew out the window. And she fell to the floor.
Perhaps there is life on Mars, but there was very little of it ever discovered (at least as I recognize it) in Carol's sixty-odd years on Earth. And few things are more disheartening than a life unrealized.
Today is January 1, 2015. The start of another year. The start of another chance to get it right. So here's another famous quote. It's largely attributed to the hip-hop group Cypress Hill, but it likely was around much earlier:
"I ain't goin' out like that."
