Because I apparently don’t have enough to read, I’ve yet another
selection for my bulging bookshelves: Advice
for Future Corpses (And Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death
and Dying, by Sallie Tisdale.
It was reviewed in last week’s New York Times by Parul Sehgal, and, as the title suggests, is
about dying. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the review:
But in its loving,
fierce specificity, this book on how to die is also a blessedly saccharine-free
guide for how to live. There’s a reason Buddhist monks meditate on charnel
grounds, and why Cicero said the contemplation of death was the beginning of
philosophy.
OK, so not just about dying, but also living. No surprise
there, I suppose. Why even bring up
death if you’re not going to eventually circle back to life.
Which puts me in mind of a quote from Henry David Thoreau in
Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
It’s the living deliberately part that I’ve tried focusing on for
the past 15 or so years. And then when the dying part looms, I want to decide the
where, when, and how. This has been true
for me since 1964, when I watched my mother die from breast cancer. She was 50
and I was 20. It left a lasting impression.
I had an essay published three years ago that includes a reference
to that seminal event. Here’s an excerpt:
Years after my mother
died, I imagined an alternative ending to her life, earnestly writing the
intimate details in my personal journal. In that scenario, I, the awakened
hero, steal into her hospital room in the dark of a May dawn, ease her small
comatose body into my arms, then carry her out of there, into the car and home,
to that particular place I know she’d have wanted to finish it: her own
unassuming, but familiar backyard.
In this image, I
place her carefully on terra firma, where she can lie with those things that
had given her life its most elemental meaning—the garden, the flowers in bloom,
maybe the dog and cat—to breathe her last. In this image, she now wears a faint
smile in place of the awful death mask that covered her face on the day she actually
died.
As for myself, I’d take this lovely fantasy a step further,
saving anyone the bother of having to stuff my remains in a box. Because now,
in this enlightened era, one can have one’s remains decompose, within certain
natural areas, with or without the box.
In other words, one can opt for a green burial, an
environmentally friendly way to leave our beautiful green planet, the kind of
ending my nature-loving mother would have loved.
And so, not surprisingly: like mother, like daughter.
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For more information on green burials:
To read the NYTG book review:
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