"Oh, my gosh," gasped my mother, "they're burying people today."
It was the Wednesday before Christmas, the Feast of the Nativity. I'd driven my mother to the Riverside National Cemetery, where we would place a small Christmas tree and a fresh red poinsettia on my father's grave.
More relentless than rust, death takes no holidays.
Death delights in working 24/7, 365 days a year. Given the chance, it will take the ill, young or old, rich or poor. It isn't choosy.
A few days after New Year's, death spirited away a good woman named Rita, my sister's sister-in-law. On what turned out to be the last day of her life, Rita and her husband Michael spent the day together buying her a new car. That evening, they went out for dinner to celebrate. Then during the night, as they slept, Rita died.
She was 50 years old. For her husband and children and family and friends, her death was a heartbreaking surprise. We don't yet know what caused it, though that is the first thing anyone asks. Everyone says that by dying at 50, Rita was robbed.
She was robbed of many more good years with her husband, of graduations and weddings, of grandchildren she will never see. She was robbed of burying her mother who, at 90-something, I'm sure never expected to bury her daughter.
Rita died too young, as many do. But when it comes to death, we have no recourse to a wrongful termination suit. We can say -- whether to placate or console, someone always does -- God has his reasons. In grief, sometimes I think it's hard to care.
While looking for sympathy cards to send to Rita's husband and children, I was struck once again by how sketchy we like to keep our conversations about death.
Rhyming stanzas liken the loneliness after the death of a spouse to the irritation of grains of sand in our shoes. If greeting card poets are right, death, like the bogeyman who lived under our childhood bed, is only as scary as we imagine.
In the book "Without Feathers," Freudianly sex- and death-obsessed comedian Woody Allen wrote, "I am not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens." The idea is funny -- in that famously ironic Allen way -- only because the second clause of the sentence belies the first, not for Allen alone but for all of us.
Allen took a snipe at non-mortal immortality as well. "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying," he said.
