Normal Gets You Nowhere

by Kelly Cutrone

  My question is, why don’t we celebrate these life events with equal sincerity? The normal way of celebrating death in our culture is to deny or outright avoid it. It’s unfortunate that physical death—the one thing guaranteed us in this world—also happens to be most people’s greatest fear. I’m evolved enough to know that my physical body can die at any minute, and that spiritual practice is no guarantee I’ll live to be ninety-four. Sometimes the good really do die young, and sometimes evil motherfuckers die old. Most people are afraid of what happens at the end, so they try not to think about it; they don’t want to see dying people, and they shield their children from them. They refuse to acknowledge that from the moment we’re born, “death is stalking us,” as the philosopher Carlos Castaneda wrote.

  But if anything, my father’s death made me realize that loved ones’ deaths should be VIP events! Let’s think about this. How many times have you been invited to a great birthday party, a really fun wedding, an engagement party, or a baby shower? Well, when was the last time you received an invite to somebody’s death? There are so many events in our lives that we’re programmed to celebrate, but we’ve left out one of the most important and certainly the most profound. My loved ones’ deaths are some of the most meaningful times I’ve spent on this planet, certainly more important than breaking the record at Bryant Park for most fashion shows produced in a single day or becoming a bestselling author. It’s at my loved one’s deathbeds that I’ve experienced the greatest amounts of vulnerability, truth, understanding, forgiveness, empathy, and love; in these moments, I’ve felt the intimacy we are all starving for as humans. Being present at another person’s death isn’t anything scary; in fact, it’s an honor and a privilege, a sacred and vulnerable experience. It’s a rite of passage, and you learn a lot.

  I request your presence at my deathbed,

  because I love you and honor the time we’ve shared.

  Please join me, won’t you, and don’t be scared.

  Love, Kelly

  Date: to be determined. Dress code: black.

  Please RSVP to lastdays@peoplesrevolution.com.

  This invitation is nontransferable and admits one.

  As souls pass into and out of the body, the charms and riddles of the universe are subtly illuminated, and lessons are effortlessly integrated. Just being in the room when loved ones are born or die bestows upon us an understanding of things that words cannot explain—and it’s in these inexplicable things that the true and real magic of life lives.

  I am suggesting that we treat our death and those of our loved ones the way we’d treat a very special wedding or birthday, i.e., with careful planning and production. By this I don’t mean we should plan how we’ll die—I refuse to attend funerals of suicide victims—but what will happen as we are dying, and after we die.

  I’m a publicist, so I’ll tell you right now what makes for a great event. First, you need a venue. Where will you be? If you’re in a hospital, will you be in a private or shared room? What type of music will be played? What kind of drugs will you get? (It’s no different than an open bar at your wedding, except this time you won’t have to pay the bill!) Perhaps you also want a theme, great lighting, and visuals.

  Oh, do you think I’m being morbid? No, I’m being practical. I mean, when you have a baby, there are birthing rooms, classes, soundtracks. Unfortunately, this chapter is probably the closest you’ll get to a cool death class, so listen up. I want you to think about this not just for yourself, but also for the ones you love.

  A cautionary tale. As my father lay dying last year in Virginia, wheezing in bed and looking like a dead branzino on ice in a fish market, one of his hospice nurses waltzed in and said, in a thick Southern accent, “Lee, you’re still here, that must mean Jesus still has work for you to do!”

  Hearing this, I dragged her out into the hallway by her arm. “You know what Jesus wants my father to do?” I said. “He wants him to die. Stop doing this to him.” I really suggest you get a great door person at your death to avoid this (my father hadn’t appointed me, but luckily, I happened to be there to do the honors).

  Why leave anything to chance just because you don’t yet know the exact date of your last great event? I do want everyone to live a very, very long life. I just think that when the time comes, there should be a clear list of who’s allowed to be present and for how long. Who do you want there, and who do you not want there? Who have you told this information to? I get it. I wear all black, I’m forty-five and a Scorpio. But if someone called me to say, “Listen, I don’t know where you’re going to be in this world when I die, but I want you to know that you’re invited to be there”—well, that’s one of the sexiest things anyone could ever say to me.

  The truth is, I don’t think it’s ever too early to think about these things, whether you’re sixteen, twenty-one, or sixty-one. You may be in perfect health, but do you ride a bike in New York City? Well, what happens if you smash into the cement head-on? To what lengths do you want doctors to go to keep you alive? And if you don’t make it, who will be speaking on your behalf at your funeral, and will you and your God be properly represented? We shouldn’t just ask these questions of ourselves, but also of our mothers, sisters, and our tribal elders. We need to organize tribal counsel meetings with our parents, our grandparents and partners.

  We live in a time when everyone is silently texting all day, but we’re not connecting enough as human beings and having the important conversations. Planning our deaths, like the deaths themselves, is a beautiful opportunity for truth, intimacy, and vulnerability. We all have a bakery number with our name on it, and it’s better to acknowledge that now and spend a couple hundred bucks downloading a living will for everyone in the family than to wait until we or one of our parents gets sick.

  If you don’t have a living will, you are a stupid motherfucker.*

  Being in control of our lives until the very end is being responsible and independent, and it is free.

  Millie, Billy, and a Mercedes Hearse

  Good-bye, Papa, it’s hard to die

  when all the birds are singing in the sky.

  —From “Seasons in the Sun,” by Terry Jacks

  I used to think death was terrifying too, if I ever thought about it at all, which, growing up, I really didn’t. Who did? My biggest problems before my grandfather got sick were why my boyfriend wasn’t calling me back and how I was going to repay my student loans. These, to me, were life’s big issues. But at the age of nineteen, I suddenly and with little warning found myself at my grandfather’s deathbed in Syracuse. I was a nursing student at the time, which meant I was often on rotation at the hospital where he was battling throat and lung cancer. No one in my family had ever died before, so watching him deteriorate was scary and confusing, to say the least. As he got sicker and sicker, I realized he was going to be my teacher on the big mystery subject of death. This man, whom I loved more than anyone else in the world, who had always been my biggest fan, would illuminate this secret and veiled world for me. He would show me how to help him die.

  After a few days of bedside vigils, his doctors made it clear that my grandfather would be taking the Exit Door. Hearing this, I sat with my grandmother for an hour before calling my parents in Virginia to tell them to come right away. My mother muttered that it was snowing out and this had better be the real thing. Once she assured me she was on her way, I decided to go meet my friends at a club to blow off steam, since I’d been sitting at my grandfather’s bedside for over thirty-six hours. Though he hadn’t spoken or moved in hours, my grandfather suddenly sat straight up in bed like a zombie and said, “Millie, she’s got pins in her ass, I tell you! Pins in her ass! She can’t sit still even when I’m dying!”

  Lesson number one: people who are dying can hear you.

  The next morning, I was again at my grandmother’s side when my parents arrived from Virginia. And sure enough, as they walked into the room, my grandfather sat straight up in his bed again—after fourte
en hours of total silence—and said, “Beverly, Lee, what the hell are you doing here?” Naturally, my mother accused me of being dramatic, since I clearly had nothing better to do than prank them from the hospital, where my grandfather was on his deathbed. NOT!

  The next afternoon, I walked into my grandfather’s room to see that the nurses had left him naked in bed, the sheets pulled back from his body to reveal a skeletal frame with a catheter coming out of his penis. This set me on fire. I didn’t really have a lot of life experience at this point, but I did have a sense of dignity and tribal acknowledgment, and I couldn’t believe anyone would just leave my greatest tribal elder like that. My grandfather, my medicine chief, who had from the time of my birth treated me nicer than anyone else in my life has to this day, who had always assured me I was his favorite granddaughter, even in the presence of his other grandchildren, and even proved it by letting me use his credit card to buy clothes. (Not to mention cash. He’d distract my grandmother somehow—“Hey, Millie, can you get me a glass of water?”—and then slip me $100. Between 1977 and 1987, that added up to a lot of money.) This was the man who had essentially given me the ability to love and respect men.

  I demanded to see the head nurse and told her that that was it. We were taking my grandfather home. She threatened me, telling me I had to sign an AMA document (meaning you are removing the patient from the hospital “Against Medical Advice”), which is what doctors use to protect themselves from lawsuits. I didn’t care. Here’s another universal truth: Italians prefer to die at home. Boom-basta-done.

  When we got home to my grandparents’ house in Syracuse, I immediately made my grandfather a really cool red terrycloth headband with two leather strips that I iced and tied around his head when he was spiking a temp. With his white hair and flannel pajamas, I told him, he looked like a cross between Willie Nelson and Axl Rose, as styled by Ralph Lauren. He didn’t say much—how could he? He had no idea what the fuck I was talking about! But when he did speak, it was usually about the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), which he was really into. “Rowdy Roddy Piper!” he’d chant. He hadn’t been home long when Italians started arriving with food, mostly cold cuts and cannolis. That’s how you know the end is near—when the cannolis and pepperoni start piling up! It was just two days after his return that my grandfather called my grandmother into his room.

  “Hey, Millie,” he said.

  “Yes, Billy,” she replied.

  He kissed her, allowed a single tear to fall from his eye, and an hour later he was dead.

  Now, I don’t mean to sound romantic, but I don’t know what else anybody could fucking want in life than to die like this. Never mind the clothes in our closets and the cars in our driveway—this, to me, is an example of real abundance, truth, and love.

  When the dying become the dead, some cultures really get their groove on. The Balinese, for example, know how to throw a funeral. They build a huge Trojan horse out of wood to hold the body and the soul, and then the men serenade it with musical instruments before spinning it in circles and walking for two or three miles to the next village, where they burn the horse (the spinning is so the soul can’t find its way back).

  Unfortunately, a Sicilian funeral is sads-ville. In fact, it makes Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe look positively lighthearted. There are two days of viewing the body, followed by the burial; all these days involve cold cuts, cousins, and resentments that have lasted for decades. Black is the preferred color, and the widow is encouraged to wear it with a veil for a year afterwards. It functions almost like a gang symbol—she is a new member of the Widows’ Club! At the burial, a priest reads a bunch of prayers, both for the soul and the living, and everyone cries and tosses a flower—usually a rose—onto the casket. In those days, the males in the family also shoveled dirt on top of the casket before it was swallowed by the earth.

  As my grandfather was lowered into the ground, it dawned upon me for the first time that I was going to die someday too, and that life is a plank of mortality. As my grandfather headed off of it into the ocean of the unknown, my mother stepped up into position, a soon-to-be grandparent, and I stepped up behind her, a soon-to-be wife and mother. Someday, if I were lucky, I’d be the person at the end of the plank, with all my younger relatives still behind me, including my own child, perhaps by then a mother herself. Watching my grandfather descend into the ground, I literally threw up and passed out. (The great thing about being at an Italian funeral is that when you throw up and pass out, everyone is prepared with smelling salts.)

  While my grandfather was dying, his biggest concern was obviously who would take care of his beloved, my grandmother, on a daily basis. In fact, one day he looked me in the eye and said, “Kelly, I need you to promise me you’re going to take care of your grandmother.” Carmela Barnello Petrocci, whom everyone called Millie, was seventy-two when my grandfather died. They’d been married fifty-four years; she’d never even had sex with anyone else. Of course I agreed.

  The morning after we lowered him into the ground, I was a little shocked to find her standing in the kitchen, impeccably dressed from head to toe. It was the day the cannolis and pepperoni finally stopped flowing and the relatives left, and there she was, looking like Jackie Kennedy going to a luncheon.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I’m going to see Billy,” she replied.

  She hadn’t realized that the viewing was over—she thought maybe she could go see him in the casket again. I knew right then that if my grandmother could get up every day for the rest of her life and go visit her dead husband, she would. She was all dressed up like a sixteen-year-old girl waiting for her new boyfriend to take her to the dance.

  Even then, I meant what I said, so I showed up for my grandmother. In fact, I moved into the upstairs apartment in her two-family home in Syracuse. When you are in your truth, good things happen to you. So although I was technically looking after my grandmother, the laws of reciprocity were in full effect. I now had cable TV, a chef downstairs, and a human alarm clock who would wake me up for school by simply banging on her ceiling with a broom! On top of that, I had my grandmother’s love.

  I don’t want you to think of my grandmother as a frail, incompetent human being. She was actually very strategic. There were lottery tickets to buy and specials at discount grocery stores to take advantage of. One day when she was attacked by a purse thief while strolling to the bank to deposit her Social Security check, she promptly slugged him with her purse and screamed for help! Luckily, the police apprehended her attacker.

  This was a great day for my grandmother, most of whose excitement came from naps, cable TV, and gossip she received while attending her friends’ funerals. (At one point she said to me, “It’s no fun getting old. The only time you see your friends is at funerals.”) She went to court, and when the defense attorney questioned her ability to ID the suspect, she scolded him: “Now you listen to me, young man, when someone tries to steal your bag with your Social Security check in it, you’re going to remember his face!” This performance landed her a feature in the Syracuse Herald-Journal.

  Years later, after I’d moved out of my grandmother’s and started my business in New York, there was a period of eighteen hours that no one could reach my grandmother—which, in Italian American life, is a long time to not be in contact with your mother. My mother called my grandmother’s friends and ultimately the police, who busted down her mahogany door and found her sleeping in a white nightgown, her arms crossed. At first, they weren’t sure she was breathing. Of course, she shot straight up in bed and demanded, “What are you doing in my home?” For months afterward, she made it really clear that you’d better not try to take a nap in the middle of the day in this family, because they’d try to bury you!

  There eventually came a time when it was no longer a false alarm, and my grandmother was about to pass. My mother and I decided to meet in Syracuse and be with her as her death coaches—just as I’d later hire a birth coach for t
he arrival of my daughter. So there we were, three generations of women, the younger two encouraging the oldest to push and move, not to welcome a new soul to the planet, but to see one on to its next phase.

  I’d hastily stuffed my rental car with file folders as I left New York, and I proceeded to run People’s Revolution North out of my grandmother’s over-the-top dining room for three weeks, surrounded by bright turquoise walls, a cream yellow Louis XIV table, and an imposing, crystal-encrusted wall piece that was somewhere between a sconce and a chandelier. In the meantime, more cannolis and cold cuts arrived, and with them, relatives.

  For days, I bathed and fed my grandmother, who had since my grandfather’s death been living mostly in his bathrobe, which she tied with one of his neckties or a hot pink curtain tassel (it was her version of a smoking jacket). At one point while I was bathing her, I saw that her breasts looked like thin, flattened fruit roll-ups.

  “Grandma,” I said, “we’re going to have to get you a boob job!”

  “Honey,” she replied, “these boobies fed your mother, and they made beautiful love to your grandfather for fifty-four years. I don’t need them anymore.”

  Forget Keats, forget Emerson; this was one of the most poetic and beautiful things I have ever heard, and from a woman who’d never graduated from high school!

  Just so you know, most people choose to die alone. When my grandmother passed, I was sitting in the dining room. My Uncle John, standing in her doorway, saw her leave her body and came to tell us. My mother recoiled and was adamant that she didn’t want to see her mother in that state, and in fact she didn’t want to leave the kitchen at all, so I immediately called my mother’s cousin Donny, owner of Pirro Brothers Funeral Home, and arranged everything. Sometimes when we’re adults, we need to allow our parents the opportunity to be children—we need to become the parent of our parent. Yes, it’s moments like these when it’s time for you to suck it up and take care of shit.