RIP Aunt Zelda

The call finally came yesterday, letting us know that Aunt Zelda had breathed her final breath.  As with everything else in her life, she had not listened to the authorities about when she was supposed to die, preferring instead to choose her own time.  I wished I had been able to play her out with some beautiful piece of music, but it was not meant to be.

I had of late begun to feel like a pregnant woman two weeks beyond her due date.  I couldn’t schedule anything without adding the caveat about Zelda’s impending death.  It was a limbo in which I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, given there was absolutely no hope of a miraculous recovery.

But today the finality is upon me.  We’re struggling with details like getting her death certificate signed so her body can be transported from Chicago to Detroit for burial.  Nothing is particularly easy.

I’ll write more about Zelda as I prepare myself for her funeral, which will be on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the speed of bureaucracy.

Our rabbi Esther offered another poignant Mary Oliver poem today, which resonated with me as I think about Zelda’s passing:

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.