Fortunately, It's Just Something Else

When I was writing on this blog every single day for, um, for a very long time, it was inconceivable that there would come a time when I would write perhaps once a month.  Now that this time has arrived, it is inconceivable to me, now, that there was a time-- a very long time-- in my life where I wrote on this blog every single day.

Life; you're a real croquet mallet to the taint, aren't you?

I've been getting a lot of croquet mallets to the taint lately which, of course, doesn't make me special or martyred, it just makes me like everyone else.  I got rejected from a prospective job, my car that I bought three weeks ago started bucking like a horse and needed a repair that, if it hadn't been covered under warranty, would have cost $4,000-$5,000 to fix.  My dog died.  Work sucks.  And I haven't slept in approximately two years.  Yes, I know the twins are only 8 months old, but I count the time my wife was pregnant and thrashed around in bed in discomfort night after night, keeping me awake, and tack on another year of anxiety-ridden nightmares and evenings spent staring at the ceiling fan.

I tell people that I haven't slept since 1984, which was the year I finally understood that my mommy and daddy weren't going to live forever.  They say there's truth in every joke, and, if you look at pictures of me at around that age, there are black rings under my youthful, sparkly little eyes.

I'm emotionally drained and physically exhausted.  The heat around here has barely let up in two months and I struggle to keep my eyes open during the day-- they're all dried out from the excessive dependence on decades old window air conditioning units that struggle and wheeze like a COPD patient huffing and puffing to walk ten feet.  I need oxygen.  I need... something.

My dog needed something, too.  He needed something more than pills, something more than Glucosamine-rich food.  He needed something more than time and care and love.  He needed a miracle, and you can just ask the Catholic Church how short they are on those these days.  We kept him going longer than we should have, longer than was humane.  Did you know your vet can put your dog on the canine equivalent of hospice care?  Well, they can, if you're cowardly enough to go along with it.

We were.  For a couple long, sad weeks at any rate.

I knelt down on the floor of that tiny little room-- no bigger than our twins' nursery-- and I held him and stroked his thick, gray fur and I thought to myself, this is the most I've touched you in months.  And I felt sick.  I just kept rubbing his head and all the way down his back, as clumps of his fur came off in my hand and fluttered to the floor.  I was fine at reception.  I was fine talking to the vet tech.  I was fine when they brought him back in, the catheter inserted in his arm, like a condemned green mile prisoner deposited into the chamber.  When the vet came in and asked if I had any questions, my throat became thick and I shut my eyes and tears sprayed onto my glasses.

"How long will it take?" I asked.  I was surprised he understood the question, because what I heard was utterly unintelligible, but I guess a lot of people must ask that.

"Not very long at all, maybe a minute or two."

"Jesus," I said.

The Propofol went in first.  Goodnight, Finley.  His breathing had become so loud and harsh and raspy, cagey, throaty, labored, awful in the past year-- it was everywhere I walked.  When we would be upstairs and the baby monitor would be on downstairs, all it would pick up was his breathing-- like a lumberjack sawing through a stubborn oak.  I close my eyes and I can still hear it.  His head thunked on the blanket covering the floor in seconds and his tongue fell out lazily.  I stared at it, and I was shocked at how repulsed I was by the sight of it-- undignified, disorganized, vulgar.  I wanted to push it back into his mouth, like the doctor who put the coins over Lincoln's eyes, but I couldn't move.  The phenobarbital came next and fast-- the overdose.  The end.  Dr. Peters put the Littmann on Finley's chest and said,

"His heart's stopped."

His heart.  My heart.  I still could hear the relentless clatter of his breath.  Only I could hear it, I guess.

I'm so tired and run down these days I haven't had time to grieve or process or anything-- I suppose that's what this is.  This blog used to be the place I would come to and sort out life's idiocies and its beauties, where I could make fun of the world and myself, where I could come to identify with that part of me that still clung desperately to the notion that I was a writer in some way.  Now, I don't know what it is, or why it is.

I still can't get over how fast it happened.  He was fourteen-- eighty-eight in people years.  He was my first dog ever and, at 32, I come downstairs in the morning and I don't know what to do.  Make coffee, I suppose.  The English make tea-- the half-Israelis make coffee.  We have hairy arms and hot tempers and we drink coffee and we get on with it.  While taking a walk today with my father's sister who is visiting from Australia, I lost one of the baby's hats.  It's somewhere, on some street in our neighborhood somewhere-- some sidewalk.  I pushed them in the stroller while they slept and my 70-year-old aunt with her squeaky voice and her artsy glasses followed diligently a half-step behind us.  She casually mentioned that, in the early 70s, she fell in love with a cousin of hers and, when he was arranged-married off to someone else, she overdosed on pills to try to kill herself.  I wanted to stop pushing the stroller and turn to her and scream,

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURSELF?!  ALL DAY LONG I WORK WITH ASSHOLES LIKE THAT-- WHAT ARE YOU TELLING ME?"

But I just said, "uh-huh-- wow" and kept pushing the stroller along, petrified that, if I stopped and thought about it, it would become real.  Something to deal with, a thing to confront.  Fortunately, it's just something else to write about.

That's all.

Looking For My Mother

She's in there-- somewhere, I guess.  She's got to be.  On outward appearance, it's the same bespectacled face, the same careworn hands, the same short, salt-and-pepper hair.  It's got to be my mother.

Lately, though, I'm not so sure.

The wry smile is gone.  I don't know that it's gone for good necessarily, but I haven't seen it-- not since December or thereabouts.  That's when my brother-in-law was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic cancer.  That's when the reality set in that her first grandson was going to grow up having never known his father.  "Buddy," my wife asked me tentatively last night during a rare, quiet moment in our house, "will your mother be sad for a very long time?"

"Yeah," I said, not looking at anything in particular, "I think so."

Tragedy doesn't visit our family.  Death does, as it drops in on every family, but tragedy?  Not so much.  I went to my first funeral at age 9, but it was for Dr. Porter, our next door neighbor, who died at a ripe old age-- an irascible, bent over, shriveled up raisin in suspenders and tatty old Florsheims.  People we know and people we love tend to die late in life, when they should.  The only person who exited the world out-of-order was my mother's mother, who was felled by lymphoma-- but that was years before I was born.  So I was not scarred.

But my mother was.

And maybe that's part of the reason why the death of her son-in-law at the age of 34, from cancer, no less, hit her so hard.  Because she'd been there.  She knew.  She'd watched the woman she loved more than anything get eaten up, eaten alive, become barely recognizable.  A shell.  A shame.

Now that I have children, I see my mother more.  For a while, while my brother-in-law was dying, I never saw my mother, because she was caring full-time for his son, while my sister was caring for her husband.  Now that my brother-in-law is dead, my mother comes by to help me with the babies when I'm home with them alone.  Part of it, I think, is because she feels guilty about missing their first few months.  Part of it is because she's from the generation that is absolutely sure a father will kill his children through sheer incompetence and absent-minded negligence by putting them in the dishwasher when their diapers get dirty or something.  Part of it, maybe, is because watching me be a father is one of the few small pleasures she gets to experience anymore.

Maybe.  I don't know.

When she's with me at the house with the babies, conversation is quiet, and the content is either superficial, or it's sad.  I can't manage to get us anywhere in between, and the fault is mine as much as it's hers.  Sometimes, I find myself trying to keep it light, because I can't bear it when it's heavy-- sometimes I say deliberately inappropriate things just to get her to smile-- and, sometimes, it works.  That's what I used to do at the dinner table when we were all young together.  I'd make a cutting remark about a distant relative or someone from the neighborhood just to see my mother smile.  I never thought then that the corners of her mouth turning up would ever mean so much to me.

Or happen so infrequently.

She's in there somewhere, I know, just like we're all in there somewhere-- who we were before cancer and before twins and before mortgages and cars we paid for ourselves and colleges we shouldn't have gone to and majors we shouldn't have chosen and girlfriends we shouldn't have slept with and friends we shouldn't have made.  But did.  We're all in there somewhere.  My daughter is cooing downstairs and my son is sleeping in the next room and my wife, a mother, who's also in there, just finished pumping.  And I'm wearing red and pink argyle socks, because, somewhere, I think I'm in there, too. 

Oh, Bits.

For a while, when I was younger, I would read the obituary page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. When I remarked to a camp counselor that I did this, he asked me why. "To make sure I'm not in there," I quipped.

Precocious, indeed.

Really, the reason I read the obituaries was to see if anybody I knew was in there. I'm not quite sure who exactly I thought I might know, as a fourth grader in suburban southeast Pennsylvania, who might be recently deceased and, therefore, would be in the obituaries. But, for a good few years, I read the obituaries-- just to make sure. I read them pretty regularly. Like other developmentally dubious, potentially unhealthy habits in which I engaged as a child, my parents did little to curb this particular... interest.

"Why don't you read the comics?" my mother helpfully suggested one morning as I sat in my father's chair at the dining room table, hunched over the obits page. I thought about that idea for a moment or two, and it seemed reasonable.

"Okay," I responded. And I began to read the comics, after finishing up reading the obituaries. My favorite comics as a child were "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury."

There is no denying that death is fascinating, especially to a child, who is just beginning to fit death into his whole schema of how the world operates. The utter finality of it, the universality of it, the why and wherefore-- it was pretty arresting for little bowl-cut ol' me. I enjoyed very much reading all the different names and professions people had, how long they lived, where they were being buried. Goldsteins was a very popular funeral home in my neck of the woods, and, as the years went on, several members of my mother's family passed through that way. Those who worshipped in a different way frequently were tended to by the Donahue folks. They had multiple locations. Death is a big business.

The one thing that really irked the piss out of me as a kid reading obituaries was the distinct lack of gory details-- especially when the decedent was a young buck. Like-- I really wanted to know what happened and I thought, if they were going to bother putting this shit in the newspaper, which is supposed to provide information, that I had kind of a right to know how these people died. I wasn't particularly interested in, "passed suddenly." Well, if you're not wasting away in some Stryker bed in your living room with bedsores all over your ass or hooked up to a ventilator in some ICU, isn't it pretty much always "sudden"? Come on, bitches-- I wanted the details.

What? Was she shot? Stabbed? Hammered or what? Did he eat poorly washed baby lettuce with E-coli in it? Was it an aneurysm or an embolism or a tension pneumothorax or a cerebrovascular hemorrhage? Did some crazy fuck put a pillow over this creep's face because he owed him $30 and a Sega Genesis game? I realized, of course, that it was just a tiny obituary and not a coroner's report, but I was reasonably sure that maybe seven or eight words about the cause of death wouldn't kill anybody.

See what I did there?

I routinely scanned the obituary pages to see if people were around the same age my parents were back then. If I read the entire day's worth of death notices, and there were no people who had died at roughly the age my parents were at this time, I could go to school relatively comforted that one or both of them weren't going to drop dead while I was not learning math. This was the kind of reassurance I craved, amongst lots of other kinds. If I read the obituaries and there were a couple of people who kicked it in their late thirties to early forties, it would be a challenging day at school. I wouldn't be able to focus. It's not that I'd be thinking about my parents dying all day, but, at inopportune moments, my mind would admittedly drift back to that unfortunate subject. Well, I'd reason, if it could happen to Stella V. D'Orisio (née Kaplan), then it could just as easily happen to my mommy. I'd like to entirely blame my mediocre grades on this preoccupation of mine, but I don't think that would be entirely fair. I also watched a lot of Monty Python.

Of course, as a child, I never found anybody I knew in the newspaper's obituary section. It was only after I actually started knowing people who had died that I stopped reading the obituaries. Maybe it became too real at that point. My great-uncle. My neighbor. My allergist. The girl I knew from school who died of a heart attack while getting her wisdom teeth out.

Suddenly.

And it was perhaps then that I realized why, when someone so young passes, the family doesn't particularly feel compelled to reveal the reason behind the premature exit from the stage of life. Because it's just too painful. And, really, in the end-- what does it matter? When you're dead, you're dead. And to you and your loved ones, it's a calamity of unequaled proportions. And to some kid with a funny haircut sitting in a turquoise sweatsuit with his legs folded underneath him in his father's chair poring over the newspaper-- it's merely a curious obsession.

To put it mildly.

Flat or Upright?

Last night, I was fortunate enough to enjoy a bowl of noodles and several different animals at a Vietnamese restaurant with my wife and an old friend. During the course of this dinner, we discussed the terribly annoying Tea Party movement, why there is an old-lady-shower-style grab-handle on the bar ("For retards, probably," I mused in that worldly way of mine), how my friend's iPhone charger port got corroded, and whether or not the waiter was going to poison my food and/or try to pick us up.

We all know that someone like me is the kind of person who has precious few friends. That's a given. I mean, if this is how I come off in the blogosphere, where I actually have time to think about and craft my thoughts and ponderings-- you've got to imagine that it's at least 80-95% worse in real-life and real-time, where asinine idiocy constantly tumbles out of my mouth like regurgitated, well, Vietmanese food. The one or two friends that I do have who have consistently stayed by me and whom I have carefully conditioned over the course of many years to expect and sometimes even appreciate my own particular brand of social incompetence know what they're going to get when they spend time with me.

If the friend is female, she will be treated to my eccentric and haphazard way of talking/behaving, the unexpected topic shifts, maybe even a reference or two to her breasts, if I'm feeling especially frisky/moronic. If the friend is male, any topic of conversation is fair game, and whatever we are talking about will be peppered lovingly with homoerotic undertones. If the word "coming" comes up (see?) then just forget it. Homosexual references and comments only increase in the presence of my wife, who has also come (see?!) to expect this behavior.

All this is to say that nobody, not my old friend or my wife, was especially surprised when, as we were enthusiastically exploring our entrees with chopsticks tenuously in hand, I looked at my old, dear friend and said,

"So, when you die, do you want a flat or an upright tombstone?"

My friend and my wife laughed. It wasn't a surprised laugh, however.

Always one to indulge me, my friend considered the question carefully and gave the following answer,

"Well, I've given some thought to green cemeteries. Really, I think, I'd like to be just left in the woods. I know there are laws about that sort of thing. And, I mean, fine, if I have a family, and they want to know where I am to go visit me, then, yes, I understand that-- that need to have a marker of some kind, but I don't think I'd want an upright one."

And then he asked me if I'd ever read a poem with some unpronounceable name. I told myself to remember the title, and he said it twice, but I can't remember it. I can't remember anything anymore. Of course I hadn't read the poem, because I am an uncultured lout. Asking me if I've read pretty much any poem is like asking me if I have ever worn pants after 9:30pm on a Sunday night.

"Well, it's about death and the recognition that it is nothing to fear, and that the fate that awaits us is the same fate as awaits kings and noblemen, and that it equalizes every man."

Why the hell do I need to read poetry? I just need to spend more time with my friends.

I considered what my friend had said. I could have guessed he might say something like this. Even though he was wearing his grandfather's houndstooth blazer, he's really just a big hippie. I can't believe he can stand to be friends with me sometimes.

"Yeah," I said, "I think I'm going to go upright. And if it weren't so fucking expensive, I'd have something really witty carved on the stone-- but that shit is very expensive."

"Right, that's true," he replied. He shoved a stickful of chicken into his mouth and chewed, considering further. "Actually, there have been times where I wanted a stone hand, you know-- a carved hand, with the fingers sort of closing, just coming out of the ground, with the fingers curled as if the hand were going to close. And, you know, in the days and weeks after I die, maybe my relatives will come and stick flowers inside the hand, and, much later, when nobody cares anymore, it'll just be there to scare the shit out of little kids who come to the cemetery to play."

I took a drink of water.

"Right, but what about stoner asshole teenagers who come to the cemetery to drink and fuck off? You just know one of them will take his pants down, on a dare or whatever, and stick his penis into the hand."

"Bring it!" my friend said.

Fuckin' aye, Death, you little faggot.

Bring it.

A Bit of Obit

I know, I know-- Corey Haim is dead. Those of us who are my age and were suckled on the teat of cinematic masterpieces like "License to Drive" are very broken up about it.

Oftentimes when a celebrity, or a long-ago celebrity, perishes, the internet is flooded with tributes-- people flock to their obsessively-updated Wikipedia and IMDB pages. They tweet about the great loss suffered by the untimely passing and they wax rhapsodic about some of the deceased most quotable moments.

It's kind of a bandwagon thing, except, instead of a bandwagon that everybody's clamoring to get on, it's a hearse.

We all know that I'm a pretty morbid sonofabitch, so, when a celebrity dies, I often turn to the New York Times obituaries-- not to read the celebrity's obit, but to see who else joined them in exiting life's stage at or around the same time.

Folks, say hello-- and goodbye, to John Thorbjarnarson.

I admit that I had no idea who this guy was before I clicked on his obituary. And I'll even go further to admit (because, if I can't be honest with you, then you might as well pull out all my teeth and replace them with peanut M&Ms) that I only clicked on his obituary because of his superawesomeballs last name: Thorbjarnarson.

Thorb

jar

nar

son.

And the "jar" is really pronounced "yar." You know, just because it wasn't cool enough already.

Seriously? That's fucking intense.

His first name bites the boredom brownie, but he more than makes up for it.

Of course, his whacked-out last name isn't the only reason I clicked on his obituary-- I was also kind of interested in the career that he chose:

Crocodile and Alligator Expert.

Can you picture this guy, when he was alive, obviously-- walking into a nice restaurant with white linen tablecloths and blush wine-colored candlesticks gently flickering as he introduces himself to a coquettish, wispy-haired blind date?

"Hi, I'm John Thorbjarnarson, Crocodile and Alligator Expert. Gosh-- traffic was just awful, wasn't it?"

Thorbjarnarson was employed by the Wildlife Consevation Society and his actual professional title was herpetologist, which doesn't even require a follow-up joke so I'll just let it sit. Not only did he make it his life's work to study crocodiles and alligators, but made the preservation of their lives one of his foremost goals.

Not for nothing-- but I would love the opportunity to go back in time to the Thorbjarnarson house, maybe when John was five or six, and just observe him. Was he the kid who was constantly playing around in the local creek, attempting to rouse gigantic, saber-toothed creatures with crusts of bread? Did he dress his little sister up as a crocodile and then chase her around the house with a butterfly net before wrastlin' her to the ground like an overzealous Secret Service Agent?

What the fuck did his standardized career prediction test say? Mine said I would be either an actor or a forest ranger. Apparently, he didn't become "obsessed with reptiles" until he was about 13 or 14, about the same age that normal boys become obsessed with cars or breasts. While he may have been made fun of by his peers, I suppose it's a good thing that there are, were, and will continue to be guys like John Thorbjarnarson who are obsessed with crocodiles and alligators, and are not only obsessed with them, but are willing to bust out the swimming trunks and go rolling around in the muddy swamps with them to get a better understanding of just what the hell they are.

Because you won't catch 99.8% of the population doing that shit. We're far too busy with cars and breasts.

I wonder if John Thorbjarnarson ever thought about his own death-- I suspect that someone who spent such an inordinate amount of time dealing with reptiles as big as a White House dining room table probably did-- and if he ever thought that he would have a normal, quiet death-- like a stroke or an aneurysm or plain old fashioned very very boring cardiac arrest. Did he ever think that he would die not inside the dark, wet, hot mouth of a crocodile or an alligator? Obviously, he had long ago made peace with the very real probability that he would wind up a reptilian squeak-toy.

He died of malaria-- decidedly less violent than being ripped to shreds by a carniverous animal-- but he died of malaria contracted whilst studying carniverous animals, and so they and the unhealthy, unhospitable conditions in which they live did John Thorbjarnarson in in the end-- though it wasn't very dramatic.

Hopefully, none of his colleagues will say something trite or stupid about him like, "He died doing what he loved" or "This is how he would have wanted to go." or "He was a herpetologist's herpetologist."

Because I just hate that shit.

Limousine Farts; Part II

Remember Aunt Mickey?

Well, unless you joined the My Masonic Apron fold recently, you probably do. If you don't recall hearing her name, or remembering her name, or hearing of her limousine farts, read up.

Aunt Mickey finally died on Thursday, February 18th. "Finally died." That sounds like such a silly thing to say. Of course she finally died. We all die, finally, and, as Basil Fawlty once said about death through clenched teeth, "I'd say it was pretty bloody final."

Pretty bloody final indeed, Basil.

According to her doctors, she should have passed away somwhere around January 10th or so. "You probably won't make it through the weekend," they told her on Friday, January 8th. Well, they were wrong. Doctors sometimes are, you know.

My mother called me Thursday night at 8:43pm. My wife and I were taking a rare break from the Olympics, snuggled up together on the couch like two pretzels in a bag, watching "Julie/Julia" when the phone rang. I know I sound like a bad son when I say it, but ordinarily, when my parents call during a movie, I let it go to voicemail. But, ever since Aunt Mickey mounted her epic Dying Odyssey back in early January, every time my parents call, I pick it up. I always take a moment to summon up the strength to hear the news before I hit that little green button on my cell-phone. Strangely enough, I didn't think Thursday night was the night.

I'm going to talk a little bit about "Julie/Julia" for a minute-- I hope that doesn't make me sound like some emotionally-detached wackjob with Aspergers who doesn't comprehend the enormity of the matriarch of his family passing away. I do. But Aunt Mickey loved the entertainment industry-- and she loved movies (remember "The Hornymooners?") so I don't think she'd mind, if she were alive to mind.

I didn't like "Julie/Julia," barely at all. I think Julie Powell is incredibly narcissitic and obsessive, and not in a charming way, either-- and I don't think Amy Adams brought anything remotely affirming or sympathetic with her wooden, whiny portrayal either. I think it's very obnoxious when you have a character who is self-absorbed and a bitch, and then thinks that she's likeable because she admits to being so.

The performances of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci certainly elevate the film, and these scenes are filmed, directed, and acted with palpable affection and sumptuous detail for a bygone era, but I didn't think they were enough to save the movie, to justify its existence. I would hope that, if Julia Child had ever met Julie Powell that she would have had enough sense to smack Julie Powell upseide her head with a rolling pin-- and a rolling pin from the 1950s, not one of the cheap, crappy ones that are made today.

Then, the more I thought about it, I thought, well-- you didn't hate "Julie/Julia," you hate Julie Powell, because she's a blogger who is famous and wipes the Boeuf Bourguignon off her chin with money and you are a blogger who will never squeeze a book deal out of this bizarre cacophany you call a blog and you get Kraft Lite Ranch salad dressing on your pants with disturbing regularity.

Or maybe I didn't like "Julie/Julia" because I'll always associate it with the phone call I got at 8:43pm on Thursday night, February 18th, 2010.

Speaking of phone calls-- I didn't make mine. When we were all told that Aunt Mickey was sent home from the hospital, we, my mother's children were told that we could call her before it was too late, before she slipped into her inevitable coma and then organ failure took her away. I didn't call. Now, you know me. Well, some of you do, I think, and pretty well, too. I think you know that I'm not going to turn this blog upside-down and make of it a soapbox upon which I will stand and lecture you in my guilt about the importance of saying goodbye when faced with death-- about how you'll never get another chance to say farewell to loved ones who are slipping mercilessly away. To tell you how wracked with regret I am. To say I'm sorry to whomever's listening.

Well, you know I won't do that. Am I sorry? Oh, yes, I suppose I am. I suppose I "should" have called my Aunt Mickey, on whose freshly-waxed parquet floor I used slide in my white cotton socks, in whose Cadillac I quietly prayed we would arrive at our destination safely, at whose chic country club I feasted on countless corned beef and pastrami sandwiches. I suppose I should have called her.

But I didn't know what to say.

Isn't that funny? Me-- the man who's been blogging every single day for three hundred and seventy-seven days, who shoots his mouth off at work with reckless disregard for the consequences, who makes flip and crass comments at every family dinner, sending everyone into hysterics and head shakes, whose ruthless commentary and remarks have more than once made my mother, Aunt Mickey's little niece, remark, "You're murder," her cheeks red with embarrassed laughter.

I didn't know what to say.

And I was afraid-- of crying, of making her cry, of saying something stupid, of saying nothing at all, of wishing I hadn't called at all, of everything. Of nothing.

I didn't know what I'd say to her youngest son, who was at her bedside from the first day returning home from the hospital to the moment when she breathed her last. Her oldest son had been to Vietnam and came back completely fucked up-- but I think this must have been a thousand times worse. I didn't know what I'd say to him if he'd picked up the phone.

After I put the phone down on Thursday night, I looked at my wife, who knew already because you can hear conversations had on my cellphone if you're in the same room and I said,

"Well, that's that. It's going to be on Sunday and we'll see if we can go," and I pressed play on the DVD remote.

I was kind of alarmed at myself at how apparently callously I took the news, especially considering that, several years ago, when my mother called me to tell me that my pediatric allergist had collapsed and died suddenly of a massive heart attack, I fell into the living room rocking chair and sobbed hysterically in my wife's arms. When I think about Dr. Greene, sometimes tears still fill my eyes, to this day. Maybe it's because he was 55 and it was so shocking-- this passing was anything but. It was a goddamned shame.

"She could have been playing tennis today if she'd had that operation," said my uncle.

Well, maybe. Not for us to say, really. It was her choice, and it was her life. Her's till the end.

I read about a BBC reporter yesterday afternoon named Ray Gosling. He's an elderly man and, while filming a documentary about the right-to-die, he made a startling confession whilst walking through a graveyard on a blustery Midlands day.

"I killed someone once," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "...he was a young chap. He'd been my lover, and he got AIDS. And, in a hospital, one hot afternoon-- doctors said, 'There's nothing we can do' and he was in terrible, terrible pain. And I said to the doctor, 'Leave me, just for a bit.' And he went away, and I picked up a pillow and I smothered him until he was dead. Doctor came back. And I said, 'He's gone.' Nothing more was ever said."

Ray Gosling, 70 years old, was arrested after Nottinghamshire Police reviewed the documentary and interviewed its producers.

After watching the clip of Gosling, walking through the cemetery, his thinning white hair blowing about as he made this astonishing confession, I realized something my father had said to me back on January 9th. He told me on the phone that Aunt Mickey had told him that she wanted to die, and that she wanted him to 'help her with that.' He had said it, and I'd heard it, but it clearly didn't register that Aunt Mickey had asked my father to help her end her life. Of course, he refused, instead agreeing to arrange hospice care for her and to plan out her funeral in exact detail. Her obituary, for instance, will not be released to the newspapers until exactly two weeks after her burial. That's Aunt Mickey, pulling the strings even from beyond the grave.

Now, just like I don't want this blog post to be about guilt, I also don't want it to turn into a debate about assisted suicide. You think what you think, I think what I think, and maybe what I think will evolve over time after I've had enough experiences with life and death. Maybe yours will, too. I don't know. I just know that my Aunt Mickey's dead, and that I didn't like "Julie/Julia" and that being a blogger is very, very good for me.

Thank you.

Limousine Farts

As I type these words, my great-aunt is dying in Pompano Beach, as the great-aunts of many other sensitive, Jewish boys have done for years.

It's nearly impossible for me to think of my family as a thing, as a thing with many different parts, each one in its place, without Aunt Mickey. But soon, very, very soon, she'll be gone. Her stomach is riddled with holes. Her colon is torn to shreds. She's lost thirty pounds in two weeks. It seems that years of taking care of her erratic, bombastic, obscene, unpredictable and Alzheimer's-ridden husband has taken its toll and, while he is still going strong and physically healthy as a thoroughbred at 93, she will be finished, mentally brisk but physically in tatters, at 82.

She was told at the hospital that bowel surgery might save her, but she elected not to be saved-- a pretty predictable choice for a zealous atheist.

"Why should I go through all that?" she asked my father, who went down to Florida to visit her in the hospital, "my children don't need me, my grandchildren don't need me, my husband doesn't know me. I have no friends. Why can't I just decide that it's time to go now?"

Why indeed?

"Look, Mickey is a ball-buster," my father said to me in my dining room last night, coming over for an impromptu pow-wow. I smiled at that, because it's apparently true, and true to the last. "Nobody can tell her what to fuckin' do-- ever. I've known her for thirty-five years-- she was never sick-- not even one day. So, what? Now all of a sudden she's going to have nurses asking her, 'Do you have to make?' Stick some thing up her ass twice a day? Feed her like a baby? Fuck that. Mummy, she's doing it her way, and she's very happy."

A ball-buster is how Mickey will always be remembered in our family, and she would be proud of that moniker. In fact, she might even have left instructions for it to be carved onto her headstone, because that's how she rolls. She was a legend in the music industry far before it was commonplace to see a woman at the head of a Board Room. She had no problem telling men half her age or twice her age to go to hell and I have no doubt that, when she ran meetings, pit-stains and swamp-ass were the order of the day for her underlings.

She was the only person I ever knew who kept a black cook in her house, like Jack Benny or something. Back when she lived in New Jersey and would only summer in Florida, she and her husband would take the train and her "boy" would drive her Cadillac down to Florida so it would be there for her to maneuver erratically throughout the palm tree-lined streets.

And did she ever.

I can remember being in the backseat of Mickey's many Cadillacs as a child and silently praying and nearly wetting myself as she careened through the opposite lane of traffic and acquainting the barge-like car's wire-rimmed wheel-covers with the sidewalk. I also remember, as a very young boy, taking extreme delight in removing my shoes at her place in Jersey and running down her expertly-waxed parquet floors and sliding at least eight or nine feet. I remember watching Three Stooges shorts while lying on her enormous bed with my sister, and I remember finding the first piece of pornography I ever saw in my life: a Beta-Max videocassette called "The Hornymooners."

I remember the bathroom at her place in New Jersey, which was mirrored wall-to-wall, and the inside bathroom door was completely mirrored so that, when the door was closed, you saw your own reflection approximately eighty-seven thousand times. The mirror above the sink was also completely framed in gigantic theatre dressing-room high-wattage lightbulbs, so that you thought you were defecating directly on the Equator.

As we aged, one special treat we looked forward to as kids was going to stay with Mickey at her place in Florida for a week or two weeks, I forget. This event would happen when we got to be around sixteen. My eldest sister went first, of course, and took one of her best friends at the time. They behaved so poorly, and made Mickey scream so ballistically, that they were summarily banned from ever coming back. A few years later, the same exact thing happened to my other sister, who brought our cousin.

I never got my Florida vacation at Mickey's place, but I've made my peace with that. Chances are that it might not have had a happy ending anyway.

My oldest sister and Mickey repaired their relationship and it was better than before. For years, they spoke on the phone nearly every week, and, because my sister is the oldest, Mickey often talked to her like a friend, a confidant, and it indeed harkened back to the early days of my sister's life when Mickey played such an active role in bringing her up after my mother divorced her first husband. My sister is taking Mickey's decision to end her life this way extremely poorly, and with a lot of hostility and frustration. She loves her great-aunt, her last link to her grandmother who died so very young. And Mickey loves my sister.

"I'll never forget," Mickey told my father at the hospital in Florida, "taking your daughter, maybe when she was seven or nine, to a play on Broadway. Had my boy pick her up in a limo... and I was farting all over that limo's beautiful leather seats, and she was horrified! She said she never knew that Aunt Mickey farted! 'Aunt Mickey,' she said to me, 'you can't fart in here! This is a limo!' And I said, 'Honey, I fart wherever I want!'"

I don't know exactly where I'm going with this-- which is unusual for me-- usually the post kind of just pours out and writes itself. I'm not asking for "Awww, I'm so sorry" comments, though I'll take them, but I'm not really pining for sympathy. I'm not terribly sad, it sounds strange to say. As Mickey's son said on Thursday when she was sent home from the hospital with hospice care, "Friday's my mom's birthday, and I think it's going to be her best birthday ever."

And so maybe I just want to send out my wish that I hope Mickey's birthday, her last birthday, was her best ever.

Autopsy Turvy

Tonight, Mrs. Apron and I slumped inertly on the couch and mechanically ate our dinner while watching a re-run of a "Jeopardy!" Teen Tournament. Our living room was stifling, the heat and humidity weighed down on us like a leatherpress, what else could we do? It was way too hot to initiate baby-making procedures in front of old Alex, so we just munched and zoned.

I remembered this episode in particular. During the usually painful interview section of the program, the slut on the right expressed her aspiration to be a doctor. She said that she had already witnessed lung surgery. "And I've held a brain!" she added with some enthusiasm.

Hmpf, I recalled, so have I.

In 2005, as I was nearing the end of my schooling, if you can call it that, to certify me as an emergency medical technician, there were three brief field stints I had to perform. First, logically, I had to complete one eight hour tour-of-duty on an ambulance. I did this at a Philadelphia hospital-based ambulance service, whose name I will neglect to mention so that I don't get sued for libel. I was positively giddy with excitement about my first real shift on an ambulance. Like most things I get positively giddy about in expectation, my shift on the ambulance didn't pan out exactly the way I had hoped.

It was a frigid day in February or thereabouts, and a layer of snow and slush covered the streets of Philadelphia. I arrived for my shift my customary twenty-five minutes early. I would have been even earlier, but I couldn't find the base. A security guard at the hospital directed me to the basement. Just so you know, if you're ever looking for a hospital-based ambulance company-- it's in the basement. There was a big conference table, but no one was sitting at it. There were four or five EMTs and paramedics all huddled around a smaller table atop which sat a fax machine. I soon gathered that they were all faxing their resumes to other ambulance companies.

The obese supervisor stepped in front of them and glowered at me, with my bright white EMT student polo shirt and my fresh-out-of-the-bag navy blue uniform pants and my stethoscope hanging around my neck. He hated me from the word "fag."

"Hi," I said nervously, "I'm, um, an EMT student."

He looked at me like he wanted to shit on his fist and hit me with it.

"Well, obviously," he replied, staring at my shirt.

"Oh."

He shoved a thick hand into his hip pocket and dug around. I assumed he had ringworm or something. He pulled his hand out and thrust a greasy key out in my face. "Move unit A-12," he commanded. "It's in the fucking way."

I took the key and navigated the complex stairs and halls of the hospital, getting lost three times on my way out to the alley where the ambulances were haphazardly parked as if they had been jumbled about by a tornado. In the fucking way of what? I wondered. They're all in the fucking way of... each other. Between the snow and the ridiculous way these things were parked, I didn't see how a single one of them could move anywhere. I arrived at unit A-12. A sorry excuse for an ambulance, it looked as if it had been gang-raped by a trio of 18-wheelers. When I opened the driver's side door, it almost fell off-- the hinges were rusted clean through. I hoisted myself into the vinyl driver's seat, which was carved up like a Christmas goose and I peered at the odometer.

289,600.

Well, I thought, at that rate, unit 12-A wouldn't be in the fucking way for much longer.

The second field placement I had to do was a tour-of-duty in the Emergency Room at the same hospital. EMTs often find gainful employment in emergency rooms across the country, where they go by the title "Critical Care Technician." Basically, they take vital signs on patients and do everything that nurses feel entitled to delegate to someone who makes considerably less money than they do, like lift up incredibly fat people and/or clean out bedpans and vomit basins. Fortunately, I didn't have to do any of that during my emergency room rotation, because I was completely and utterly ignored by the nurses. My presence was only marginally acknowledged upon my arrival (initial my time-sheet here) and upon my departure (initial my time-sheet here). I did finally manage to make my mark on the evening when a transsexual psych-patient locked herself in the bathroom and was refusing orders to come out. A nurse had gathered that not only was she probably doing drugs in there, but that she was armed with a knife. I was told to go get security but, just as I was passing the bathroom, she burst the door open and she bolted out of the exit of the hospital. Not thinking at all, I tore off in chase, racing down a dimly-lit Center City street after her.

"Stop right there!" I screamed at her, my brand-new boots pounding against the pavement.

"Jesus Christ! Stop!" I didn't realize that the security guard who yelled that out was yelling at me until I got within around four or five feet of her and he yelled, "Kid! Stop! Jesus, stop!"

So I stopped and doubled over, panting. I looked behind me and there was an elderly security guard, extremely overweight, about thirty feet back, his hands on his thighs, a nurse behind him, holding my stethoscope, which had flown off during the chase. The tranny turned down an alleyway whilst hooting and laughing and extending her middle finger in my direction.

"Kid," the huffing and puffing whale-of-a-guard said once he'd caught up to me, "once they're off the hospital property-- fuck 'em. She's the cops' problem now. God! You're fucking crazy-- she could have killed you. It's not worth it."

Last up on the field rotation: the autopsy. The rationale behind EMTs attending autopsies is that they ought to have empathy and compassion for the human condition, and attending an autopsy is also a good way to get seeing your first dead body up close and personal out of the way fast. It's kind of ironic that, in seventeen months on the street as an EMT, I never saw a dead body, except one in the ICU of a local hospital that was slumped half out of bed and half on the floor. The curtain hadn't been pulled shut yet and "The Golden Girls" was still playing on the patient's TV. But, yeah, if I had ever encountered a dead person, the autopsy would have been a good primer for that occurrence. Plus, it's a really awesome way to learn anatomy. Most EMTs-in-training, being dickheads in their early 20s, just think it's cool/sick/fucked up. The subject of the autopsy I attended was an elderly woman who had perished while in the hospital. I made sure to stare at her wrist bracelet, mostly so I wouldn't have to stare at any other part of her, but also because I wanted to remember how old she was.

Of course, that was four years ago, and I've forgotten now. She was either 78 or 87. Damned dyscalculia and Alzheimers.

Anyway, I don't know what other people remember about their first autopsy, but I remember the stench that infiltrated my nostrils upon the opening of the woman's bowels. That's a smell no amount of mental Snuggle can ever ameliorate. It was horrid, putrid and fetid. Basically, any adjective that ends with "id" would be accurate. I also remember the smell that emanated from the saw as it buzzed through the woman's skull. It was slightly burnt, slightly sulphuric, slightly nauseating. Once the attending coroner had cut her domepiece entirely off, he used a pair of long, thin scissors to cut through the glistening, gelatinous membrane covering her brain. He told me to cup my hands below what was formerly her head and I thought to myself, "Oh my God, in about six seconds, I'm going to be holding this woman's fucking brain, aren't I?" Then he made two final clips by her occipital lobe and *glorp!* I was holding this woman's fucking brain.

Can I go on "Jeopardy!" now?

A Post As Inevitable As Death Itself

You'd think that, for a person as obsessed with death as I am, I'd write about it more.

I mean, I write a lot about other peoples' deaths, but I kind of shy away from writing about my thoughts about my own. I guess that's because it hasn't happened yet. Or maybe because I'm just too scared.

A few days ago, someone was talking to me about my time as a practicing EMT. She asked me if any of my patients ever died in the ambulance. In just over a year-and-a-half on the street, I am still relieved to report that nobody ever died while under my care, not even the spindly little grammaws who were definitely at least gently tapping on death's door with their brittle fingernails.

"No, no one died on me," I replied, "but plenty of people threw up."

That reminded me of one particular patient who did plenty of throwing up in the back of the ambulance with me. He was an elderly gentleman, very sweet and kind. His first name was Jacob, and he was being discharged via ambulance from the hospital to a long-term care facility. During the ride, he vomited four or five times. I would clean him up and the half-full basin rested on the vinyl bench seat next to me as the contents sloshed around uneasily with every Northeast Philadelphia pothole. He was extremely good natured and repeatedly apologized, which I told him was nonsense. I would take his pulse every five minutes or so, and it was steady and regular, though a bit weak. He had good color and wasn't in any distress.

I leafed through his discharge packet, which contains vitals from his hospital stay, nurses and doctors' notes and observations by the various therapists who visited with Jacob. He had been in the hospital for pneumonia and was having lots of difficulty keeping food down. He was on thickened liquids and had been upgraded to oatmeal just this morning, all of it was now in the pink emesis basin.

When my partner and I plopped him into his bed at the long-term care facility, I gave report to the nurse who accepted him. She, like many nurses, barely listened to my report. I mentioned that he vomited several times and should be kept upright to avoid aspiration. She turned her back to me, the universal sign for "Go Away" and so my partner and I walked out with our clipboard and her signature. Just like when you receive a package from Fed-Ex.

"Should we have taken him to the hospital?" I asked my partner as I opened the rear ambulance door to put the throw-up basin in a biohazard bag.

"Why? Because he lost his lunch a few times?" my partner asked.

"I don't know. That was a lot of throw up."

"Don't think so much," he told me. People are always telling me that. "Come on," he said, "let's get you some coffee, you'll feel better."

The next day, we were summoned to the hospital again and the obese nurse in the yellow scrubs who used to enjoy razzing me stopped us in the hallway.

"Hey, that sweet fella you took yesterday died this morning. I thought you guys should know."

"He did?" I asked. I immediately felt awash in guilt and sorrow.

"Yeah, they rushed him in late last night. Shame."

This was the only patient I had transported that I had heard passed away, though I'm sure others did. I could not shake the feeling that I was in some way responsible for his death, that, if we had taken him emergently to the hospital instead of the care facility that he would have survived. Of course, throwing up a couple of times does not constitute an emergency, but what if you're a frail old man being discharged from the hospital with GI issues, pneumonia and you're an aspiration risk? Is it an emergency then? My partner didn't think so, and he was a paramedic with many more years experience than me. But I couldn't stop thinking about it-- couldn't stop second-guessing myself. Fortunately, I was already one week into my two-week notice when I received the news about Jacob. I don't know how much longer I would have stayed on anyway.

I remember the night that my father's father passed away. He was dying slowly for some time in a nursing home in Australia. My sisters and I were watching "The Hard Way," starring Michael J. Fox and James Woods. We were laughing our asses off in the basement when we were called upstairs into the living room, long the arena of choice for family disputes, debacles and other assorted get-togethers. It was nighttime, pitch black outside, and all the lights in the living room had been turned off. My mother called to us, so that we could follow the sound of her voice, and told us not to turn the lights on. She and my father were on the sofa and he was sobbing, a sight that we were not allowed to see. His Abba was gone, and it was too much for even this old soldier to bear. He held each of us to him and clutched us with his big, awkward hands as his tears got on our arms and clothes.

Now, years and years later, I cannot bear to be at their house in the dark. When my wife and I go over for family dinners, my parents enjoy sitting at the dining room table or in the living room as the sun sets without switching on any lights. As 8:30 or so nears, and it gets a little too dark, it always prompts an uneasy,

"Jesus, can we turn on some fucking lights in here, please? What is this-- a goddamn strip-club?"

I make it into a joke because I have to. I don't want to be in the dark in my parents' house again.

Death's funny-- well, the way you think about it is, at least. I used to fear dying and being mourned and remembered and missed by no one. This, I feel, is the single greatest impetus behind the human animal's desire for fame. Now that I have a wife, I dread death because now there is someone who will mourn, remember and miss me, someone who will most likely, statistically, be left behind. She is the vegetarian in this relationship, after all. And I consume dubiously-coated processed meat.

I don't think that I obsess about death the same way I did when I was a little boy. I used to think about it constantly. It would keep me up at night. The entire night. For days on end, I wouldn't sleep, convinced I would not awaken if I let down my guard. I think I was the only third grader in the Western world with deep, dark purple circles around my eyes. Ironically, as I've aged, those circles have not increased, they've gone away. I sleep soundly through the night, more often than not. I've learned how to be happy in the moment-- somewhat. Though I still catch myself thinking about death, usually at very inopportune moments. Like when the Mrs. and I are having a cuddle on the couch, I'll think about it. Why does a love like this have to end? Why was it ever allowed to start if it has to stop and tear the remaining one of us apart? How and when will it happen? Usually, I'm able to quickly rid my brain of these thoughts and get back to the snuggle, but it always comes back. While we're watching a movie, while I'm walking the dog, while I'm brushing my teeth-- it comes back.

At the dentist last week, I was told that one of my bottom wisdom teeth, that I had previously thought was totally bone-impacted was poking through the gum. The dentist told me I had to get it seen to.

"I know it isn't bothering you now," he said, knowing the cavalier attitude I take towards dental issues, being a notorious appointment-postponer, "but this is an eventual problem. Down the road, maybe when you're in your seventies, you'll develop an small little infection down in there, maybe pneumonia will set in, and that'll be it."

"So, basically what you're telling me is that I'll be killed by my wisdom tooth?"

"Well, maybe," the dentist replied. "Maybe."

Through the paths that I've chosen for myself, I know that my demise will probably not be glorious or newsworthy-- I won't be going down with the shipwreck on the shores of Bermuda, I won't be slain while trying to apprehend a dangerous felon, but I don't think I want to be felled by a fucking toothache. I mean, I realize I'm a bit of a loser, but that's pathetic.

I used to go to my mother with my fears about death, and she'd tell me to stop it.

"If you spend your entire life worrying about death, you'll never get to enjoy life," she'd advise.

"But it's scary," I'd say.

"I know it's scary. But you won't be so scared all the time if you'd stop thinking about it all the time. Cut that shit out," she'd wisely conclude.

While I haven't cut that shit out entirely, I think I'm at a point in my life where I can balance my enjoyment of life with my inevitable thoughts about death.

See, ma? You can have it all.

As long as the lights stay on.

See You in Heaven

Because I live less than half a mile away from my parents house, I have the good fortune to be over there a lot. I'm not sure that many other people would consider such proximity to be fortuitous, but I do.

My wife and I were at my parents house on Sunday for a combined Mother's Day/Masonic Apron Birthday celebratory dinner. My father, who is a late bloomer in the kitchen, cooked his traditional garlic-swathed vegetables and succulent shrimp. (A side note: Yes, he is Israeli, and yes, shrimp are not kosher. We do what we want.)

My oldest sister was in attendance at the dinner, and, being the gossip maven, she kept me abreast of the latest important developments in our small little world:

1.) My aunt and uncle are selling their house, which burned to the ground in 2005 while my aunt was drunk and napping in the bathtub. She only survived because a neighbor saw the fire and ran into the house and got her out. They used the insurance money, and a lot of other money that wasn't theirs, to rebuild greater and grander than before. The house is going for $1.4 million. Cash or check. Paper or plastic.

2.) There is a Cryptosporidium outbreak in Montgomery County. Why does my sister know this? Why, because she elected to receive text message and e-mail alerts from the Montgomery County Health Department to aide in scaring the bejesus out of her, obviously.

Cryptosporidium, by the way, "a gastrointestinal illness caused by parasitic protozoa of the genus Cryptosporidium and can produce watery diarrhea lasting 1--3 weeks; one or two cases per 100,000 population are reported annually in the United States. Fecal-oral transmission of Cryptosporidium oocysts occurs through ingestion of contaminated drinking or recreational water, consumption of contaminated food, and contact with infected persons or animals (e.g., cattle or sheep)."

This information is taken, obviously, from the email message that she forwarded to me the following day. I have since taken steps to limit my intimate contact with cows and sheep, as well as putting the kabash on fecal-oral activities.

Thanks, sis.

If you weren't discussing gastrointestinal diseases at the dining room table at your Mother's Day celebration, I have no doubt that you were at least chit-chatting about death and cemetery plots. No? You're weird. We were.

I forget exactly how it came up-- I think we were talking about my Great Aunt who is currently living in Florida with her 3rd husband, who is 92 years old, in excellent physical condition, but whose brain is being turned into a cottage-cheese-like mixture, not by Hulu, but by Alzheimers. He is uncontrollable. When the two of them go out to dinner, he routinely approaches young, beautiful women and advises them to have sex with him, regardless of whether or not they are already accompanied by a gentleman caller. When my parents visited them in Florida last month, my father complained that the kitchen chair on which he was sitting was very hard. My Great Uncle cried, "AH! Like my PENIS!"

Always an Olympic-level alcoholic, this tendency has only increased with his Alzheimers. Where he used to begin drinking at two or three in the afternoon, my Great Uncle will now commence libation activities at around 9am, consuming twelve to fourteen glasses of vodka or gin (that are watered down with futility by my Great Aunt.)

"You know, she's going to leave him there (in Florida) when he dies," my father said to us at the Mother's Day dinner.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, not entirely surprised.

"Yeah," my father said, smiling mischieveously, "she said that the second he's in the fucking ground she's moving back to Philadelphia."

"Well, where will she be buried?" my sister asked while conducting a necropsy on her eviscerated piece of shrimp.

"With my parents, with us," my mother said with irritation.

"With us, huh? Where the hell are "us"?" I asked.

"My parents are in Frazier."

"Is that where you're going?" I asked.

"I'm going to Heaven," my mother answered with all the confidence of someone announcing that they were going to Trenton or to the gas station.

"Oh, really?" I asked, amused.

"Yes," she answered, cracking a smile.

"Wow. I didn't realize that's where you were going. I guess I should engage in more air travel after you're dead, maybe I'll see you out the fucking window."

My mother laughed at that.

"Sure, you will. I'll be floating around the clouds."

I stared at her.

"Hey, it's better than thinking I'll be stinking and rotting in the ground."

"Well, yeah, you got me there," I said. My father continued eating, no doubt completely disengaged from the current conversation. My father is like HD-TV. Sometimes he's totally tuned in and impressive, and then *poof!* the signal goes out.

"What exactly is it that makes funerals so expensive," my sister pontificated, "is it that people haven't pre-purchased their plots, or is it the service, or.... I mean, what is it?"

"Well, I think part of it is the fucking casket, for Christ's sake," I blurted out. "I mean those fucking boxes alone are, like, $3,000."

"Really?" my sister asked, stunned. I was surprised she hadn't already exhaustively researched and vetted them on Consumer Reports.

"Really," I said, "and those aren't even the ones with power windows."

I asked my mother if they had their plots purchased.

"Yup. Picked out, purchased and paid for."

I admired her businesslike attitude about the whole thing. She's always been a no-nonsense type person, like Margaret Thatcher without the business suits, handbags and cool accent. I guess it was her stoic practicality that made her comment about ascending upwards in a white robe to hobnob with St. Peter and Gandhi so surprising to me. My mother can smell bullshit a mile-and-a-half away and no greater bullshit story has ever been written to surpass Heaven. If there is a Heaven, my mother will be there. I just hope they'll let me have visitation sessions.

Ten or so minutes later, the conversation had moved onto another topic-- God knows what-- I think my wife was putting my sister onto the Consumer Report hunt for a new gas stove for us. In a week, we will have a dossier on ovens bigger and more detailed than J. Edgar Hoover's file on Marilyn Monroe. Ever the perseverator, I turned to my mother.

"So, let's say you decide to get cremated and have your ashes spread in the ocean. If I go snorkeling, will I see you?"