Death and gratitude

Monday evening, after a good day’s work, I relaxed in a recliner with a cup of hot, sweet tea. You know how it is; relaxing is often not actually relaxing, as our minds rove from the things we didn’t get done today to the things we’d better do tomorrow, then back to the things that happened 10 years ago or might happen 10 years in the future.

But that evening I really relaxed. I felt profoundly happy to be in my little house, looking out a big window at a small, pleasant view. For once I wasn’t bothered by the fact that one of the windows within my view runs an inch downhill and slants an inch toward the inside of the house (“Maybe the wall bowed,” says Contractor Mike. “Window installed by morons,” says I.) For once I didn’t notice all the projects still to be done or all the little things out of place. I just relaxed.

I felt profoundly grateful, profoundly peaceful. “Thank you,” I whispered. Thank you to the universe, at that moment so pleasantly arranged. Thank you to readers who’ve made it possible for me to live.

Thank you to the activists who are out there doing those Agitator things I used to do (and more power to them). Even though I have no hope for change within the system, even though I accept that government is truly beyond any law, even though I now reluctantly accept that there really is a class of people engineering the deliberate ruination of freedom (and not merely a class of people who see freedom a little differently than we hereabouts do), I’m grateful that moments like Monday’s exist beyond politics, beyond economics, beyond all those “outside” things.

I was grateful and at peace. And better, the mood held all evening.

—–

I didn’t know at the time that my neighbor across the street had gone off that morning to his job of restoring old houses, been felled by a monster stroke, and was then on a ventilator in a distant hospital.

They kept him on the ventilator until yesterday when his daughter was able to make it here from the midwest. When they pulled the plug, he was gone in 10 minutes.

I never knew Andy well. He was a character who’d chew your ear off about conspiracy theories. He was the guy who insisted that poisoning knotweed would make me a “Hitler” to his bees. But he was kind and generous. He and his wife looked after my dogs (and spoiled them rotten) while I was at the beach last month. One day he needed to use my power for a few hours to run heavy equipment, and to my shock he pressed a $50 bill into my hand afterward and refused to take it back even after I chased him down the street trying to return it. ($50 was more than my entire electric bill that month.)

His best friend lives around the corner. The three little boys down the street loved him dearly. His 86-year-old mother-in-law lives next door.

I stopped by the mother’s place and asked what they needed, how she thought her daughter would handle it. “She’ll be alright,” Vi said. “We’re Finns, you know. Sisu.”

What can you do at a time like this? Cooking is always the easy way to deliver a useful form of care. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but where they’re from, their house would now fill up with weeks’ worth of food — all those people saying, “I care” without being intrusive. I don’t even have an oven for baking the traditional midwestern “hot dish.” I feel at a loss. Then I feel selfish even for thinking of my concerns.

—–

Andy’s friend Richard, who told me the news, used to fly planes and sail sailboats. Now he keeps bees and grows the biggest veggie garden in these parts. The bees and the garden sound better to me, but Richard says Andy’s death makes him want to get up there in a plane again or out there on a sailboat, never mind that he’s probably 10 years older than Andy was.

Sure does make you think. Sure does make you want to live, whatever your idea of living might be.