Several people have died. Expecting some of them to, and wanting to be informed of obituarial particulars without troubling the deceased's nearer bereaved, I considered subscribing to the RSS feed of the obituary section of the local newspaper, but felt a little ghoulish and did not. Until, later, when an old dear friend informed me via email (which email I forwarded) of the surprising and sudden demise of a mutual friend from school, which he, in turn, had learned from the deceased's facebook page. I did not join facebook, but I subscribed to the newspaper's obit feed, or tried. It did not work: I received about 200 death notices in the first day (and, if it seems callous and morbid to scan obituaries looking for people you know, how much worse it is to just idly scroll past one after another dismissing it at [the] glance [that reveals an unfamiliar name]!), and not another one since. Saving me, so far, the trouble of unsubscribing. And I found out later, through personal channels, that the two other people had passed.
Of those three deceased, I searched a bit, but was unable to find any information concerning memorial observances for the two who were not my relatives (and, as to the third, my mother told me).
The gentleman who passed suddenly, of a stroke, aged circa 39, was my cocollegiate and we shared many mutual friends, and sometimes traveled to or from the campus in tandem. I believe he was a nerdy introvert, like me. He lived in my city. As a college student, he was quiet and cool with an air of jaded hipness: It does not feel as though I honor the man's memory to observe that my strongest, clearest recollection of him, the utterance that was most his, and that best signifies his essence in our interactions then, is the short, percussively aspirated and dismissive syllable, "Pfffh," or "'Cchh!", accompanied by a shrug or wave of the hand, but that is what he's doing when I visualize him (and I hope those who also knew him will recognize that, and chuckle even in greater cognizance of others of his multidimensional qualities and quirks about which I did not know him well enough to reminisce). As adults, when we attended the same social events, he always wore interesting footware, and I feel that I never saw the same shoe twice on his feet. I am informed that he had just opened a recording studio, or founded a record lable.
The mother of another old friend passed away June 26, in hospice, after defying doctors' prognoses concerning her stage four pancreatic cancer for two years (just as anyone who knew her would have expected). She might have been a saint; although I cannot report with any authority on her rich lifetime of good works, I understand them to have been consistently apparent from reports of others better situated to observe. I think she cared for stray children, or fostered. She was always calm and gracious in my experience, and seemed to naturally facilitate others' development. She encouraged me, a youth with a passion for words, to consider the drudging, barely-living-making work an avocation undertaken to support the vocation of words. Or something like that. It was consoling and encouraging all at the same time to a know-it-all kid with art in his heart despairing of the bleak prospect of the rest of his life punching a timecard. Later, after I had been broken to the bit of eking out a modern American living a bit more, she recommended me for an interesting job that looked good there toward the beginning of my resume, for a time. In the years since, because I had the good luck to bill TKA hours in the building right next door to her organization's offices, I also enjoyed the good luck of seeing her from time to time, or riding the bus with her. I have the impression that she was one of the best people I've ever met.
My mother's aunt passed away June 9. I am given to understand there were some plots concerning some plots, but they were too late; her remains had been almost immediately cremated by prearrangement with the care facility where she resided. That end of the family recently gathered to remember her. She had been a gifted young lady just out of college with a degree in microbiology and a job as some sort of doctor's assistant in 1946 or so when she had a "nervous breakdown," that resulted in a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia (some seem to recall). Her mother, my great grandmother (whom I don't think I remember, 'though there is a photo said to be of her holding infant me), presented with the treatment options of a) her daughter being institutionalized for life or b) her lobotomized daughter being released into her care, opted for the lobotomy. From then on she was a ward of her mother, her brother, her nieces and nephews and, briefly, Medicaid, but not restrained, and with her family. She was a responsible playmate for my mother's generation, who remember riding bikes, going on walks, and swimming with her, and reminisce about how she would sometimes grumble angrily and quietly cursing to herself or else being perfectly happy and laughing. Her [I'm not entirely clear on this woman's relation, but the deceased's most recent foremost family caregiver] said that she didn't always know when it was, or where she was, but that that could be liberating insofar as she could be wherever she might please. Also, she attributed to her "I don't worry about what's already happened; there's always something new about to happen," which, oddly, poignantly to me, echos the speaker's brother's, my grandfather's, motto: "Always something," as though, starting at her aphorism with corpus callosum intact, seventy years of war, work and worry wore that lighthearted, forward-looking optimism down to its hardest most desolate nub. (Although, I don't think "always something" has to be desolate; nor need "...something new about to happen" express hope.) She also wrote:
My name is Nell.
I am the flower in the vase
or the piece of cake.
The time of day is what you want.
My name is Nell.
I hope you like it.
I am 13 years old.
It looks funny sitting there-
a bike that is ready to go.
Perhaps we can bike
together some day.
At the memorial gathering, my cousin, who is a preacher of some sort of nondenominational branch of Christianity, introduced the public reminiscences with a brief word and a prayer, and then, after the eulogizing, preached on the story of Lazarus as a call to being born again in Jesus, like his nondenomination's nontenet must require of the saved, rather than as an allegory of the faithful soul's being restored in glory to the kingdom of God at the word of Jesus, to the comfort and edification of the attentive bereaved, as I might have, with that text. The room contained several brands of Christian, of agnostic, of Buddhist, quite possibly an atheist or two, and of who knows what, including active and reforming-among-the-Protestants Roman Catholics. We said several different versions of the Lord's Prayer in as close to unison as the varying cadences would allow, but did not have to defenestrate or otherwise abuse one another over it. There were many other cousins, and aunts and uncles, and persons whose actual consanguineal or legally-constructed relation is not entirely clear to me, there, and children everywhere. And we ate Chinese take-out, like grieving families do.
More later. It took a long time to write that.