Beyond Human Existence: Living and Dying in Suburbia

By Angelo Zuccaro

This is an anthology of my work in short stories, essays, poems, and scripts about someone who grapples with his existential angst. There are eternal problems from the dawn of man to be solved philosophically, but there are always special problems in each era that require our immediate attention due to the lifestyles we choose and the way that families, societies, culture, and civilizations come together and sometimes break apart. It is during those moments of the day when the residue of what we have said and done falls from grace and is distilled and bottled under our particular brand that makes the existence of our marvelous species worthwhile and ready to pass on to the next generation. This book is dedicated to those that are young in spirit and romantic to the furthest reaches of our mortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532065057

Angelo Zuccaro

Angelo Zuccaro is a writer working in the Greater Toronto Area where he lives with his family. He has a degree in philosophy from the University of Toronto and studied acting and screenplay writing at George Brown College.

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Copyright © 2018 Angelo Zuccaro.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-6504-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-6505-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018914798

iUniverse rev. date: 12/22/2018

Contents

A Day in the Country

A House in Ruin

A Human Story

My Mother’s New Home

A Journey Through This World

Nostalgia for Happier Times

Alone in the Crowd

Angels

Arriving and Leaving

Autumn Leaves

Backstory

Sunday with James

Summer’s End

52 ½

A Canadian In Cuba

My Mother’s New Home

D

Liberation of Human Life

The Bricklayer’s Apprentice

Paradise

Wild and Free

Being Human

Carol

Delirious

Delirium

Demons Death and Beyond

Lightstone

A Silent Season

Nostalgia for a New Life

The Empty Soul

Part Three: Death as the Final Insult

Living in Denial

Lonely Men

Looking for Marlon Brando

Nostalgia for Clarity

Sally

The Adjudicator

The Forgotten Tribe

The March Toward Civilization and Loss of Self

The Running Man

THE STALKER

Death

Destination

Do Cats Dream?

Emptiness

Escape

Everyone Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die

Everyone Garden Grows One

Fall

FALLING

Familiar and Lost Places

Fleeting Images

Flowers Don’t Grow Here Anymore

Glaring Into the Abyss

God Panic

Hell is People

Life is Like a Shopping Mall

In Our Time

Infernal Summer

Island Girl

Just in Time

Life is a Good Joke with no Punch Line

Lost Illusions

Meeting Conrad Black

Mid Afternoon Dream on a Sunday

Migration

Moments

Mrs. Kimono

Nostalgia

Ode to the Unemployed No. 1

Optimists at a Funeral

People

Poem for a Sunday Afternoon

Return to Innocence

REVOLUTION

Riding With a Pack of Ordinary Wolves

Sad Sundays

SHINNY PLAYERS

Strange Days

Sunday Dread

Sundays in Summer

The Acceptance of Death

The Adjudicator

The Admission

The Awakening

The Burning Bridges of Time

The City of Light and Shadow

The Clash Of Civilizations

The Dead Are With Us

The Dead of Winter

The Double Life

The Drop Off Point

The End Of Days

The End of the Day

The Existential Fog

The Fall of Man

The Fall of the Angels

The Fall and Rise of the Individual

Working

The Flying World

The Foreigner

The Frozen Landscape of the Past

The Full House

The Good Man

The Graveyard of Broken Furniture

The Grinning Jogger

The Heart and the Mind are not speaking to each other!

The House

The Human Condition

The Human Face

The Human Story

The Human World and the God World

The Immortality Game

The Intersection

The Land

The Long Goodbye

The Meaning Behind Meaninglessness

The Meaning of Life Question

The Measure of all Things

The Moment

The Mortality Game

The Night

The Open Sea

The Ordered Universe

Death Oh Kind Death

The Perfect Summer

The Pessimist

The Polish Nurse

The Precarious Business of Being Human

Henny Youngman opens with the line; Take my wife……..please!

The Race of Days

The Race

The Road back from Nostalgia

The Room on the Third Floor

The Running Man

The Rusting Junkyard

The Sadness of our Human Condition

The Scientist Who Couldn’t Spell

THE SHOPPING CHANNEL

The Silent Death

The Solitary Animal

The Stairway to Heaven

THE STALKER

The Sun and the Wind and the Little Boy

The Totality of Being

The Traveller

The Troubled Heart

The Venetian Ball

The Weather

The Winter Drift

There’s No Place Like Home

Time Travel

Today

Tragedy and Loss

Tragedy

GOD DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE

Wallace Lee

We are not children anymore

What is Truth if Not You

What is Truth if Not You

Where are they all going?

Where have all the sad young men gone?

Where Night meets Morning

Why is Passing Time Important?

Why Men Never Last

Wild and Free

Windswept Worlds of the Abyss

ZUCCHINI

Apocalypse of the Soul

A Summer Place For All Time

MEDITATIONS OF A LONELY SAILOR

DEADLY AFFAIR

Achilles Heel Revisited

Across The Continental Divide

An Exiled Life

Beyond the Shadow of Light

Black and White

Family Reunion on Christmas Day

Staying or Going

Here Today Gone Tomorrow

In a different time

In the Dead of Winter

La gioventu

Man in the World

Night Street

Old Earth, Old Friend

Old Man Winter

One drink leads to another

Poem for Remembrance Day

Relative Lives

Saturday, Sunday

The City That Knows How to Wait

The Death of a Man in the World

THE FORGOTTEN TRIBE

the friendly old tree

The Invasion of my Soul

THE LIFE OF AN ABSURD MAN

The Same

The Scent of Wood

the sun

The Time Has Come

There Was a Time

this winter

Time To Move On

what is this life without freedom

Diary of a Deadbeat Dad Saving Money

Living and Dying in Suburbia

Part Two: The Resurrection

Part 3-How will we pass the Time?

Part Three: Death

A Silent Season

Nostalgia for a New Life

The Empty Soul

Part Three: Death as the Final Insult

Lonely Men

Sally

The Acceptance of Death

The Pessimist

Ruffy

A Day in the Country

On Wednesday I spent a day on a farm in Halton Hills with my colleagues and students. I had gone to Scenic Acres last year with the same staff and students but this year felt different. There was a strange sense that this farm was going to close down and become another decaying sore spot in the country unless you were the kind of painter that liked painting old dilapidated barns. My lawyer was of that ilk and he enshrined these stalwart wooden tombs in his art for generations to come.

To kill some time I chatted with the blonde cashier, a summer college student, fa shurrr, who exuded insouciance I thought only the French could perfect. It seemed self-evident the old guy who owned the place had had enough and his children weren’t willing to carry on the tradition. They were in absentia in the background like intransigent ghosts.

Left behind with Dave in his wheelchair we felt like pariahs with no homeland in sight. We hung around the store where the overpriced wine, eats and treats were laying about in carefully packaged wrappings and containers. They were stubbornly waiting to be sold to the naïve but willing tourists who gobbled up the stuff like the food of a Thanksgiving dinner. I bought some corn and an apple pie after some wine tastings. I find that alcohol consumption lowers my ability to avoid impulse purchases. Despite my inebriation I managed to arouse a freshly resurrected pride and prudence and bought no wine.

I was soon bored with looking at the obscenely priced items of honey, jams and wines and so I went outside to chat with the Mexican farm laborers. They were eager to hear the gossip about why the farm was being sold. Sadly this would translate into a loss of employment for them. I changed the subject and reminded them that soon they would be swimming in the warm rivers and oceans of their hometowns in Mexico. This forced them to forget about the grudging farm labor and the cold northern winds blowing across the abandoned fields of raspberries and pumpkins at Scenic Acres. Based on the emotionless expression on their sun-drenched faces my consolation was of no avail.

The cold of mid October and the desolate location of this farm didn’t stop the arrival of busloads of school children, mostly from local elementary schools, rampaging through the bails of hay and playgrounds set up to keep them occupied. I was part of a high school that dealt with special needs students that looked more like inmates on parole than visitors out to enjoy the great outdoors. Overall they behaved admirably. It was implied that the staff were assigned the role of the warden but it was like trying to herd cats.

I beckoned them toward the fenced-in display of sheep, chickens and an improvised Halloween exhibit that was still there from the year before. I hadn’t visited the exhibit this year yet I imagined it was hard to appreciate the cheeky display of zombies, vampires and disemboweled victims of foul play in broad daylight. The students disappeared down the pathway and left Dave and I to our own devices with a wayward student who volunteered his services by pushing Dave across the bumpy pathways of the farm.

Once we finished with the walk through the animal farm Dave and I retreated to the raspberry fields for a tour of the neglected rows of fruit. I ate my fill feeling somewhat guilty that I should have paid for them. This made me feel like a criminal who might conclude that being on his own honor was both impractical and facetious in this situation.

We headed back toward the company store to chat with the pretty blonde cashier. She was attractive but out of sorts and gave you the impression she was stuck out here in the country begrudgingly catering to stuffy tourists who didn’t know what to buy with their money. I probed her for a backstory and discovered that she was studying to be a legal assistant. This was the answer she gave me after stupidly asking her if she studied agriculture. She seemed to spend most of the time trying to avoid any contact with the customers by sneaking free cups of coffee and closing the doors the customers had left open. This she did with clinical precision to prevent the cold polar winds from entering her lonely, little part of the world behind the counter. She hugged her wool sweater and made love to her cup of java. In plain view she used her grey and white coat as camouflage to hide from the people she hoped would go away. Since Dave and I had nothing to do we bugged her anyway.

The customers stayed and grew in number as she shuttled back and forth at being both the host behind the wine tasting counter and the cashier. The owner popped into the wine shop to remind her about placing the plastic spoons in the proper spot or something. She responded with the insouciance of a teenager as the man soon walked away with his bow-legs and Canadian cowboy demeanor and all I could think of was getting drunk with his strange black current wines and having hot monkey sex with the blonde up the stairs to a place that had a chain across the front claiming it was for employees only. I couldn’t help thinking that it led to a forbidden room where employees made love to keep from going insane from the drudgery of their meaningless lives way out here in God’s Country.

One student was behaving aggressively with the other students and his father was called to pick him up. That put a damper on the noble teacher who stayed behind and sadly missed the festivities. It is worth mentioning why the teaching profession is one of the nobler professions since what we are asked to do on many occasions is above and beyond the scope of most jobs. We are at any given moment a parent, friend, custodian, nurse, travelling partner, a comedian, tyrant, therapist, demi-god and drama king and lastly judge, jury and executioner without the prior approval of any court or overseeing body. All of this is done in absentia and in locus parentis. Oh, yes and somewhere along the line some teachin’ and some learnin’ happens!

This day sort of ran away with the imperceptive ticking of a country clock. The fleeting time made me feel restless and troubled with the creeping notion that one relaxed on a farm and drove down country roads that never ended. We arrived with our yellow school bus around ten and left three hours later; yet one o’clock seemed to take forever to arrive because Dave and I were outside the loop of activities.

Everything that day, including the people I met, seemed to fade into the blurred Autumn landscape of a decaying countryside. The Mexican laborers, whose faces were wrinkled by toil and wind while squinting at the sun looked like a mixture of Latino pathos and hope. What remained prescient to this day were the expressions grafted onto their brown smiles and skin inherited from the scorching heat of Mexico. Though the sun here at Scenic Acres was the same as the Mexican one the Canadian sun shone with a melancholic tug of the heartstrings. It spilled onto the shadowy landscape from the ominous October clouds and it lit up the countryside with a strangely divine and almost unworldly light. The falling yellow leaves captured some of this light as they fell from grace and collected in pools by your feet and though the crops were scant and almost gone, I felt like winter would never arrive here. In my delusion of sound and light I assumed that the cold and snow would arrive somewhere else in Canada, but not here.

I knew I could never live happily outside a city like Mississauga or my native Toronto. I realized what pretentious snob I had become letting Loblaw’s do all my hunting and fishing while providing me with a secure food supply. I knew that some of my food was grown on farms like Scenic Acres but that this farm wasn’t a real farm but one where tourists picked there own fruit and chose a huge pumpkin for Halloween because members of the owner’s family were too lazy to do the work. The boss had to bring in Mexicans to do all the heavy lifting. The farmer at least in the traditional sense was becoming extinct. Food was now grown on the production lines of hydroponic greenhouses or from the fecund fields of countries far away that had two, three and four growing seasons throughout the year.

The sun barely made its presence felt all day. I had hoped that the sun would soon be available as it lurked behind the clouds that threatened to spill its water from the reservoirs of the clouds controlled by a heavenly group of Mexicans specialized in the rain department of Paradise. They could pull the string that would release the cascading rain from up above while God and nature remained on vacation here on Scenic Acres.

I thought of the farm my uncle had near Kettleby Ontario where I spent countless happy days frolicking among its tall grasses and apple trees or hiding in the dilapidated barn after drinking too much wine during family festivities. The country life was something I passed through but could not stay long enough to understand. I had this dread of living on a farm and assumed that everyone died by the time they were thirty as the tombstones from the nearby cemetery of my uncle’s farm clearly revealed. They had lived from 1895-1924 or 1902-1932. In those early days if tuberculosis didn’t kill you, boredom and insanity might. I like to think of those poor souls dying for a just cause in some foreign war.

I still feel that the best and worst of what life can give you must flow into out of cities and not the towns and villages of the country. As I look now outside at the passing cars and trucks of a main street where I live I gladly welcome them any day over the horses and wagons of an era when people were alienated and suffered from being disconnected to cities. Everything we need and love must be close by, near our homes and jobs; schools and universities, museums, and art galleries and libraries, sports stadiums and a guaranteed, secure food supply from a Loblaw’s or No Thrills (No Frills). We need to be near hospitals and clinics for the sick and aged.

All of this kind of living keeps us from being forgotten in time as we become sketchy characters grafted onto a canvas of pastel colors on a farm perhaps just north of where you live; while the ravages of rain, wind and time chart their course and bury their dead much too early. One day in the country was worth five weeks in the city. I clambered back onto the old, yellow bus with my motley crew of teachers and students. The fumes from the diesel fuel spewed out the muffler of the bus and signed our names across the rarefied air of the countryside. We rolled over the asphalt roads and disappeared into the hills lost forever in the spoils of a happy day. We all felt proud and lazy and eager to go home.

A House in Ruin

Facing southeast toward Toronto I gazed out of my tiny washroom window and saw the Toronto skyline in the early hours of a Saturday morning. The CN Tower was visible from 25 kilometers as the line of vision ascended toward the grey billowing clouds that link the memories of my childhood so long ago in the city to the nothingness that has now become my reality. Everything I smelled back then stank of the passions of youth. The long days of ball hockey playing in the church parking lot we affectionately called The Churchyard and the stirring curiosities brought on by the insatiable consumption of reading books were all part of a happy, normal life. Nowadays I can’t get my son away from his online computer adventures to play ball hockey with the local kids.

Much older now I looked deeply into my memory bank to remember that the past is merely a distraction, a chimera that keeps me busy, avoiding the challenges I confront as an adult. In my early teen years I formed a rather indifferent attachment to the local church where I performed duties as an alter boy. Later I made friends with a more street savvy, virile boy that led me down the irreversible pathway of a lustful and willing sexual exploration of the flesh. Other than the fleeting pursuit of sports activities and reading there was no other human meaning for me other than an obsession with losing myself in acts of love and pursuing carnal knowledge. I would go through the motions of praying, acts of confession and my alter boy duties at a St. Nicholas of Bari Church with the insouciance of a pedantic Parisian.

I spent grade nine and ten in a private school in Toronto until I moved to attend a public school in the suburbs where girls were simply strange and marvelous creatures that aroused my primal urges to achieve one thing; the satisfaction of the sexual drive. I left the age of reason and entered the battle zone between men and women. Yet there was a silent, almost imperceptible and often invisible zone where raging hormones aligned themselves to target and attract those female beings I was sexually attracted to.

Whether you stay single or marry a blonde, a black haired woman or Siamese twins joined at the hips and whether she or they come from a small country or a large one; whether you have one, two or no children seems like a small detail compared to the cause you choose to take up and fight for. I have come across many men who seem lost and without a good reason to live because they don’t have a good cause to pursue. Women today are equally pursuing causes other than the domestic life and rearing children. They are equal partners in the game and fight fiercely to gain status and use their power to change the way the world is.

Once the children grow or the day when retirement is at hand, whether or not you are divorced and stay married to the bitter end; you still need a cause and reason to wake up in the morning.

I was no different in this regard. I just turned sixty and felt that the world was winding down. My athletic prowess diminished but my spirit is very much alive and ready to make life interesting. The colleagues I work with, the students and staff at the learning institutions where I spend a good part of the day, all vanish from sight by the weekend. Soon the memories will too. The day ends and I find myself puzzled at the prospect of questioning my mortality. The family members that still grin long after their death inside the black and white photographs scattered throughout the house; at one time were alive with their own personalities and way of doing things. I drive by old schools I used to work at and I recall the many smiling faces of the children yet the ones that passed away from debilitating medical conditions still haunt me.

It’s strange but I feel l kind of consolation from the deaths of some people; especially the ones I didn’t get along with. After my mother’s death I had the impression that her spirit and memory are still alive in a certain way. Sometimes I like to play god and think I can resurrect the souls of my deceased parents by making children. I get this uncanny feeling that my son is the reincarnation of my father and so now I have to help conceive a girl and bring back my mother. Funny how we are prone to recreate the past by resurrecting the dead through the reincarnation of our deceased parents by giving birth to our children so they can act out the roles of our long dead parents and often siblings, relatives and friends.

Death becomes some people especially when there time is up. I like to think that I can live to a ripe old age, ripen and fall to the ground to die. I do stare at fallen leaves or apples and wonder about their life cycle as I do about my own when I die. I have had this obsession since my teen years. I wondered back then what I would look like when I was forty, then forty-six and then sixty. Here I am at sixty and still feel no closer to the truth about death.

The greys of November are here and the roofers who came to repair my roof are long gone. The leak remains unrepaired and despite the threat of looming lawsuits, still can’t keep the cold rainwater from trickling through the ceiling. It feels like the world is bleeding and winding down to a deserted and arid desert in the middle of the city. The homeless have given up long ago and are wandering the cities sober or drunk and crazy while the terrorist kill the innocent and naïve Parisians as they dance, sing or walk the rainy streets of the Left Bank.

Yet life has always been a blessing to me. All I have to do to smile is look out my third floor window and while watching the passing traffic I drift back to the memories of my youth and remember. While my memory is permanently etched onto the back of my brain the past remains sacredly frozen and I can choose to spend the end of days remembering my youth with a certain insouciance that makes me happy.

That is where everything ends and the screen of life would go blank if it were not for the memory of things. What keeps us alive is not the illusion of immortality but the encoded aspect of our gestures and the memory that lives on by someone who once loved you. Mona Lisa must have been loved by someone; a husband, child or mother. Her enigmatic and enduring smile and eyes shine and follow you to every corner of the room. Yet she was mortal and died long ago and has become the most famous and talked about painting in the world.

Do we endure in the mind and hearts of those we loved and lost? If not do we fade away into oblivion? I would rather have lived and been remembered as a living, breathing virile man than the stark and frozen image of a woman painted on a piece of wood.

A Human Story

The beginning of life is also the end of life. All stories great or small, for even the small ones are worth telling, begin where they end. As preposterous a claim as that extols a reality that has pitilessly placed us in a situation we perhaps never asked for nor deserved. Yet everything worthwhile is not what we think we deserve but what we fight for and experience through our conscience. We are after all, as my brother-in-law Renato once remarked; ‘A product of our genetics’! Yet live we must with quality or quantity until our final days.

The moment they say is king and where spontaneity gives way to our neurotic claims, well so what! Whether we don’t know who are what we are or whether we build an idealized self from the ashes of a self that was buried or lost in time by forces stronger than the ones capable of destroying them; in the end we still have to live with the life we have. If you are alive that is paramount and as for the rest of your life, history has been made for others to discover. If you are dead then you were someone that was once alive and accomplished something but lived and so something irreplaceable was born whose ashes have been implacably etched in stone forever.

In my silence and solitude I can hear a dog barking. At times the dog is silent like me and I wonder if at any time the dog thinks or aspires to be something greater than what is was born to be; a dog. In my heart I soon realize that it is impossible for a Beagle to be a Cocker Spaniel just like it is impossible for me to be an Asian or a Black Man. My genetics has determined what I am since conception and I am bound by my genotype and the phenotype that everyone recognizes as me and so I am bound by what I have become so far. That doesn’t mean I can’t aspire toward self-idealization and a god-like status although this may seem unrealistic and unattainable. What you say, a god! Such arrogance in humans nonetheless a human aspiration lest we forget that there is a spark of the divine in us!

As a human we are always thinking about being something more than what we are and want something more than what we have. If we are wealthy but squander our money then we are still wanting and this defeats the whole purpose of becoming rich. If we are struggling to find some lasting peace and joy but for some reason belittle our attempts through self-doubt even if it is of an undeserved nature, we are still wanting. But if we just slip into that quiet part of the day when we shut our eyes and day dream about a past full of youth and free play, exploring new ideas and worlds beyond the one given to us; the glory we pursue will find us again without the wanting that has eluded our best intentions all these years.

The orbits we pursue remind us of what we once had and yet we cross paths with the same habits and people we have grown fond of just like the law of attraction stipulates. Does this happen for a reason we can’t see but hope to feel as something authentic and important in our lives? It must be so for to feel whole again despite our fragmented lives disrupted by the pitfalls and obstacles set in our way we have to find that magic, that feeling that connected us to what made us feel alive with the love we deserved.

My Mother’s New Home

I was always a carefree sort of man. I have a passion for the classics especially the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. However people started to question my attitude when they noticed how strangely I acted toward the death of my mother. I felt at peace when she passed away for I spent most evenings making my way toward the hospital bed where my mother lay staring at the clock and numbering her days. If she weren’t awake she would be in a semi-conscious state or in a deep sleep. Her chest would heave up and down indicating to me that the breath of life was still in her.

On her final day, a Thursday night, I meandered along the bike path to the hospital to be with her. I had to almost ignore an old colleague along the way who recognized me and tried to engage in a conversation. I said I had to visit my mother who was deathly ill. The words trailed out of the mouth of the woman and then faded away as I pedaled onward.

What’s wrong………

What’s wrong, I thought. What’s wrong is she’s eighty-nine years old!

I was alone with my mother except for the other woman in the bed next to her as the odd nurse or caregiver who would flit into and out of the room, attending to the patients almost undetected. I found my mother in the same state that night, unconscious and in a deep, peaceful sleep. The smell of lingering death, that all palliative care facilities are notoriously famous for, permeated into my nostrils and filled me with a sense of doom and gloom. I had to escape and un outside to the patio next door where I could be distracted by the sounds and sights of a city ready to bring the day to a close.

The idea that hospital life comes to a close when the sun sets, is just another concept hard to accept. In reality it is a place that churns out new life on one floor and welcomes the grim reaper onto its premises on another floor. This human cycle of life and death is played out in the safe, sterile confines of a modern, efficient institution, staffed by trained professionals. The interior is under attack by its own internal microbes and pathogens. The exterior exudes a façade of calm control, with the exception of the blaring shrill of the ambulance as it races through the streets on route to its garage adjacent to the emergency ward. Otherwise the impression you get is that you are now entering a safe haven. The whole show seems unnatural and yet we flock under its roof when the shit hits the fan and God seems to be in a panic mode via his beloved human creation.

Nonetheless the patio helped me to overcome my nausea and the dismal state I found my mother in that Thursday. My mother’s death seemed perfectly timed, (I had just finished the semester as a teacher’s assistant), to begin a new era of acceptance, reflection and a resigned hope that she would fade away into that good night without a hitch. It seemed that time can be either a friend or a nuisance. This time, time was a friend and her death was convenient because it now gave me the whole summer to be absorbed in my latest obsession; the processing of death since it was so close to home. For others in my family it may not have been for they had already made plans to go to some exotic shore or to their cottages. For me death became more intimate since the person who had brought me into the world was gone. The body that had incubated me from all harm and hostility was gone. The last remnant of the umbilical cord had faded away and I now I was free floating in the matrix called earth; a halfway house between birth and death.

I saw her life and soul leave but I wasn’t convinced. I had to try a more personal approach and so I pushed her skin and though it left an impression there was nothing that responded. The soul I knew as my mother left no imprint. I could make no impact that would last. The whole experience left me cold and alienated from a life force that was the most human I ever knew. I simply was lost for words and death itself could not move me. I was determined to say a resounding ‘No’ to death and ‘Yes’ to life.

I pulled myself together and asked a caregiver who had just wondered in, someone I never met before, to let the staff know what had happened so they could undergo the begrudging task of confirming her death. It took more than an hour for a nurse to respond to the grim task of identifying what I knew was the truth. My mother had breathed her last breath of life and I was there to witness it.

This was a woman who was wise beyond her years. She had lived through World War Two seemingly unscathed and produced three children with me in the middle between my older sister and younger brother. I now had a new puzzle to solve. Who was this mysterious person who had lived 90 years and who had left without any fanfare, formal announcements or blip on the evening news. I only knew that she had been a good person, kind and generous, and very humble and wise. I was left standing there, emotionless and in awe and wonder about the whole process of death. It seemed to take forever for someone to arrive to confirm what had seemed very obvious to me. I didn’t care if she had given the best gift a mother could give her son other than life. She had given me a chance to stare at death right in the face. I then realized why there is so much confusion here on the ground. Everyone is either in a free fall from grace or running away from the reality that death is all about us ready to claim our corporeal state and rob us of our unbridled innocence without even so much as a ‘how do you do’ or a thank-you!

Death I had come to know as a sneaky, stealthy and conniving conspirator. Death could also be a relief, a reprieve from a prolonged, suffering terminal illness. Death hid in every corner in an unlit space in that hospital room; a rather banal and boring friend that overstayed its welcome. It snuck in as a shadow under the hospital clothes of the staff, the linen and bed sheets that were folded, forming part of the sterile and inhospitable landscape of a world that entombed my mother and never let her go home again.

I had my reservations and fears about hospitals but now I loathed them even more for what they were, the sanitary hollows where the Grim Reaper lives and breathers; a place of ill repute that would not allow my mother the strength and strategy necessary to combat this stealthy enemy. Surgery, chemotherapy and the miracle waters I had brought to her from ‘The Fountain of Youth’ high up in the escarpment near my home were all ruled out as a last ditch rescue attempt. After my long discussions with people still alive and healthy, there was no illusion left under the sun that could save my mother. She was never going to get out of this conspicuous rabbit hole alive. Somebody plugged both ends of the hole with morphine and nurses. The worried looks and finally the moment of truth would arrive; death itself was something mobile, shifting and inconspicuous right up to the last second of life. Death had many faces and no face. Time could not pin it down to any hour, minute or nanosecond.

Death like life moved in mysterious circles, bobbing and weaving, biding its time releasing its venom at will. Humans were at the mercy of an old crafty master, wise and artful, learning and preying on the sick and weak, the young and brave, the cowardly and unlucky. If there was a kind and merciful God he was there at the end alongside me, like a guardian angel. I couldn’t help but think He left the room that night to attend some other place. My mother died because God had known all along that his work with her was done. It was now in the hands of some force that brings to a close what God could not bring himself to do so He outsourced Death to someone more qualified, more human and impartial; the funeral director and staff, the priests and the laborers who dig and prepare the plot for burial.

Yet it was the viewing that perplexed me the most. She was set in coffin in a surreal state of repose but it wasn’t the woman I had kissed on the forehead that last Thursday night. It was the caricature of someone that pleased the people that do the embalming, the ones that make coffins and the flower arrangers who stand in line and must be paid for their morbid work. I have nothing against a person who drives a Hearst for a living or who administers the last rights to a dying person. Everyone has to make a decent living somehow. What I find confusing are the little things people do to send people off on their last journey in life. For instance my sister put my mother’s glasses in the casket alongside her body by her arm. Personal effects mean a lot to people during life but in death it means very little unless she has to read the directions, the signposts, hopefully in Italian; to get to Heaven. I like to think that we all board a passenger jet and ascend into the sky, through the clouds and then after some turbulence, some shock and awe we reach our destination; the land of movies, restaurants and field trips. After which comes the judgment and playback of a video to remind us what we did well and what we did badly. Then comes the reincarnation so we can enjoy it better the next time around.

Mom was taken on a ride to a place of rest where the living hold onto to the image of what being human means; the false sense that everything goes on forever as long as you’re alive. People laugh, cry and seemed lost until they in turn are reminded of their own mortality. Then there is a scramble for questions, ideas and more questions about what to do with the rest of your life before its too late. Yet it is always too late to live because the moment has come and gone while you were sleeping, eating, making love or just lying to get by. It’s like when you think about time. When you least suspect it time is never enough when you start to wonder where it has gone. It does make its appearance the moment you ask where it has gone? Time like life is wasted when you allow it to be bought and sold into the hands of others less qualified and less knowing of yourself.

My mother was always in control of herself and what she wanted to do. This is why she gained in stature during her death despite its lethal impact. She accepted her situation and she met death squarely where death used to live but now ran out of breath because my mother’s body failed, the tissues broke down and her spirit gave flight. Death is always a few steps behind life. The life of her soul had left a dying body to ascend to its next phase, my conscience.

I had my squabbles with her but I now understood that while her dying shut one window in my life it opened a wider portal that may lead me to a more profound meaning and spiritual quest about how the universe works and why I was brought here?

Like most other nights at the hospital I would rest my folded arms on the steal railing of the patio and gaze at people walking about playing out various roles. There was hospital staff starting their shift as they sauntered with a hurried step as opposed to those on their breaks who were aimlessly stepping here and there in the parking lot glued to their cell phones or puffing on a cigarette. Life seemed to go on outside the hospital room in a kind of video arcade where everyone walked, talked, laughed and little children whined and cried as they all bounced around like the steel balls in a pin ball game.

Yet inside the third floor of the older section of the hospital where people were spending the end of their days struggling with the tubes hooked up to their bodies life moved in a slower and slower orbit until time itself was frozen and strung its last few pearls across the minds and hearts of the death and dying.

My mother was no exception though despite her cancerous condition never complained, remained courageous and stoic to the bitter end. I suppose she resigned herself to her imminent death when she realized she was loosing her strength, appetite and will to fight off the tumor lodged in her colon. It was diagnosed on the Easter weekend of 2015 and two and half months later she died.

As I mentioned she was hardly alone in the palliative ward. I brushed up against all kinds of people at various levels of chronic and acute illness. Some were in the healing process and would leave soon. Some would never leave due to the seriousness of their condition. The people with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease perhaps didn’t realize where they were or who they were?

I met a proud Japanese woman Kate who was in denial about her condition and she needed round the clock care. She was feisty, rebellious and all of ninety pounds soaking wet right after a cold shower. She had the place going and managed to piss everyone off, staff, patients and visitors but I never let her get under my skin. When I first met her buffeted between two surly female caregivers I saluted her with an cool Sayonara; (Hello/Goodbye in Japanese?). She immediately inquired.

Oh you speak Japanese?

No I sadly responded.

That’s because you’re stupid!

I would try and charm with chit-chat to win her respect and to this she responded favorably so much so that I brought her to my mother’s room to introduce her but Mom was asleep at the time. I was later told that I should not have brought her to my mother’s room probably for security reasons since Kate was not altogether there some of the time. Her mind probably drifted back to Japan and her very conservative upbringing under the old school tactics of the Japanese culture.

There were others I would meet and greet strewn about the hallway. Strangely they never seemed to move from the place I last saw them. There was Judy who thought that Kate Didn’t know her ass from a whole in the ground! There was one stolid fellow Jack, sitting in his chair as soon as I stepped through the automatic door of the palliative section. Sometimes he sported a cowboy hat as if he were some urban cowboy ready to ride out of there in his chair. Like Kate, Jack was not impressed by the seat belt that was made to keep him harnessed so he couldn’t fall out of his chair. Jack would constantly play with the harness and unbuckle it much to the chagrin of the hospital staff.

Despite the many moans and groans that rose and fell from my ears as I walked through the hallowed floors of the hospital world I managed to keep myself in a relatively positive mood so that I could lift the spirits of poor old Mom. Sometimes if I was in a happy state, especially after a bike ride when my endorphin level was high. I could be seen sauntering past the sick and dying in a rather jaunty mood. I was never a person who would slip into a sulky or even morbid state long enough to lose my better nature and succumb to the depression associated with hanging around people who were in their death throes but I must admit I could easily become morose once I realized where I was.

I had asked the staff if they could ever get used to working alongside the terminally ill and most would shrug their shoulders and indicate how it was just a job and they needed money like the rest of us to survive. Yet one tall nondescript, mustached Polish nurse astounded me by mentioning Hope on the short list of the Death Menu that was being served in the palliative section. The truth was that most of the patients would die, if not today, then tomorrow or next week yet here was this young, probably religious man with a nonchalant belief that my mother could possibly leave the hospital for a hospice room in another building or even home one day.

He actually inspired hope in me that my mother’s tumor would miraculously shrivel up, go into remission and I would once again see her in her home, happier than being in the hospital, surrounded by her flowers and photographs of her loved ones on happier, more youthful days when our pet cats would leap onto her to keep her company during the lonely hours of the day when I was at work. Yet being the realist that I am by developing a keen nose for bullshit, I went over the equation in my head and realized my mother was going to die soon.

Her aggressive tumor was soon reaching stage four and since her age of eighty-nine preempted any surgery or chemotherapy the chances of recovery diminished rapidly with each advance of the ticking second hand on life’s clock. She would stare at the clock endlessly as if it was the crucifix of a smiling, welcoming Jesus. I even went so far as to create a romantic scenario in which I would take her out to the opera or some dinner for seniors where she could socialize amongst her peers. Yet that remained in my imagination where it was born so that the immortal memory of my mother could be played over and over again like the movies you love to watch that have become part of your soul and you simply couldn’t live without them from now on.

So this is what it means to lose someone you love. Meaning in life comes from loving and losing. How else could we explain why we feel the way we do when you see a mother’s health deteriorate or an old girlfriend leave you for someone else. They both amount to the same thing. They are leaving you and moving on.

A Journey Through This World

If reaching the next life I am asked what had I learned in this life I could give all the typical answers about finding meaning in sport activities, friends, family, duty and love but in my heart I should still seek a definitive question about loss, hope and betrayal. When I nudged my mother’s dying body and whispered to her so she could awaken I had no response from her but her deep and labored breaths, rising and falling in her chest; this from a woman who gave birth to me and was tending her garden and driving her car a few years ago. Now at 89 years old a cancer has riddled her body for the first time in her life. How is this not a betrayal of everything life stands for as the soul begins to depart from a body that is shutting down?

I can only reflect on my own life lost and confused as ever about a soon fading mortality in which I can only use words to describe my introduction to this world and my departing of it in terms like; I have seen many wondrous things both sublime and profane but I can’t take them with me unless my memory of it is carried with me in the after life. I can’t tell what it must mean, to die; as the light in this world fades and I can’t see my way into the next one. Death is never experienced in life and is met but once and then what……

I suppose that a calamity like death was made universal for all mortals to experience so that it is not a horrid and painful experience unique to one individual but different to another. Many conditions in nature indicate clearly that most of the important experiences in life and death are made for all of us to experience, at different times and places; as a metaphysical certainty. The only real question then is, at what time and place will I experience true love, loneliness, happiness and finally death? The only valid reason for living is living a life that contains all those values that make it worthwhile and have been collectively agreed upon as good for everyone.

What are they and why do they work? It becomes increasingly clear to me that certain values are the right ones to live by like civic and family duty, loyalty to a good cause and so on so even though they may not apply to someone who lives like a self-absorbed narcissist and hedonist. Who are we to judge but have we properly achieved our selfhood and used it wisely? How can I judge another’s life as better or worse than mine if for example the hedonist is content to live by his credo; live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse?

I kept nudging my mother’s body for a sign of a waking life. Lately her lucidity has come and gone and when I would leave I sensed her sadness; especially when I went with my son Angelo. We judge this life to be a hallmark of our humanity when we are lucid, fit and healthy and we devalue anyone who does not meet specific standards of human attractiveness. Suddenly the scale of values I have set for myself must then apply to others and if they do not comply with mine I begin to judge them and for a brief shining moment I feel superior and god like and lucid just before this artifice crumbles to the ground and I return to the human condition none the wiser.

There are aspects of my nature that feels connected to a netherworld that is quiet and motionless, full of shadows with no soul; except for the few animated beings I have resurrected for my own entertainment. Otherwise safe from the hostilities of this world my netherworld has been constructed from my imagination so that one day I can go there at my own bidding and take with me my memories of this life to keep me happy and ready if I should return to this world again.

Is there a need to bring God into this world? Perhaps but the idea of God is already playing out in every act and decision I make in this life. I carry all that is near and dear to me into that place in the soul that is quiet and still; ready to engage with all that is real at least in appearance. As for the hidden meaning behind all things they should reveal themselves on a need to know basis for all that lives in hiding in a vacuum may be filled with the necessary ingredients that bring it to life and deserve my attention.

Life is evolution and forward moving and all inert objects must perish or move on for everything in flux must of necessity be transitory until it finds some other arrangement like a stable condition that yields to a happier state. If this life is a temporary state, for it must be by nature since we can’t stay alive forever and must cease to exist, then what’s at stake is to give back what was so generously given at birth. Death is the final release and is a restitution and praise for a life well lived. More of it isn’t necessary for what was given is enough and anything beyond enough is not worth pursuing.

A man can live through two, three or four lives as he marries a second, third or fourth time. The offspring of a cat can reach 420,000 in seven years if left to procreate in a natural timeline. So the question becomes what is the most important reason for me to be and stay alive? My mother has kept her bargain with longevity and lived to a ripe old age, surviving war, disease and accidents.

Her bargain was well paid for in advance by a life well lived, her kindness and generosity approved by all recipients. The beating heart and deep breaths that a baby reveals when watched by a doting parent is proof that death is only met by those alive. As we age and reach the zenith of our time on earth it seems clear that death is always met with a surprised smile for the living and those about to die. We all act as if death was never on its way and yet Time with its open and endless future is met by increasing moments of clarity, depth from a fleeting past and the limitations of our mortality.

Yet it all seems to be given in generous heaps of promise and hope that the ending will be peaceful or happy and that all of us will turn out and celebrate the rite of passage of a loved one’s death without being able to experience one’s own death.

One evening I walked into a room expecting to visit my mother only to find a dying Chinese woman surrounded by her family. My mother was moved to another room nearby, so explained a grieving Chinese relative witnessing the death throes of her mother. They needed my mother’s room so that the Chinese family could have the room for themselves and say their final goodbyes. For a split second I wondered how my mother shape shifted into the body of an aging Chinese woman. Was it to cheat death and trick me into thinking she could do whatever she put her mind to do even if it employed some dark humor and a shock to my system?

We might rehearse our own death by living through terrible illnesses but never experience death fully until the day it catches us by surprise. We may witness the death of others not close to us by preparing for the day we will mourn the loss of loved ones yet it seems that imminent death is always on the way and never actually here until it arrives and passes us by. Birth is the same in that I can’t remember arriving here until well into my childhood and by then my reflections thus far only go back to the age of two or three. It seems to be this way for memory always erases what is futile to remember and impractical to hold onto. Much like the dreams we enjoy for better or worse as if they seem real until we awaken to forget quickly what was experienced and felt, was the same as our waking state.

That foreign land where death must visit us one day, doesn’t trouble us just yet for we take up our journey and face the challenges in the land we now live in with gratitude and a willingness to procrastinate what will inevitably find us some day. It’s not so much that we are afraid of death as that we just don’t understand it that well the same way we know ourselves and the way that our conscience works. The moment we contemplate our death or witness the death of others is a moment lost in time because there is no actual experience of death or a way to convey it in words and actions. At least the description or recollection of death has not been given the gravitas it may deserve. It may very well be that no adequate explanation of death is possible for some very good reasons. Namely it isn’t necessary to explain what nature has already worked out in advance in that the universe has its way to use and recycle the molecules necessary in forming my being. It is what it is and it may be enough just to be part of the cycle of life and not have to constantly be demanding the meaning behind all life.

It may be that the only meaning is the one I attribute to it just now in these words I feel compelled to write so that I can clear my conscience of any further doubt I have about death or life for that matter. Could it be that like Woody Allen who understands what dying means but doesn’t want to be there when it happens?

Much of the thoughts that seem to reverberate through my mind are usually from the fallout from some emotional relationship long ago. They seem to be there deposited in a sealed vault with the key still in the door. From time to time the door opens and the old memory floods my soul with a bittersweet nostalgia for its return. This is the price we pay to be human. The aspiration to live as gods do, without vice or virtue, but in a perpetual state of blissful being, without the remorse or guilt, that good humans have; is a tempting offer. Yet the stakes seem very high for when we fall from such lofty heights the bottom seems to get deeper and deeper.

This must be the paradoxical nature of our being. For the greater our existence grows the harder we fall when we slip from the beckoning heights of our civilization. What we feel, who we are is determined by the acts we do and when all the clutter of the mind, the muddled thinking and some peace is found; it seems futile to engage in those aspects of our humanity that leave us high and dry in the vapid wastelands of the emotional appeal to love each other. Yet we do just that for we can’t grow and be happy without filling in those parts of the soul that seem sealed in a vacuum of an unlived life.

Nostalgia for Happier Times

After reading other people’s stories and articles for a lengthy period of time I notice how my interest begins to wane and slowly the inexorable processes that initially excited my curiosity begin to shut down my brain and I drift off into a sleepy haze that leads to a nap. I find myself questioning how important it was to find out how other people live and what they write about and how it relates to my life? They have opened my eyes and imagination about something I would never have known existed before.