Cemetery strolls summon perspective on death’s ways

I spent a couple of hours this week walking through Spokane’s cemeteries, reading headstones. The walk felt familiar and comfortable. I grew up with a Memorial Day tradition of visiting the graves of dead family members.

At age 5, after placing flowers on my grandmother’s grave, I asked my parents why we couldn’t just dig her up. My fascination with death began early and continues. In college, I grew obsessed with poets obsessed with death. As a feature writer long ago, I focused on grief stories. And death has claimed several of my family members and friends.

So today seemed the appropriate time to share some of my “death notes” – observations on death and dying. Morbid? Perhaps, but here they are for your consideration:

•Mystery and chance often determine the timing of a person’s death.

I’ve interviewed people in their 90s who were so sickly as children that no one thought they’d make it to adulthood. They did – and outlived all their stronger siblings. And how about those women and men whose plans changed at the last minute, sparing them the crashed plane, the deadly fire? The 1918 influenza epidemic claimed men and women in their prime, rather than frail children and older folks.

John Wesley Powell, during a pioneering trip down the Colorado River in the late 1800s, scouted an enormous rapid near the end of the expedition. Three of the men climbed out of the Grand Canyon rather than face the rapid, sure they would drown if they didn’t. They reached safety, only to then be killed by Indians.

Author Wallace Stegner wrote, “They lay out there, victims of an Indian misunderstanding and their own miscalculation of the algebra of chance.”

•Dying people “choose” who will be with them at the moment of death.

This phenomenon occurs mostly with older people who lapse in and out of awareness as they journey toward death. They cannot usually say, “I want so and so here with me at the final moment.” But they seem to die just when their “chosen” people have gathered around them.

I don’t have a rational explanation for this, but some hospice experts have also noted the phenomenon. And I have collected anecdotes from friends and acquaintances.

One matriarch of a big family died with only her oldest son present, perhaps in keeping with the cherished-oldest-son tradition in their family’s culture. Ultraprivate people sometimes wait until their loved ones have left the room. Dying parents often hold on while sons and daughters catch flights home. I don’t believe the chosen ones are necessarily the dying person’s favorites but I do believe they are chosen purposely and for a deeper reason.

•In the end, our lives get reduced to a single headline.

While reading grave markers this week, I saw that a man named George is “now building in the house of God.” Popular “headlines” on tombstones include women who were “beloved mothers, grandmothers, wives” and couples who are now “together forever.”

News headlines scream at us with urgency: Iran flirts with nukes! Toxic chemicals saturate our bodies! The globe warms!

A cemetery walk offers perspective. These folks worried, too, about crazy world leaders, about toxic infections, about the changing weather. They bolted awake at 3 a.m., distressed about work and family. And here they are now, buried among us, illustrating where all our worries ultimately come to rest.

This is the blessing of death, and of the holiday set aside to ponder it. Happy Memorial Day.