I was never a huge fan of David Bowie. I've been more appreciative of his music in my middle age than I was in my youth and young adulthood, and I understand the impact his recent death has had on the music industry and on his fandom.
What turns out to be the most disarming aspect of his death is that Mr. Bowie turned it into his final artistic expression. One can't know — at least at this point, one day after his death — if he intentionally timed the release of his new album to be around the date of his death (it was released two days before he died), or if it just turned out to be an ironic coincidence (someone involved with the production of the album has said that Bowie intended it as a "parting gift" to his fans). But what can be known — or at least perceived — is that, during the writing and creation of his final music album, he was fully aware of, and prepared for, his impending death. Aware, and inspired.
One need only absorb the disturbing themes, recurring imagery, and haunting words of two songs from the recent release, Blackstar:
Lazarus
Blackstar
Nobody outside those in his closest circles knew he was dying until word came late Sunday night, January 10, 2016, that he had passed.
Constructive Contemplation
People rarely think of a terminal cancer diagnosis — or terminal anything diagnosis — as a positive thing, but one can imagine that it certainly gives one perspective. Clearly, in David Bowie's circumstance, it gave him the sound and vision for his final curtain (see what I did there...?)
But what about the rest of us? Is there anything we should be thinking about for the rest of our time manufacturing carbon dioxide? Of course, there are life insurance and succession plans and wills and trusts, but those are things that take effect after we die. We tend to put off a lot of living in an effort to secure a comfortable life in our future. But isn't life today worth as much as life tomorrow? Why suffer through the now when tomorrow isn't promised to us? Life ultimately sucks when you look at it from the end of the run: if you had a great life that's ending, that sucks because it's ending; if you had a crappy life, well, that sucks, and now it's ending. Total suckness.
I used to feel that my biggest fear was to die alone. I think that's the top of the list for a lot of people. But I don't fear that any more, because, after all, everyone dies alone. Sure, you may be surrounded by family. You may even go flying off a bridge in a bus with a hundred other people, all fated to cease in the same instant. But even then, you'd be alone. Death is a solitary thing. No one goes with you.
No, my biggest fear is to be the last of my family and friends — but family, especially — to go. Not that I wish it upon any of them, either, but, being the youngest of seven children, I've known all of my siblings for my entire life! With my parents and one sister gone already, I don't think I can take that five more times as I stagger through old age.
What is your biggest fear? Don't you think that you — we — should go about the rest of our days seeing to alleviate that fear? Or at least face it, embrace it to assuage the stress it causes us while we think death is far away?
Does it take death facing us and our stocking feet at the end of a long, polished hardwood-floor, tilted hallway to give us the inspiration to do something interesting with our lives?
David Bowie lived an interesting life. May we all endeavor to express our lives as profoundly and as openly as he expressed his dying.
And my uplifting parting shot for this downer post, a guest-starring appearance by David Bowie on the Ricky Gervais HBO comedy, Extras. I hope you'll have a laugh:
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Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Monday, January 11, 2016
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Family Tragedy
It was a poignant moment in the flash of a few seconds as I drove on Golf Road in Rolling Meadows during rush hour Friday. A family of Canada geese not unlike the one pictured here had apparently just crossed the road. Golf Road in that area is a stretch of four-lane, divided highway with a speed limit of 45mph past an office park on one side and a forest preserve on the other.
The drama unfolded in the seconds it took me to approach and pass the geese. One of the babies had straggled or perhaps struggled at the curb and was run over by a passing car. The rest of the family was standing in the grass next to the curb. A couple of the babies stood at the edge and looked at the suddenly flattened corpse of their sibling. One adult goose pressed onward in the direction away from the road, with some of the goslings in tow. The other adult looked at the dead bird on the pavement with a sort of bewildered thrust of its head toward the flattened, lifeless form.
I didn't witness the death of the baby bird, but only this aftermath and, as I mentioned, in only a few seconds. But those few seconds are burned into my soul for the moment, and the sadness I felt for that adult goose — most likely the mother — as she looked on helplessly at one less chick in her brood.
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Thursday, September 09, 2010
Just. Like. That.
Little more than a year ago, not long after I was laid off from my job, I started meeting at a nearby Starbucks on Wednesdays with a group of people with the similar interest of video production. It is rather loosely helmed by a friend of mine, Sean, and we talk about all kinds of things, but generally about new media and content creation.
The group has never been large; there’s usually only the core group of about four or five of us, and everyone other than Sean — with whom I once worked with back in 1989 at the TV station at Southern Illinois University, and then again in 1993 at the ABC affiliate in southern Illinois, and with whom I have bumped into on and off in the intervening years — is someone I hadn’t known before I started meeting with the group.
One of the group was an older woman, Celina, who I had guessed was in her late fifties to early sixties. She was admittedly clueless about video production at all, let alone video for the digital age. While I found myself mildly annoyed that she would monopolize the day’s conversation with her efforts and questions to understand a concept of production or a trick in editing, I was also impressed at her dogged determination to learn something that was so far beyond the realm of her body of experience, as well as the many computer-age things she had incorporated into her otherwise old-fashioned world.
Celina was forever searching for client companies and organizations for which she could produce videos, and in March of this year I helped her shoot a video for the local chapter of a national sewing organization. The edit of that video became her new obsession, and the new distraction for our Wednesday morning group!
I never really knew Celina all that well. I recall from conversations that she had been an art teacher, but had retired. She and her husband, Ernie, had me over for lunch one Sunday afternoon in autumn last year, and it was a very cerebral experience in addition to the excellent chicken parmegiana that Celina made for the occasion. She wasn't a close friend, but she was a current friend, all the same.
Several weeks ago Celina went absent from our group due to a cracked rib she suffered moving a heavy item in her home, and she remained at home to recuperate. On pain medication, she didn’t want to drive under its influence.
Last week a get well card was passed around the group to send our wishes to Celina that she return to us soon. In my inimitable style, I wrote “Don’t die!” and then crossed it out as though to imply an afterthought, and then the pat, “Get well soon!” comment in its place.
The very next day the whole group and I received an e-mail from Ernie telling us that Celina had experienced a fall in their home the day before, which resulted in a severely broken arm and a broken neck. At the emergency room, tests and x-rays revealed, in addition to the broken bones, a mass in her lungs: stage 4 cancer which had metastasized and spread to her cervical spine and her brain.
There was nothing the doctors could do for her. It had already spread too far.
She opted against any life-saving measures — had there been any available to her — and chose instead comfort care, and was immediately sedated beyond coherence.
One of our group, Stephen, was able to use his status as a clergyman to visit Celina in the ICU where no one else other than family were allowed to visit. In addition to the comfort and support he provided to Ernie, he was able to give us an update on her condition. She was still heavily sedated and incoherent. As one would expect, the outlook was grim.
In reference to my suddenly callous-seeming comment on the get-well card, I had expressed the hope that the card had not yet been sent, but it had been. Stephen, in an attempt to head it off, or to head off any offense it might cause, mentioned the comment to Ernie. Stephen later reported that Ernie, in his characteristically warped good humor, said that Celina had opted not to take my advice. Regardless, I was still mortified, though relieved that he had taken it in stride.
Tuesday evening, around 11:30, I received from Ernie the message that Celina had passed away just after 8:00 that evening. “Shocked” does not even begin to describe my feelings about the whole progression.
Celina is the first friend I have lost. There have been other friends with whom I had lost touch years before and never re-established contact before their passing, and there have been friends of the family — of my siblings or of my parents — who passed away, and to whose families I came and provided support and comfort, but, until now, I had never lost a personal friend. The strange, sudden, and seemingly cruel manner in which she was taken has left me feeling quite hollow, and this bustling, noisy Starbucks today seems nonetheless quieter.
Celina was 62.
Celina Acquaro
September 25, 1948 - September 7, 2010
(photo: Sean McMenemy)
(edited to replace originally posted photo with a better one, above, and assign proper photo credit)
The group has never been large; there’s usually only the core group of about four or five of us, and everyone other than Sean — with whom I once worked with back in 1989 at the TV station at Southern Illinois University, and then again in 1993 at the ABC affiliate in southern Illinois, and with whom I have bumped into on and off in the intervening years — is someone I hadn’t known before I started meeting with the group.
One of the group was an older woman, Celina, who I had guessed was in her late fifties to early sixties. She was admittedly clueless about video production at all, let alone video for the digital age. While I found myself mildly annoyed that she would monopolize the day’s conversation with her efforts and questions to understand a concept of production or a trick in editing, I was also impressed at her dogged determination to learn something that was so far beyond the realm of her body of experience, as well as the many computer-age things she had incorporated into her otherwise old-fashioned world.
Celina was forever searching for client companies and organizations for which she could produce videos, and in March of this year I helped her shoot a video for the local chapter of a national sewing organization. The edit of that video became her new obsession, and the new distraction for our Wednesday morning group!
I never really knew Celina all that well. I recall from conversations that she had been an art teacher, but had retired. She and her husband, Ernie, had me over for lunch one Sunday afternoon in autumn last year, and it was a very cerebral experience in addition to the excellent chicken parmegiana that Celina made for the occasion. She wasn't a close friend, but she was a current friend, all the same.
Several weeks ago Celina went absent from our group due to a cracked rib she suffered moving a heavy item in her home, and she remained at home to recuperate. On pain medication, she didn’t want to drive under its influence.
Last week a get well card was passed around the group to send our wishes to Celina that she return to us soon. In my inimitable style, I wrote “Don’t die!” and then crossed it out as though to imply an afterthought, and then the pat, “Get well soon!” comment in its place.
The very next day the whole group and I received an e-mail from Ernie telling us that Celina had experienced a fall in their home the day before, which resulted in a severely broken arm and a broken neck. At the emergency room, tests and x-rays revealed, in addition to the broken bones, a mass in her lungs: stage 4 cancer which had metastasized and spread to her cervical spine and her brain.
There was nothing the doctors could do for her. It had already spread too far.
She opted against any life-saving measures — had there been any available to her — and chose instead comfort care, and was immediately sedated beyond coherence.
One of our group, Stephen, was able to use his status as a clergyman to visit Celina in the ICU where no one else other than family were allowed to visit. In addition to the comfort and support he provided to Ernie, he was able to give us an update on her condition. She was still heavily sedated and incoherent. As one would expect, the outlook was grim.
In reference to my suddenly callous-seeming comment on the get-well card, I had expressed the hope that the card had not yet been sent, but it had been. Stephen, in an attempt to head it off, or to head off any offense it might cause, mentioned the comment to Ernie. Stephen later reported that Ernie, in his characteristically warped good humor, said that Celina had opted not to take my advice. Regardless, I was still mortified, though relieved that he had taken it in stride.
Tuesday evening, around 11:30, I received from Ernie the message that Celina had passed away just after 8:00 that evening. “Shocked” does not even begin to describe my feelings about the whole progression.
Celina is the first friend I have lost. There have been other friends with whom I had lost touch years before and never re-established contact before their passing, and there have been friends of the family — of my siblings or of my parents — who passed away, and to whose families I came and provided support and comfort, but, until now, I had never lost a personal friend. The strange, sudden, and seemingly cruel manner in which she was taken has left me feeling quite hollow, and this bustling, noisy Starbucks today seems nonetheless quieter.
Celina was 62.
Celina Acquaro
September 25, 1948 - September 7, 2010
(photo: Sean McMenemy)
(edited to replace originally posted photo with a better one, above, and assign proper photo credit)
Saturday, April 21, 2007
An Angel Passes
It is a macabre, cruel power we humans have given ourselves over the lesser beasts in our midst. I mean, specifically, our pets.
I wrote last year of the impending demise of my beloved dog, Angel. I made the decision last weekend to finally put an end to her struggles and indignity…this weekend.
I won’t lay out any more details of her troubles; she was an old dog and had old dog problems. What struck me through the week was the pervasive acknowledgement that these were her last days. It was like a person in the room, an invisible, unpleasant, unmentionable character who waited patiently for the appointed time to take Angel away from me.
Frequent bouts of tears and doubt, and an evil prescience about her future battered me while she blindly went about the business of being a dog, blissfully unaware that she was doing these things for the last time.
But don’t we all? We never know how many beats our hearts have left, or when the car rolls off the assembly line that will be shipped, delivered, purchased and driven into ours. But it was the knowing how much time Angel had left, the scheduling of her final heartbeat, the complicity I felt doing it “behind her back” that wrecked my thoughts and interfered with my work.
And the tears it caused, tears she didn’t understand were for her, let alone understand at all. The mourning process started a week before the vet came to the house. It was mostly at night, bed time, when she always would look at me with those doleful eyes, pleading silently with me not to go upstairs, to stay with her downstairs or to take her up with me. But maybe the week of agony was best.
Not long ago Mrs. Farrago and I had two Dalmatians. Cosmo was hers since he was a puppy. Angel was mine since she was a puppy, and moved with me into Mrs. Farrago’s house back in 1998. Cosmo, two years older than Angel, developed his own set of age-related problems and, in late August of 2004, Mrs. Farrago decided the time had come for him to be done with it. We had consulted weeks earlier with a traveling vet, and on a Saturday we called her. She was available to come the following day, in the early evening to put Cosmo down.
This gave us little more than a day to make our peace with it, to say, hug and kiss our good-byes to him. And he was gone. He wasn’t really my dog, having lived more than half his life before I ever met him. But on that, his last day, I bawled my eyes out as if I had known him since the day he was born. And the next few days were especially difficult.
Angel had been mine since her eighth week of life. She had no concept of life without me; despite my frequent travels, I always returned home. Her appointment set, I was able to ease into the grief a little more, each day becoming a little easier to come to terms with my decision, each day making me, if only slightly, able to grasp the reality that I would soon see her take her last breath.
It didn’t make the very moment any easier to take, as the life left her eyes and her body went slack, but I had, to a degree, prepared myself for the moment. Cosmo helped me get through it, too.
That she go peacefully and calmly were all I could ask for her last minutes, and that’s how she went.
I will remember her and miss her forever.
Angel For Now
October 31, 1993 - April 21, 2007
I wrote last year of the impending demise of my beloved dog, Angel. I made the decision last weekend to finally put an end to her struggles and indignity…this weekend.
I won’t lay out any more details of her troubles; she was an old dog and had old dog problems. What struck me through the week was the pervasive acknowledgement that these were her last days. It was like a person in the room, an invisible, unpleasant, unmentionable character who waited patiently for the appointed time to take Angel away from me.
Frequent bouts of tears and doubt, and an evil prescience about her future battered me while she blindly went about the business of being a dog, blissfully unaware that she was doing these things for the last time.
But don’t we all? We never know how many beats our hearts have left, or when the car rolls off the assembly line that will be shipped, delivered, purchased and driven into ours. But it was the knowing how much time Angel had left, the scheduling of her final heartbeat, the complicity I felt doing it “behind her back” that wrecked my thoughts and interfered with my work.
And the tears it caused, tears she didn’t understand were for her, let alone understand at all. The mourning process started a week before the vet came to the house. It was mostly at night, bed time, when she always would look at me with those doleful eyes, pleading silently with me not to go upstairs, to stay with her downstairs or to take her up with me. But maybe the week of agony was best.
Not long ago Mrs. Farrago and I had two Dalmatians. Cosmo was hers since he was a puppy. Angel was mine since she was a puppy, and moved with me into Mrs. Farrago’s house back in 1998. Cosmo, two years older than Angel, developed his own set of age-related problems and, in late August of 2004, Mrs. Farrago decided the time had come for him to be done with it. We had consulted weeks earlier with a traveling vet, and on a Saturday we called her. She was available to come the following day, in the early evening to put Cosmo down.
This gave us little more than a day to make our peace with it, to say, hug and kiss our good-byes to him. And he was gone. He wasn’t really my dog, having lived more than half his life before I ever met him. But on that, his last day, I bawled my eyes out as if I had known him since the day he was born. And the next few days were especially difficult.
Angel had been mine since her eighth week of life. She had no concept of life without me; despite my frequent travels, I always returned home. Her appointment set, I was able to ease into the grief a little more, each day becoming a little easier to come to terms with my decision, each day making me, if only slightly, able to grasp the reality that I would soon see her take her last breath.
It didn’t make the very moment any easier to take, as the life left her eyes and her body went slack, but I had, to a degree, prepared myself for the moment. Cosmo helped me get through it, too.
That she go peacefully and calmly were all I could ask for her last minutes, and that’s how she went.
I will remember her and miss her forever.
Angel For Now
October 31, 1993 - April 21, 2007
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