Dying. It’s What We Do These Days

Dying. It’s what we do these days.

We’ve known about dying for most of our lives. We’ve known that animals die, that people die, that dearest loved ones die. It’s something we know, but manage not to feel most days, most of the time.

We’ve known about death ever since Bambi was read aloud to us in third grade. And ever since our parents went off to a funeral, leaving us behind to wonder what it was about death that we children were not allowed to see up close.

Death is. That has been clear to us since we cried for Bambi and his mother.

But, most of the time, we keep death and dying tucked out of sight, inviting it to show its face from time to time in the safety of a tear jerker: “Love Story” or “Romeo and Juliet.”

A Partner Lost

But sometimes death, the fact of it, is not so easily banished, as happened to me with Jon’s passing a year ago today. I lost my partner in life, my world turned upside down, and that upside-downness has created in me an awareness of death’s reality, a reality that refuses to be banished to the far reaches of my psyche. It’s there every day, right next to me.

Jon died, and in recent weeks I’ve learned of three more deaths —  a cousin, a dear friend’s husband, and Jon’s godfather Dave Nelson (featured in two recent blog posts).

I see that this is not going to let up, this dying thing. I’m 80 years old now, and so are all of my high school and college classmates. My newspaper colleagues, most of them, are in the queue, not far behind.

People will be dying on me for as long as I have left to live. One real-life tear jerker after another will come my way over the next two, ten, twenty years.

A Father’s Words From Beyond

After my father died at age 78, my mother arranged for my brothers and me to see his body at the funeral home. That was a good thing. I was able to say the words I needed to say, a simple, “Good-bye, Dad.”

And in return I got a message from my father that surprised me. My father was a tough-minded, no excuses person, a realist — so I was surprised that his message to me was a kindly, reassuring one: “It’s OK to die.”

It’s OK to die.

Dying — It’s What We Do These Days

Dave McQueen died last September. Dave is — was — the kind of person you’d expect to be there indefinitely.

During the ’70s, Dave was a prominent radio personality here in the Bay Area. He delivered the news on KSAN-FM to his youthful listeners in a sonorous Texas drawl. His obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle called him “the Walter Cronkite of the counter-culture.” (Remember the counter-culture?)

Dave broadcasted the news. Jon wrote about it for Zodiac, his alternative news service. Dave subscribed to Zodiac. He was Jon’s muse. If Dave picked up and read one of Jon’s stories on the air, Jon’s day was made.

And now Dave McQueen is gone. So is Gordie Fox, a high school classmate who was the glue that held together the Birmingham, Michigan, High School class of 1959 and coaxed us to attend its reunions decade after decade.

A Mid-Century Cohort

We — our cohort — have been moving inexorable through the stages of life, one after the other. Like it or not.

Not so long ago, a decade or two, when our parents were still alive and growing frail, it fell to us to look after them. That is what we were doing then, we products of post-war, mid-century America. And there was a solace to it. If I was facing up to my mother’s failing capacities, I wasn’t the only one. I had company. Everybody was doing it. It’s what we did then.

And this is what we do now. Our parents are gone. It’s just us. And this is what we do — Dave McQueen, Dave Nelson, Jon Newhall and, one of these days, you and me. We die.

Everybody’s doing it.

Another dear friend I’d like to remember here: Mary Ann Hogan, a coworker during my years at the Oakland Tribune. Her husband, Eric Newton, also a Trib colleague, saw her book project to its completion after her death in 2019. (The book is about Mary Ann’s father, a San Francisco Chronicle colleague.) Its title — “Circle Way,”

Need to read something upbeat? Try “Small Boys — Reading, Writing and Yucky.”  And, “I’m the Mother of the Groom — Now What Do I Do?”