Shooing Death from my Doorstep: Roaring for More of My Life After Covid-19

With this viral pandemic comes daily escalating numbers of individuals who have not survived. The growing number of souls lost, now topping 55,000 in the United States, more than just bothers me. I am unsettled and scared for others in the world…and for myself.

I take no daily medication and am fit as a fiddle – a Stradivarius fiddle mind you. Still, I am vulnerable because of my age.

When the evening news airs a story of a nurse holding the cell phone while a child or spouse says their good-byes, I think about how that experience would feel for me if I were the patient on the ventilator.

Why? Because this person, just like me or you, was perfectly fine last week. But now, he or she dies.

Granted I could perish unexpectedly next week in a biking accident. If your lava lamp explodes and a shard pierces your heart, you could depart this life too.

I rarely think about my life being over. But now a global pandemic destroys individuals each 21 seconds, attacks randomly and the sheer numbers of the dead are staggering.

Covid-19 changes my life and your life. I am on lockdown. My groceries are delivered. I will not hug you.

So, along comes thoughts of my mortality and the uneasy feeling that La Catrina could be on the back stoop caressing the red roses in her hair.

She waits patiently to take a stroll with someone. Anyone will do.

Let Me Live

I know there is an end to my time on earth. I understand the circle of life. I get it.

But for the last three months confronted with mortality day after day, I now grasp a certainty – an understanding about myself - I did not recognize before Covid-19.

It is big. I feel it in my bones. This is not a fever dream.

I galvanized thoughts slowly as this pandemic stirred the world.

I always thought that if I realized I might die soon; I would feel happy and blessed about the life I have lived and thankful for all the opportunities. Not so.

Yes, I am happy and blessed about the life I have and all that. But, if I become one of the victims of this pandemic, I will be riled, peeved and enraged beyond what I ever could have imagined.

These last months unearthed in my core a monsoon of zest for my life. I had no idea it would make me so heady. Turns out I found I have a very hefty appetite to relish life once again when this is over…or subsides…or whatever will be.

I am adamant about this. I crave every moment I am supposed to have. I want the whole she-bang of my time on earth. I am so not ready to die.

Whispering with conviction to La Catrina: I want to live. I want my life. Do not come for me.

What I now understand about myself will stay with me long after Covid-19 vanishes. And for all my friends (and family) who think I already treat myself well, just get ready folks. It is a safe bet that I am now going to engage an even higher gear in my time left on earth. I will pour more of me into me and what I want for my life. 

So, no angels. No Gloryland trip. No Grim Reaper for my soul…not just yet.

I Know Dying

To say I am comfortable with death is an overstatement. Let’s just say I have enough experience being at the bedside of loved ones as they passed away to understand how it can go.

At fourteen, I sat alone at my grandmother’s bedside as she died of cancer in Van Lear, Kentucky, taking turns with my aunts and mother. I learned about the death rattle – the gurgling sound heard in a dying person’s throat as the body’s breathing slows. I cannot say I heard it, but I was told to listen for it.

What I most remember is the old woman who walked round the back path from Webb Holler and stole into the bedroom one afternoon. She lifted the blanket from the bottom of the bed, felt my grandmother’s feet, turned to mother and two aunts and said only one thing before she left the room. “It will be tonight.” It was.

One last breath and it was over.

The next day after the body was picked up by the funeral home, my mother told my aunts, “Barbara will go in my place.” So off I went to do the job of what daughters do - walk around the coffins and choose one, hand them the clothes to dress the body, pick out the color of roses for the casket spray, tell them where to dig the grave, make the timeline for the hearse and procession and figure out how much everything is going to cost.

Visitation in eastern Kentucky back then was a home affair. When the mortician is done, the coffin is loaded, brought back to the house and placed in the front room – the first room inside the door adjacent to the bedroom. The coffin is opened.

For the next three days people tap lightly on the front door then walk inside to join whoever is sitting around. People are up all night telling stories. Many pray or stand by the coffin and talk to my grandmother.

Often, someone sings a hymn. “Precious Lord Take my Hand” is a good one.

My most vivid moment of the experience happens when it is time for the coffin to close and leave the house for the church where the funeral will take place. My mother and two aunts wail and moan from deep within their souls. Their anguish startles me and frightens my younger siblings and cousins who hang on the banister looking over the goings on. That’s when I realize the finality of it all. Later I will learn the preciousness of life and that no one knows how to make oats like Grandma.

Years pass before my youngest brother, 50, dies of cancer and later my father, 96, succumbs to septic. Now I am bedside in hospice rooms. I hear the death rattle. In both situations, I swear that in the hours before my brother and my father pass, I see angels gather in the corners near the ceiling.

But this could be my imagination because dying is hard work and waiting is long. One gets weary.

Just like Grandma, the end of life was simple. My loved ones took one exceedingly long last breath, held it for what seemed forever. And never took another.

That’s it. It is peaceful.

My mother wasn’t able to take a breath because after a brain aneurysm a machine did her breathing. At her bedside I did not need to talk because we had talked about most everything during our time together. But I did need to look one last time into the hazel eyes with grey flecks that had followed me throughout my life.

I cared less who watched me push her eyelids open. My mother’s eyes were beautiful.

So, you see, I don’t have a lot of experience with death. Only enough to know I need not be afraid of the dying part. It’s the leaving part that has me stirred up.

More, More, More

I have few answers for questions about the meaning of life, but I understand something more valuable. We can always do better, try harder and go further.

Most of us understand who we are, how we fit in the world, what makes us happy, what we might want to change and a defiant attitude the we know better than anyone when to change up life.

The time can be now.

If you and I get more of life, then together we will all become voyagers in a strange land that must be navigated once the virus subsides. How will you live your more?

What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown. What now can also be our job. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. I acknowledge that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that every point is our development we are still striving to grow. --Ann Patchett from What Now?

Thank you for taking your time to read and support my work. I invite you to make a comment. Special thanks to all of you who continue to forward posts. I appreciate that!

All Photos by B. Pagano