by Anne Lamott
You saw dead mice and squirrels—once so Beatrix Potter, now reduced to looking like stiff little rugs, miniature bearskins with arched claws.
My parents were not crazy to fear death. It is an instinct to stay alive. My father had fought on Okinawa, my mother had grown up poor in Liverpool—so yeah, stay alive and prosper. Burnish that surface. We don’t need any more cold reality.
When you are young, death is so creepy, addressed only in the dark by your friends, who explain to you why you are going to rot in hell for all eternity or spin through outer space forever. (I was told both things. Curiously, I became a lifelong insomniac.) This rang so true.
All children know exactly why they should be punished and thrown away.
My maternal grandmother weighed about seventy pounds when she came to stay with us, when I was six. She had Alzheimer’s, which her two daughters, my mom and my cherished aunt, would both die of, too. The person, Nanny, whom I had been used to, was completely vacant—a stranger with a bad attitude. It was as if she had stepped into a chute of total self-absorption, where she didn’t care about adorable me. And my paternal grandfather, who had heart disease, couldn’t even be visited near the end, and just got vaporized one day.
I was terrified of death, and yet I remember thinking I was immortal. Most kids do. They couldn’t be kids if they didn’t. They are the green fuse, the energy of growth, the cord stretching from this side to the other, and it is inconceivable that someone, even one of them, might be ripped from the root. Six months before he died, my father said, “I simply cannot imagine a world without Ken Lamott in it.” He was fifty-five. Then a long cognitive deterioration, but pain-free, thanks to early hospice. Then poof. Gone.
He was so gone. Dead people look universal—the gaping mouth and locked jaw. Where was the angelic expression of sweet release? The flesh had fallen away, all that life and brilliance transformed into a beaky, craggy face. We closed his eyes and mouth, and then there was something sleepy and peaceful in his face, yet there was also a grotesque finality.
At some point you experience that a body is just the shell of a person, a cocoon that’s been outgrown. Hospice showed us how to wash his body; twelve years later, my best friend’s body; and each friend after that. This is the sacrament, because our people are still so precious, and when you learn this, you experience it as privilege.
Dearest, if you could just gently tend to the body of a dead person, wash them with a warm soapy cloth, rub oil into their skin, dress them in their favorite clothes—don’t forget socks!—and see the love and honor in this, it would greatly diminish your fears.
But until then, fear thrums from deep within, and it is pretty damn scary—the great unknown of absence, the fear that the whole world could be gone in the death of one person, as if a nuclear bomb has fallen. Draw nearer. Do it afraid.
In the church garden, beside the Hens and Chicks, my now favorite plant, I asked my friend if her deceased son still felt present to her, years after he had passed away. She said his energy was still alive and palpable, like her husband’s, but not in a way she’d sensed anywhere else. His atoms and his vigor and humor are still around in the ether. When she comes across something that would have pleased her son and husband when they were alive, mostly music or an old vaudeville routine they loved, she can feel the two of them grok it in some peculiar way. The love and energy remained, those fields of atoms that aren’t wafted away at death from our familiar sphere.
I have felt this so often, how we flash on our loved ones who’ve died, which means they are alive in us.
The flash is seeing their face, hearing their voice as clearly as we heard them in this life, teasing and noodling us—“Hey, Annie, aren’t you going to pick that penny up?”
They visit—ectoplasmically—and you invite them to come closer, so you are together with them, no longer in separation, together like the individual hen with her brood of chicks. There is a cupping, like a hand, a palm ready to receive and already holding.
When you’re younger, especially in your thirties and forties, when you may have stopped taking drugs and drinking quite so much and maybe have had children, all of which destroyed any sense of complacency you may have had, you’ve seen some deaths, experienced some grave and impossible loss. Maybe you search for understanding, but find only one thing for sure, which is that truth comes in small moments and visions, not galaxies and canyons; not the crash of ocean waves and cymbals. Most traditions teach that truth is in these small holy moments. Even our friend Jesus, whom we don’t see acting ebullient very often, expresses pleasure in Matthew 11: “Thank you, Father, because you reveal things to the small and simple and hide them from the clever.” (I think he was looking at his disciples then, and fully acknowledged what a sorry bunch they were, and we are, and yet in their way they were getting it. They were seeing the glory around for those who have eyes to see, the kingdom within.) “Watch,” Jesus says, again and again.
Watch. See the divine presence everywhere, from the most glorious bearded Tibetan iris, to weeds and grasses, to cacti. Cacti are really amazing once you get to know them. They are much friendlier than they look. They adapt and survive, even though they often live in snake-infested regions, where it is so arid (and scary). They are very resourceful. They seem to have a good time, with small careful moments of delight, in the live theater of soil, in their fingers and toes.
Because there was that light rain at the church, my friend and I took one last look at a Hen before leaving. There was the thin piping of light around all the petals, the outline that grew rose-colored in the older petals, warmer but not as exciting; fading. We fade, too. It’s poignant to see kin and friends who were once so vital grow aged. There is grief at the memorial service, but also gratitude for what the person brought to our lives, amazement at the details in the obituary—who knew about all the places she traveled to, all the volunteering she did? And gratitude is a very bright light. Not the Christian kind, which tends to be transactional—Thank you for this result, or the check; thank you for my gift, or my health; and please don’t let anyone take it. Gratitude is seeing how someone changed your heart and quality of life, helped you become the good parts of the person you are. Never will a gathering of people feel a deeper awareness of the present, a longing for immersion in the right now, and to share their love out loud with those they love most, than at a memorial service. This often lasts the whole day.
Of course when certain people die, there is anguish. We will never get over their deaths, and we’re not supposed to. A year after my best friend died, another girlfriend asked me, if I could have anything I wanted in the world, what would it be? She said her wish would be that she and her wife stay together forever. I said my wish was to see Pammy one more time. I had a beloved child and a life I enjoyed, but that was what I longed for. Do you think that is crazy?
Later, when time, grief, therapy, and love helped me make a kind of peace, the anguish and obsession became a wistful, nostalgic gratitude. It’s not ideal. Yet along with my dad’s death and my son’s birth, nothing has given me so many gifts of growth, expansion, and knowing myself, which is not always lovely, but it’s why I am here.
Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will. I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset. Yes, the Buddha was right about sickness, old age, and death, but check out that moth, that plum. I have not had a near-death experience, but I am having a near old-age one: failing memory, vision, stamina, skin tone. (When my grandson asked, “Can I take a shower with you if I promise not to laugh?” I thought, “You and me both.”) Both my parents died too young of advanced brain disease, of brain cancer and Alzheimer’s, so I sometimes get a little worried about my condition. Losing the ability to walk made their worlds smaller and smaller, to the size of a bed. The only worlds smaller were their urns.
And for people who manage to live
longer than my parents, so many of their friends will have died. There are fewer and fewer people to relate to. To have survived can be lonely. But I have seen great blessings in the losses of my oldest friends and church family. Simplification, for example. Life is richer when it is simple. A walk, buttered toast, a child’s soccer game. You’re afforded the opportunity to stop doing and can instead just be here. Wow. Yet you don’t have to be near death or have the depth of Thomas Merton to love and seek it. It’s not navel gazing. Contemplation is the opposite. It’s being a human being, implicit in the job description, what my very old friends have loved most at the end. They can’t look anymore to power, stature, schedules, or fame to fill them up, and they sure as hell don’t feel like entertaining you. All those things turn out not to have been real and eternal. Love did and is, that’s all.
The reason to draw close to death when we’re younger is to practice finding and living in the soul. This grows our muscles for living. In the absence of the illusion of power and majesty, we see that the soul was right here all along, everywhere, and consequently we can once again feel charmed by the world.
Can you even imagine living this way, charmed by the world, in the light of gratitude, for what is real, for the truth of who we always have been and will continue to be, no matter how much ground we lose? I don’t think my parents remembered to teach me this. This truly is what it means to be born again.
Thank God my parents exaggerated the danger of death when I was young. It kept me alive, kept me from drowning and getting run over. But now, if I am not careful, this fear keeps me small, cringing. It gets me to check my messages at waterfalls and baseball games. Facing it down got me to visit India. Facing it down let me fall in love at sixty-two. Sixty-two!
When I am sitting next to people who are in the process of transition, I always tell them: Stay as long as you want, and fly away whenever you’re ready. Sometimes I read these people poetry or Scripture, but more often I sit with them in silence. I turn off my phone. It is okay to do that, just as it is okay to stare out the window. Maybe it is not spectacular outside, no sunrise or storm clouds, but maybe the sky has the thin bright light of mid-autumn, is a pretty pale blue with small puffs of white clouds above the ridge of the grassy hilltop. Silence is medicine. You may feel overwhelmed with the profundity of the moment, or get really bored, and in either case will want to check your texts. That’s okay; many of us do, too. Maybe try not to check so often, though.
Nothing much happens at the bedside. Maybe the person’s color changes, maybe their breathing. When petals of the Hen get really old at the base, they sag like droopy bloomers, much redder, rust instead of rose, and they eventually drop to the ground and become part of the mulch. This fills me with hope, their return to the earth, their recirculation. Nothing is wasted. Before we left the garden, my friend and I bent down to touch the papery shroud of a former plant. We grunted and laughed getting up—oof oof. I guess each of the petals has to become part of the soil so they can feed the plant again. The petals go from those tough, muscular baby belly buttons, to big and strong, to fragile, to papery, and then to nourishment—invisible, beneficent, here.
NINE
Hands of Time
Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this very moment. As soon as you get used to being some extremely advanced age that you used to think of as ancient and hoary, you will get even older, God willing. Random teeth will fall out of your mouth as you walk to your car. You will rarely feel as old as you are, except when you have just returned from traveling overseas or are in line at the DMV.
I feel and like to think of myself as being forty-seven, but looking over the paperwork, I can see that I was born in 1954. My friend Paul told me in his eighties that he felt like a young man with something wrong with him. If a doctor told me I had some sort of brain or blood disease, my current level of cognition would make sense.
Aging can be hard. It might have been useful had we not followed the skin care rules of the sixties, which were to get as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and basking in the glow of a tinfoil tanning reflector. Your inside person, your soul, the innermost baby in the nesting doll of you, is close by when you despair about your neck, your failing vision and drive, but your inside person also knows that with myopia, cluelessness, and tiredness comes grace.
TEN
Jah
The God with whom you are having problems, or whom you hate or ridicule, is not the God we are talking about.
When we talk about goodness, an animating intelligence in the universe and in our hearts or a pervasive positive unity or presence, we are not talking about an old bearded guy in the sky, Parvati, or a Jewish Palestinian baby. We are talking about a higher power, a power that might be called Not Me, a kindness, a patience, a hope, which is everywhere, even in our annoying, self-centered, fraudulent selves.
The lower powers—greed, hatred, addiction, ignorance—are easy to connect with and describe, but a higher power is not easily defined. It can’t be controlled, manipulated, or appropriated. It opens us and heals us and brings us together and turns hearts of stone into human hearts. Anytime you are experiencing love, you are experiencing the God we are talking about. But as novelist David James Duncan says, “God” is the “worst nickname ever.”
So what is a good nickname for a positive force greater than ourselves, bigger than we can imagine, way bigger than we are comfortable with, better than we can hope for, deeper than where we can fall, beyond mind and awe, where we can still also believe in geology, evolution, astronomy?
The best name ever is Gitchi Manitou, which means “Great Spirit” in several Native American languages. “Jah” is beautiful because reggae is percussive with hope.
Over the decades, I’ve suggested many names—Ed, Bubbe, Little Tree. I’ve already shared most of my God thoughts, as there are only a few: Not Me. Look up. Be kind. But here’s a God story I’ve never written before, because it is too scary.
I had a friend from San Francisco society who got sober when we were the same age, thirty-two, but I believed in God and she was a proud, lifelong atheist. This didn’t ever get in our way of devotion to each other. Kelly was brilliant, hilarious, and had been a really bad drunk, one hundred pounds overweight, living in her car. She had gotten sober in AA, and for the first ten years went to a lot of meetings. She looked and dressed like her old upscale self, which is to say a lot of the plaid that only the very wealthy or Russians can get away with (and I’m not a hundred percent sure about the Russians). She became a prestige realtor, got married, stayed sober.
We lived for movies, our dogs, and each new season of Survivor, spending hours on the phone discussing every episode and contestant.
Then over lunch one day, she mentioned two teensy details—that she was getting divorced, and had stopped going to her AA meetings. “The God stuff drives me crazy,” she said.
“But don’t they let you come up with a higher power of your choice?” I asked. “Like the mountain, say, or the ocean? What about your dog? Dog love is god love.”
“Dogs are dogs. Friends are friends. I don’t believe in a higher power. It’s infantilizing.”
My friend Don, who was dying of emphysema and alcoholism at the time, decided to experiment with the idea that a caring force outside himself was with him in his last months. He called this higher power his old HP. Then he began to call it his Old Hewlett-Packard. It was silly and made him smile instead of worry so much. That’s a very God thing, and “my old HP” is a great name for God.
I told this to Kelly.
“Nah,” she said. “The whole God thing wrecks the valuable parts of the meetings, the support and humor. It turns it all into Vacation Bible School.”
“But those meetings helped you stay sober, even with the God biz. What about using Good Orderly Direction?”
She rolled her e
yes.
I had one more of my famous good ideas. “Emerson said the happiest person on earth is the one who learns from nature the lesson of worship. This is a good place to begin. Go outside and look up.”
I thought she would say, “Nature is nature,” but instead, she put up her palm like a traffic cop.
“Stop,” she said sternly.
My good ideas for other people so often seem to annoy them.
She lost her house in the divorce. It had been a nest of comfort and creation, and a container, the illusion of protection. It had held her and her beloved dog. They had to move to a more affordable county.
Kelly and I didn’t see each other as much after that. We talked on the phone every month or so. After getting fleeced in the divorce, she stayed sober, but she reported that she was steadily regaining the weight she had lost. We met for lunch every few months, and while she was still stylish and game, she had outgrown the plaid wardrobe, the ersatz Chanel suits, and her dog had grown old and sick. She mentioned how terrified she was of dying alone. I did not give her my talk on the immortality of the soul. I listened, nodded, and thought about taking on her dog’s vet bills.
Like everyone, I have been in dire, searing straits before, when life has pulled the rug out from under me and all my nice Jesusy beliefs have been shaken, when almost everything I am afraid of—loss, failure, crucial deaths—has appeared. These threats and losses could have thrown me into hopelessness, but the rich love of my friends and my crazy consignment-store faith eventually pulled me back to my feet. I could let my breath out again. You never get over certain losses, but the anguish part eventually ends, and it all just sucks for a while.