Everybody Gets a Turn

Ending is an utter inevitability

Some seasons lend themselves to discussions of death more readily than August. Autumn, for example, with all its flavors of dormancy and decay. But here we are in the height of summer heat—blistering blue skies all around this northern hemisphere—and death is everywhere I look.

In the last few months, seven friends have lost their fathers. One of those fathers belonged to Marido. He got the word while on a work trip to California in June. His father was 88 and had Parkinson’s disease, so the news of his passing wasn’t unexpected. All the same, it was a devastating blow.

We all know someday our end will come. Someday someone we love will cease to exist. Many someones, perhaps. None of us will escape it, neither the end nor the sorrow. We know this all our lives.

And yet, when death comes, are we ever truly ready?

I am in England at the moment.

Two weeks ago, my best friend’s husband fell over dead. He was 55 years old. His death was shocking in all the worst ways.

So I am here now, with my friend, doing laundry and vacuuming random corners and making spaghetti bolognese. (I’m not a good cook but it’s hard to fuck up pasta.) We’ve talked and laughed and cried and sat for hours in easy silence.

We’ve thrown out the abundance of soggy bouquets supplied by well-meaning well-wishers. No one knows what to say so they send flowers. So many flowers, real and metaphorical. On a table in the dining room lies a pile of flower-bedecked greeting cards that say Sympathy. Condolences. Thoughts of Comfort. Gone Too Soon. Heaven Gained an Angel. Deepest Sympathy. Heartfelt Sympathy. Flowers. Flowers. Flowers.

One poor misguided soul even sent a tree. Through the mail. In memoriam. So now there is one other chore my friend must manage in the midst of collecting her husband’s ashes and planning a memorial service and dealing with a vicious toothache and seventeen miles of paperwork.

My friend’s husband would have called all the flower senders cunts. But then, he called everybody cunts. Tenderly, at times. Affectionately. But also quite sincerely, when he ran across an idiot (of which there was never a shortage). He was British and so the epithet that is nearly unthinkable in American English is much more casual over here in Old Blighty.

So we sit here amongst the detritus of flower petals and condolence cards and gentle suggestions from every Tom, Dick, and Harriet that maybe the funeral should be on this day or that day to plan around someone else’s holiday leave. I listen from across the room as my friend fields phone calls from relatives who cannot believe her husband’s body will be cremated and there will be no coffin, empty or otherwise, at his service.

“It’s what he wanted,” she tries to explain.

“But, but, but…” they remonstrate.

At the end of the day we settle onto the couch with our Chinese takeaway (or spaghetti bolognese) and leave our own worries behind to gorge ourselves instead on Catherine Cawood’s latest troubles in Happy Valley. (If you have not seen Happy Valley, OMG, get thee to the BBC post-haste and start binging!)

I head home to Portugal tomorrow. I don’t want to leave my friend here alone in her townhouse with her grief. (Thank stars she has a dog!) I know I’ll be back, as soon as I can. I know I have my own life to attend to. Even still.

It’s hard to go.

The day after I returned to Portugal from the States—one week after my friend’s husband died—a childhood friend succumbed to cancer. He was diagnosed four months ago. He was 49 years old.

As I was writing this post, a newsletter pinged in my inbox from another Substack writer, Emily McDowell, with the subject line: “My mom died and I didn’t write a newsletter for two months.” The cancer diagnosis came on June 7 and by June 23, her mother was gone.

Death is everywhere I look.

Actress Shannen Doherty (age 53) died in July. So did Richard Simmons (age 76) and Dr. Ruth (age 96).

And these deaths I’ve been telling you about are all from natural causes—age and illness and sudden, catastrophic heart failure. We haven’t even discussed the lives that are violently ripped asunder, even to this very minute in Gaza. The West Bank. Sudan. The Democratic Republic of Congo. Ukraine. The good old US of A. And elsewhere. And everywhere. According to the Global Peace Index, right now, today, 92 countries are “involved in conflicts beyond their borders.”

So yeah. One way or another, death comes for us all.

Cheery, I know. Just the sort of stuff you want to read on a blue August Tuesday.

But it’s reality. It’s a reality that every human being shares, like breathing oxygen or being born of a woman. Every one of us gets a turn eventually.

Better to think of it now than never.

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Dirge Without Music, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in
the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
a formula, a phrase remains—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
the love,
they are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant
and curled
is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do
not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses
in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

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My best friend’s faithful companion. His name is Buster.

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