Love and Death and the Whole Damned Thing
by E. Noel Preston, M.D.

   Not so long ago I visited an out-of-state daughter and her family for a long weekend. While we were waiting for the time to take me back to the airport, we went to a nearby state park. There were bullrushes growing out of the water, and Luke, my four-year old grandson, asked me what they were. I told him they were bullrushes, like the ones where the princess hid baby Moses, and he asked me, "Who was Moses?" I started to tell him about Moses and the bullrushes and the princess and the Pharaoh, but my daughter caught my eye and whispered, "No k-i-l-l-i-n-g!" and I was perplexed. How in the world do you tell anybody, even a four year old, about Moses and the bullrushes without saying why Moses' mother put him in the basket in the first place? Or why Pharaoh's daughter didn't say anything to her father about finding a beautiful baby boy in the bullrushes? To me, it seems scarier that a mother would put her own baby in a basket and float him down the river without saying a word about it than it would be to say she wanted to send him where he would be safe and no one would ever hurt him. But I limped through a story of some sort and finally boarded my plane, convinced Luke thought I must be the strangest grandfather he had ever seen.

   My mother dismayed me no end when she would refuse to stop smoking. She said it was "the one pleasure left" in her life and that "if it would shorten the time" she had left, that was good, because she had "nothing left to live for anyway." That statement made me feel hurt, angry, depressed, helpless, and guilty. For a long time I was the light of her life, her joy, her treasure, her splendid shining son -- and now, when she said she had nothing left to live for and her only pleasure left in life were those horrible damned cigarettes, what did that mean I meant to her now? Nothing!  I loved my mother, and I still do, and I still miss her. But God Almighty, she made me mad, and she still does. She could have taken her thyroid pills, which she refused. She could have stopped smoking, but she didn't. She could have had someone drive her to go swimming, which she used to enjoy, but she didn't. She just wasted away and died. She chose her exit. I wasn't worth her staying around for, and it still hurts.

   It's one thing when a family pet "goes away." But people, and especially family, don't "go away." If they do, it means they chose to go away. They left, as my mother did. Luke has a 97- year old great grandfather and an 83-year old great grandmother. I have high cholesterol, Susan had a very nearly fatal heart attack, and one of Luke's grandmothers has rheumatoid arthritis. Our days on earth are shorter than we want to think. But none of us are "going away." When I die, it will not be because I am bored and tired of my family and no longer find them as wonderful and marvelous as they are now. It will not be because I have nothing left to live for. It will be because I died and cruel death took me: death that will someday be defeated when we will all be together again, but for the moment, death that takes me away still loving and caring about everyone in my family.

   I know my grandmother was happy when she died because she would at last get to see her little boy who died in infancy. I know she died still loving me because I reminded her of him. Whenever I see Orion the Hunter in the sky at night, I remember her pointing it out to me, and as long as there is an Orion and I am there to see it, my grandmother will never die. And I hope my grandchildren will remember me the way I remember my grandmother, instead of the way I remember my mother.

   I wrote all this to my daughter after I got back to Atlanta and promised never to bring up the subject again. Last year, she and her children came to visit, but we only had an afternoon to spend together. We took bread crusts to the local cemetery to feed the ducks and geese that swim in the lake. It was a glorious bright sunny day and there were little ducklings and goslings and mama ducks and father geese and stately swans and lots of flowers and beautiful green trees and it was a fantastically gorgeous afternoon. Now five years old, Luke and three year old Emma fed the ducks by hand, saw a real Mother Goose sitting on her eggs, and laughed at the last little gosling in line trying to keep up with its hatch-mates as they followed their mother down to the water. And then Luke asked me, "Grandpappa, what are all these stones on the ground?" I said, "Those are tombstones, and they name the people who are buried underneath them." "They are? You mean people are buried down there?" The children were astonished. Not frightened or disgusted, just astonished. "Yes," I said. "After a person dies the real part of them, the spirit, or what some people call the soul, goes to Heaven, and what's left, the body, is buried so that the rest of us can remember them." After that we read a few names -- Elizabeth, Frank, Alice, and a few more, and then it was time to go back to my house for cookies and lemonade.

   When we got there we found the robins' eggs in the nest on my bathroom windowsill had hatched and there were two baby birds, and mother and father robin were busy feeding worms to their new babies. We named the baby birds Rodney and Rosalyn, and then my daughter and her children left to drive back home.

   A few days later she wrote to me. It was wrong to tell the children about the dead people. Little children don't like to think of their mommies and daddies dying and being buried under the ground. It's frightening and disturbing. When it's time to tell them about death, she and her husband will tell Luke and Emma about dying and going to heaven and someday all of us being together again. And would I please not talk about Big, Important Things to the children? That was her job. What was I going to do next -- give them The Drug Talk?

   The robins were terrible parents. I thought mother and father birds took turns watching their nest, but they don't. One day, right while I was watching, a huge black crow flew up to the nest and grabbed one of the baby birds and flew away with it. The crow flew up to a telephone pole out on the street and dropped the baby bird onto the pavement. Then it flew down to the carcass and ate it. The same thing happened a few days later. The next week my daughter called to say hello and then she let Luke talk. "Grandpappa," he said, "how are Rodney and Rosalyn?" Now what to do? I hesitated a moment and then said, "Rodney and Rosalyn grew up and they flew away." I'm not sure that was the right thing to do, but I had my orders and I did as I was told.

   My daughter and her family now live here in Atlanta and six year old Luke is in the first grade at a Catholic school. The whole class' favorite subject is Science and they're learning about the South Pole. One of the things they like the most is learning about the whales and the penguins. The baby penguins walk along the edge of the ice and the whales swim up next to them and catch the baby penguins' feet in their mouths. Then the whales swim out to sea and shoot up out of the water and smack the baby penguins over and over again on the surface of the water until the baby penguin turns inside out, and then the whale eats the penguin's internal organs. Now I know how Catholic schools achieve such legendary student discipline. If you don't be good, the whale's gonna get you!

   The robins have come back, and this year they built their nest in the climbing rose bush on the back of my house. The crow got one of their babies last week, but there are two more still alive. And so love and death and the whole damned thing go on and on…but so does life. And that's good.

E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross, Georgia 30092. (770) 448-1553.

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