Love in COVID Times: Life Going On

Seven months into this physically-distanced, socially removed COVID world, I married Karen (not the vapid “Karen” of media notoriety, rather her anti-type), my Karen, just hours before the moon entered Scorpio, which I understand to be a bad thing. After a few years of live-in courtship and recent convolutions in planning a ceremony, we eloped, somewhat last minute, to the north country and, amidst full fall colors, wed on the rocks in fewer than four hundred words.

Why marry at sixty-one? Well, my father some years ago recommended it; he had enjoyed sixty-four years of married life before dying this past June. My mother, likewise, had long preferred it before dying a few months earlier in March; in her last days, she had beamed mutely at hearing news of our intentions. But I rarely followed my father’s life advice, and my mother, who may have endured sixty-four years of marriage more than she enjoyed them (I trust she had her moments), may have wanted to see my and Karen’s partnership in less problematic theological terms than living in sin. Whatever the motives behind their endorsement, I was happy to know that if in attendance, they would be pleased. Perhaps they were. And yet, I did not marry for them, though in marrying, I honored them.

Stoic philosophy, you might be surprised to learn, recommends marriage as well, for the possibility of “a community of life” and for the purpose of children. Now, of course, at our moderately advanced age, children are entirely out of the question. We’ve had ours, respectively, and simply cannot conceive of more or better—though we have, strangely, somehow acquired a rescue cat, Goob. Insofar as I can articulate a reason behind my intuition, this impulse to wed, it must be this sense of commitment to a community of life with someone, these specific creatures, Karen and Goob, mostly Karen. A community of self-sufficient introverts is no mean feat, but it offers a worthy purpose for the final phase of this man’s life.

And did I mention “love”? I did not, not because I do not feel it, or say it to my beloved on occasion, only because as a Borowicz male, one doesn’t make a public display of such things. And “love” makes a very short blog post to the query, why marry in old age? Same reason we marry in youth, really. Same reason we marry at all. Love, the inspiration of which is ageless.

R.I.P. Norbert

Bereft now of both my parents, I am an orphan at 61. Adult onset orphanage is the best kind of orphanage because you’ve had all the benefits of their parenthood lifelong—with a few, it is true, of the difficulties. Moreover, at senior orphanage, you have the added benefit of the lessons of their dying at a time in your own life when those lessons are more likely to be heeded. The chief distinction to be made here, an obvious one, but at the same time one we often fail to make (fudging death and dying into a single concept) is that death is death, the finality, and dying the process thereunto.

Some philosophers and writers argue that we are always in the process of dying. I don’t think so. As a metaphor, it has its melancholy attraction, but as a working assumption for life, it is lugubrious. While we inhabit an entropic universe as agents of disorder, for at least some of our time here on earth, we are, rather, creating our lives, an internal order of self, out of our genetic inheritance, our surrounding material world, and our experience. We are living. This is life. At some point, and I place this point much later in time than many—I place it long after our physical “prime of life,” as it is sometimes called, or even after our cognitive prime—we begin to die.

My mother, as I recorded in this blog, died in early March. But she began dying in the summertime, after the death of her sister-in-law, my Aunt Jo, my father’s younger sister, who died last summer. Over sixty years of familiarity, they had become “best friends,” my mother and Aunt Jo, who spoke on the phone almost every day in their last years. When my mother lost that connection, her physical and cognitive decline was swift. She suffered heart problems and probably a stroke or two that left her mute. A woman of faith and prayer, she had come to terms with both her dying and death, I trust, but because we never talked about either specifically in those terms, I have still pangs of doubt. Perhaps there is always vulnerability in the eyes of the dying, even the most prayerful and faithful.

My father, on the other hand, had quite clearly come to terms with death. A number of years ago he had relayed to me, convincingly, that he was just “waiting for the call.” He had written his own epitaph, his own obituary—which required some editing for length and relevancy—and had asked me to speak at his funeral about his faith, a task of no little delicacy given that I had left the Church forty-something years ago. What he had not really considered nor understood, it seems to me, was the process of dying. He seemed to think that he would simply, some morning, wake up dead. Or, if he had to go through some formal process, he would have my mother to help him through. Neither of those possibilities eventuated.

Instead, grousing and grumbling about the pain in his right chest and the general incompetence of the medical profession, and unacknowledgingly missing his wife of sixty-three years, whom he had mistakenly imagined himself to precede in death, and counseling me not to “get old,” (he was ninety-effing five), he struggled with the process of dying. “Why am I still here?” he would wonder of a new morning. Because most of us have to die to be dead, Pop. Process.

And so, he began, we think, to more or less starve himself, where his pills represented the chief constituent of his diet, with a swallow or two of Ensure. No more biscuits of Shredded Wheat, drowning soggily and all too sweetly in milk or half and half; no more deep-fried Admiral’s Feasts;  no shrimp scampi, “Ooh, that’s goohd;” no black raspberry milkshakes, medium wings. His last meal was half a peanut butter meltaway. Perhaps unknowingly, perhaps only unadmittedly starved for the love embodied in Rita’s full person—womanly, wifely, motherly, grandmotherly, and just basic humanly—he seems to have gone on a hunger strike of sorts and took the dying process back into his own hands. We buried him this past Tuesday next to her.

You can rest in peace now, old man.         

Old Age in the Time of the Coronavirus

The metrics of the corona virus, complicated as they can be, pretty clearly indicate that older people are at significantly greater risk than younger people. Not surprising really and not unusual for diseases. The mortality rates skew heavily toward the 60+ demographic. One ethical upshot of this pandemic is how much of an economic hit should the country and the world take to preserve, to extend the lives of seniors. As a member of that demographic, let me just say, “Not so fast.” Seems a pretty complicated policy question to me and prone to any number of paradoxes. For example, a couple of 60+ prominent right-of-center public figures have—well, not quite—offered to die for their country in the interest of re-opening the economy. They’re white and sufficiently-resourced with access to higher-end healthcare, I suspect, so they’re not exactly proposing to actually die, but to run the risk. Which I am, too, personally, having no underlying health issues, but it’s not so simple. You also have to be willing to kill, to possibly be a vector to vulnerable populations, however unwittingly and unintentionally. Social distancing is as much about protecting others as protecting oneself.

An equally profound paradox arises with regard to the idea of “dying for one’s country”—not to mention the distinction of dying for one’s country’s economy. Depends on the country. In Alcestis, Euripides’s tragicomedy, the main character, Admetus, the king of Pherae, received from the god Apollo the extraordinary privilege of not having to die at his appointed time if he could find somebody to voluntarily take his place. (A weird premise, no doubt, but such are the workings of art sometimes.) Among Admetus’s expectations is that because his parents are older and seemingly closer to death, they should  rightfully take his place: “They were ripe enough to die with grace—/yes, die gracefully and praised—/for their own son’s sake: an only son at that.”

Neither of Admetus’s parents were so inclined, and his father, Pheres, spoke for them,

I brought you into this world. I brought you up:

you to be the master of this house.

Ought I now to die for you?

Is this the custom handed down—

that fathers die for sons? The Greek tradition?

It was never handed down to me.

You were born for your own good or ill.

Whatever is your due from me you’ve had.

…………………………………………………………………..

Don’t you die for me and I shan’t die for you.

You enjoy the light of day.

Do you think your father doesn’t?

Admetus, the king, personification of the city-state, strikes us as both resolutely presumptuous and supremely unappreciative. He permits his wife, Alcestis, to die in his stead. Need any more be said about his qualities.

A country that expects the older, the more vulnerable, the darker complected, the poorer, and the generally more at-risk to die in its interest is not a country worth dying for. That country is already morally dead.  

saint Rita

Mar. 10—My mom died at 7:15 a.m. She had passed a relatively peaceful night—wind chimes, light rain, and morphine—and went gently into that good morning. I had spent the night on the couch next to her in her home hospice bed in the living room, which had been delivered earlier that evening, along with instructions and hourly doses of morphine to ease any unrest. Her chain-stoke breathing had reduced to 6-7 breaths in sequence before a 25 second pause, down from previous nights’ 15-17 breaths. They were deeper and less urgent, but as the night progressed they also grew guttural, apneal. I woke at 3:45 to dose her and didn’t fall back asleep until six, counting breaths, timing pauses, reflecting on the inchoate meaninglessness of the universe and all life in it, as well as the meaning that arises from it. (Today was the 32^nd birthday of Rita’s first grand-daughter, asleep upstairs, and named for “life.” A coincidence that must now be made sense of—or not.) 

My sister Beth arrived at 7:00 a.m. to check in before going off to her school nurse gig. All was as well as we could hope, though, to be honest, we didn’t have a lot of it, given the steepness of her physical and cognitive decline over the last few months. After making her examination and kissing our mother on the forehead, Bethie reminded me that the hospice nurse would arrive sometime later that morning and departed. I lay back on the couch to sleep, first returning to her breathing cycle. The pause struck me as strangely silent and now, inordinately long. I rose and in the absence of her breath, looked for the subtle pulse in her neck, which no longer pulsed. Her smooth cheek appeared to have sunken ever so slightly, and her face was cool, cooling. I patted her cheek, called lowly to her, “Ma,” shook her shoulder, but only with such force as to get her attention or to awaken her from sleep. I had long been anticipating that moment, both in dread and as relief. The notion of thumping her on the chest or even respirating her struck me as abhorrent, impossible violence. And then I let her go.

Orhan Pamuk has written somewhere that he did not become conscious of his own mortality until his father died. That seems to me a bit obtuse for a writer or very fortunate—unless his beloved father died early, I don’t recall. My mother was the last of her family’s generation, the sole survivor of eight siblings until this morning, now yesterday. My father, the youngest son of his family, survives with his two younger sisters, of a family of eleven. Their sister died this summer. My sense at the passing of my mother is less of my own mortality, immediate or less so, but of the passing of that generation. We are the next in line to die.