Dying Feels Like Abandonment

A moving, lovely essay about aging, loss, and death by Bonnie Friedman, The Watcher, subtitled “What You Leave Behind When It’s Time To Move On.” The “becoming a real person” theme with which she ends I find less interesting, though some readers may identify with it. I liked the stories she tells and the insights she draws from them. Like this, about her sister Anita, who died at 51 of MS.

I’ve come to understand that dying feels like abandonment. If only we could have completed the fairy tale task! If only we could have fixed their teeth and eyes and all! Swept back the years with a stronger push of the broom. But we went off into our own lives—we had to. One evening I phoned my sister Anita in the hospital. She’d been in bed all day. This sometimes happened; the staff told me they lacked the pulley to hoist her from bed. The pulley was dirty, or on another floor. I called over to the nurse’s station; I raised holy hell. And the pulley was produced from wherever it had been. But what haunts me is Anita’s voice on the verge of tears: “I’m in bed. The others are all together. They’re eating together in the dining room, and they left me in here.”

Really, Anita? I thought. It really matters to you to be with that sorry crew? Those people with jaundice-yellow skin who must have their suppers spooned into their mouths? Those scarcely capable of conversation anymore, but who know you and nod, the man with just one leg, and the woman with plastic necklaces on her sunken chest – you want to be with them?

Yes. It matters altogether whether you are with them or not. What my sister taught me: Exile is torture.