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| Rosemary & Niño 22 March 2020 |
Who Will Go First?
I have
witnessed death three times. I will elaborate after the introduction below.
Two events in 1950, when I was 8 in Buenos Aires, have affected me to this day. It was then that I became aware of death. My mother had taken me to visit my grandmother Lolita who worked at the Philippine Legation (not yet an embassy) on Calle Florida in the same building as the American Embassy. The American Embassy in conjunction with the United States Information Service (then an arm of the CIA) had a novelty in Argentina. This was a lending library where the miracle was that you could take a book home with you.
My mother
left me in the library and somehow I found a magazine called American Heritage. Inside I saw
photographs taken by Timothy O’Sullivan that showed Confederate soldiers of the
American Civil Wall dead on the field. These dead soldiers, in stark black and
white, looked like the many people walking in the mall that was Calle Florida,
outside. I stared at the pictures and thought, “These men were alive many years ago and then they were dead.”
The second
event was a purposeful one. Our neighbours had a teen age son who had crashes
his motor scooter head on with a train on a level crossing. I was taken to an
open coffin wake next door. The boy’s face was covered with bandages. I am sure
my mother wanted me to learn what death was.
Reinforcing
the above I had a Jewish friend called Mario who lived across the street. In a
visit I commented that the photograph on the wall was of him when he was fat.
That was not the case. Mario told me it was a portrait of his brother who had
died at Auschwitz.
On a
slightly lighter note, two families on our block (but across the street) had
won the lottery. At age 8 I thought that only neighbours won the lottery or
died.
From 1962
until 1963 I studied philosophy with at Mexico City College with Ramón Xirau Subías.
Thanks to him I became a Platonist as I understood what Plato’s essences were
all about. When we were studying the early Greek philosophers I thought that Epicurus
was out to lunch when he wrote that we should not fear death as death is not
painful. He added that we fear pain.
In 1972 my
mother was on her deathbed. With my wife Rosemary present she said, “Alex I
know all of you think I overact my sicknesses but this time I am going to die.”
Rosemary and I heard her breathe in and she never exhaled. I could not find a
doctor in our neighbourhood so a veterinarian wrote up a temporary death
certificate. He looked at my mother and said, “Está muertita.”
My Rosemary
was sick with multiple cancers in 2020. At least a week before she died on 9
December 2025 I would lie in bed with my back to her and my tears flowed and I
tried not to make noise. I could not ask Rosemary what it was like to know you
were going to die.
The day that
she died in the afternoon, 6 minutes before she did she asked, “Am I dying?” I
could not answer.
On 12 May of
this year, I woke up with my two cats Niño and Niña in bed. Whe I touched Niño
he did not react. I looked at him and his eyes were blankly open. He had died not long before as
rigor mortis had not set in.
In the past
Rosemary and I had many cats. When one died we discovered that the best cure
for the sadness of a dead cat was a brand new one. We would to to the SPCA and
pick a middle-aged cat. We enjoyed the mutual adjusting that had to happen.
Before Niño
died, when Rosemary’s Casi died and we adopted the twins Niño and Niña, I
finally figured it out. Somehow a dead cat would transfer that essence of being
a cat (Platonic!) into the new cat. My Portland friend Curtis Daily told me, “Alex,
cats have the memory in their genes that they were stroked by Egyptian pharaohs.”
I am going
to be 84 at the end of August and death is much in my mind. My family does not
understand when I tell them that I feel that I am waiting. Rosemary and I both
believed we would never see each other again. Thinking of Epicurus does not
help. I think that we fear death because it is in our genes. It was Charles
Darwin and more recently Richard Dawkins who championed the idea that we want
to make sure our genes survive by having offspring. To try to think what it is to no feel, see, to be alive is against our genes.
My favourite
composition by Argentine Ástor Piazzolla is Oblivion. As he was was raised in
New York City as a boy he spoke good English. He gave the title of Oblivion to
his composition knowing there is not transalation in Spanish. The closest is “olvido”
or to forget. For me I find it interesting that in English “nothingness” is a
close synonym. Nada is not close at all.
Up until my
70s with Rosemary as my ever present companion I still had photographic work.
It kept me busy. I had no time for my present talent of bed rotting. I
constantly remember, while on my bed and looking at the ceiling, that lyric, from
Captain Beefhearts’ Ashtray Heart – Somebody’s had too much to think.
As time
passes these days of feeding Niña in the morning, reading the NYTimes (on
paper), going in my bike for an hour to Jericho Beach, scanning my plants and
now approaching 7000 written blogs, I find that I feel a lack of utility to my
family and friends. I am obsolete,redundant, retired and inconsequential (soon
to be a country and western song.
And I wait.