The Season of Dying
I become surrounded by ghosts at this time of year. Not that they aren’t always with me, but I feel their presence especially strongly in the fall. After all, fall is the season of dying. Fewer flowers bloom, the leaves fall off the trees, and the sun sinks earlier than in the long, bright days of summer.
Curiously, it was at this time of year that all my family followed the leaves to their deaths. In 1996, my 45-year-old brother suddenly died. My mother died two years later, followed 10 months later by my father who missed her very much. In 2003, my son died two weeks short of his 35th birthday. A young friend died just after Thanksgiving. And, in the early morning hours of October 8, 2008, my dear aunt died without reaching her 83rd birthday.
I loved my aunt very much. She was my mother’s younger sister who was in and out of my childhood and growing up years. It was my Aunt Bev who gave me the comfort and acceptance my mother couldn’t give me when I was in the throes of a gut-wrenching decision about divorcing my husband of many years.
Although they shared genes and grew up in the same family, my mother and my aunt were very different personalities. While my mother was unhappy and had a volatile temper, my Aunt Bev was happy and easy to get along with. My mother was creative with words, but my aunt had an artistic eye for fashion and decorating a home with just the right touches. Although Aunt Bev had not loved school or books as my mother had, she had achieved a simple wisdom about life and living that led us into interesting conversations.
I got to know my aunt even better after my mother died in 1998. While I had seen my aunt’s marriage through the filter my mother put over it, I began to see why her lifelong marriage of love to my uncle had been so successful. They had followed their own version of “Treat each other as you wish to be treated.”
My parents moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1995 because my mother wanted to live near her sister in their old age. On my extended visits home to my parents, I saw my aunt and uncle and the Dallas side of my family more often. After my mother’s sudden death late in 1998, my dad and I moved to California. It was my aunt I called crying in terror and sadness when I intuitively knew my father would die just hours before he did.
Although I remained in California, I visited my aunt and uncle in Dallas regularly, and filled in the missing months with frequent phone calls. She appreciated my coming to help her cope with taking care of her home and physically ailing husband while she was recovering from a mild heart attack. I read some of my mother’s journals to her during that time, which led to her talking about her own early life with my grandmother and grandfather, and then as a young bride and mother. Our phone calls after that were long, rambling, wonderful updates on our lives; so much so that I had to switch to a generous long distance calling plan.
I was out of the country when my uncle died. To give her some distractions to adjusting to life as a widow, I invited her to spend a month with me in California. I remember that we cried about my uncle, and laughed a lot as I introduced her to some of my friends, and toured the sights of Sea World, the San Diego Zoo, and magnificent Laguna Beach. It was a very precious time together, but there was an ominous difference in her. She was, like her mother and brother before her, in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Over the years and changes in her, I came to call it “the mist.”
“The mist” crawls into the brain, expands out and around, randomly closing some spaces, yet leaving some spaces free and untouched. “The mist” dilutes connections and sometimes disconnects them completely, like suddenly pulling out a plug, or switching the railroad tracks. The invasion of “the mist” causes tension, insecurity, and confusion. But the soft, floating mist is neither malicious nor kind. It wanders around and steals what it touches, invading silently, slowly, relentlessly.
My visits to Dallas followed my aunt to an apartment with a nice view, a lake, and resident beautiful and noisy peacocks, where I read her chapters from the book I was writing. We had never talked a lot about my travels and the people I had met, so we were able to connect on yet another level.
The visit after that was to an assisted living facility, and after that, to a nursing home. While she could easily remember and talk about family, and enjoy simple things like an ice cream sandwich, she knew what she no longer knew or could figure out. She was frustrated, sad, and angry. I left her knowing it would most likely be the last time I saw her, or even talk to her directly because ”the mist” severed our chance for phone contact.
So, ”the mist” stole pieces of my beautiful, kind aunt from me over four years. I took some comfort in the fact that she was still among the living, but it was more and more obvious that she no longer wished to be alive. It was a protracted, lingering downward spiral that finally ended and brought relief to her as well as all who loved her.
She loved well, and was very well loved by many. For me, she has the special place in my heart of the only person in my life who loved me truly unconditionally.
Because death is universal, each culture in the world must find ways to deal with death. Chinese culture observes the spring holiday of Qing ming. When I lived with a family in Taiwan, I went with them to visit the father’s grave. There was no sad feeling of visiting a cemetery as in the western world. Instead, the family brought food and flowers. They washed off the grave, burned paper money, and bowed holding joss sticks. Other families were having picnics and flying kites.
On the same holiday in Macau, I paid my respects to a friend’s deceased grandfather as I joined the family walking to the grave carrying a small, whole roasted pig along with other food. They burned paper money, and “useful” items like cars and houses made of paper that the deceased might want. They cleaned up around the tomb and respectfully washed his picture on the stone. Other families also gathered in jovial fashion to honor their dead. We then went back home to a feast.
There is even a special holiday in Chinese culture to feed the wandering ghosts who have no one to provide for them in the afterworld. Wandering ghosts can cause trouble if they aren’t looked after.
Since ghosts are more real to Chinese than in western culture, Chinese people don’t know what to think about cute ghosts like Caspar and other masquerading ghosts on Halloween in the western culture.
It makes sense in nature that everything that lives must die. I’ve comforted myself that humans, as a part of nature, must share the life and death cycle. But I am a lonelier person without my aunt. And her death reminds me of my own mortality as I move higher up in the older generation of my family.
Tags: Alzheimer's; death in Chinese culture; ghosts in Chines, Travel
