Thoughts on Mom’s Death and Dying in General

                David Hathwell, who retired a few years after teaching literature to the gifted students at Lowell, shared his beautifully written poem about death, “Slipping Off the Raft,” with a group of people including Jonathan and me.  After I shared Jonathan’s very thoughtful reflections on it and a few of my own thoughts, David let us read how he went about writing it, inspired—or perhaps provoked—by what David called “Julia Child’s awful saying” about friends slipping off the raft.

                But it doesn’t seem so awful to me.  I WILL go gentle into that good night, if I have the choice.  I’d have wished that for Mom too, that she could have slipped off the raft instead of suffering so much mental and emotional anguish. 

                David also pondered “in what odd circumstances would somebody slip away and nobody do anything to help or be particularly distressed?”  But in the poem it’s clear that when they hear the sound, they think it is just troubled sleep.  Even the person dying thinks it’s just troubled sleep.  When Mother was suffering so much, we were particularly distressed, but we weren’t particularly distressed by her death. 

                But I wondered whether David felt that people really hadn’t cared much, that they didn’t notice, weren’t distressed.

                So today at the Y, I realized that I hadn’t missed a couple of people that I really like.  I asked Ken, “When are you going to Turkey?” and he said, “I just got back,” and I commented on what a short trip that must have been.  “Two weeks,” he said.  I had “felt” him there at the Y every day.  I had also “felt” Annie, the receptionist, who I heard had been out sick.

                I’ve recently changed my days, which used to be every other day, meaning that some weeks I’d be there on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, and other weeks I’d be there Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.  So I started asking people I hadn’t remembered seeing, “Were you gone for a while?” and one man, Tom, said, “No, you were.”

                So I was the one who’d slipped off the raft but only in a temporary sense. 

                Was it better to be missed or for people to continue to feel my presence the way I felt Ken’s and Annie’s.  The way I still feel Mom’s.