John is in the living room, playing through some music on the electric organ he bought from some guy up near Elmira NY a few years ago. It took five men to move the thing in from our Eurovan. But it's convenient for him to have it, so he doesn't have to drive all the way to New Brunswick to get some practicing done.
He's working through organ literature, to find something appropriate to play for our friend Doug's memorial service, which is taking place next Saturday, in Ocean City NJ. He would have begun this process earlier, but we just got word of the timing of Doug's memorial, and John had already made arrangements to make an overnight trip to Rochester, to attend the memorial service for a former Eastman School of Music organ professor of his, David Craighead. And as I was looking at the date, I was doing a little mental addition -- which would have shocked my third-grade teacher, who thought I was a mathematical dunce -- and realizing that, one week after Doug's service, John and I have to drive down to Philadelphia, for my dear friend John Willard's memorial service. Including his mother's service out in Los Angeles early last month (for those of you in my math league), this makes four death-related events in little over a month. And the year is yet young.
Of course, I knew this was coming. How can it be any surprise? There were all the snide jokes about the 'baby boom', as I was entering high school, and had to share a locker with another student, because (for reasons unknowable) the newly-built facility hadn't installed enough of said lockers to accommodate the thousand or so of us, who were slated to graduate in 1964. (No one knew? Were there no demographics in the '50's?) And lately, there have been the snide accusations, which I've only lately noticed, about how self-centered and wicked we Boomers are -- as though we'd all been secretly corresponding all these years, as part of some massive underground cabal, plotting to bring about the general downfall of Western civilization, at the very least.
We were just born all at the same time. Because a massive war had just ended, and those young men who hadn't been killed came home, married, and started families. Some plot.
But that which is born is sure to die, as we all know at our core. And it stands to reason that, if there was a sudden upsurge in births 60+ years ago, there must be, lying just ahead, a similar uptick in the number of deaths, starting... right about... now.
I guess, if I were really clever, and had money to invest, and were sure to outlive most of my contemporaries by a margin of some fifty years or so, I would put that extra cash into companies making the more fragile working parts involved in the operation of your average crematorium. As it is, however, I'm just a bit bemused that the second-hand, black tweed sport coat I picked up for something like $4, at a Salvation Army outlet in Newark, has come in so handy, so many times, so soon. Although, come to think of it, I'll probably wear a different jacket to Philadelphia -- the one that's a much more profound black.
In an early scene in Bergman's 'Fanny and Alexander', the magnetic center of the Ekdahl clan, grandmother Helena, weeps on the shoulder of her old lover, Isaak, and bemoans the fact that the beautiful part of life is now over, and she's sliding into the ugly, dreadful part. (Or at least that's what the subtitles say) It's just a sliver of dialogue, early in the work, and perhaps easily overlooked among all the rest of the drama, mystery, terror and visual richness unfolding before the viewer. But these two sentences have (obviously) stuck with me, and seem, day by day, to take on an added weight, as life echos art in the simplest, most painful of ways.
I'm now thinking of John's maternal grandmother, who lived until just a week before her 100th birthday, and died in her sleep, largely because she'd refused to have the battery in her pacemaker replaced for the umpteenth time. And she'd refused this procedure because, she said, her husband had been dead so long, she couldn't even remember him, and almost all her contemporaries had died, and she was just kind of bored, I suppose. She'd been mentally and physically stable and acute until relatively late in her years -- and really, there's no way to know whether she'd have lived even longer, and stayed agile and keen, if she'd had that new battery installed. But, it seems she reasoned, for what?
Well, at this point in my life, I'm feeling far greedier than John's grandmother. I keep joking that, if I could remain as physically fit as I am today, I'd be happy to live for another six or seven hundred years. Until I was truly good and bored. Having, after all, learned every language known to man, mastered the greater portion of musical instruments in an orchestra, and created several substantial bodies of art work. That's all. In a universe teeming with grandiosities we can't even begin to comprehend, how out of shape would things be, if this... unprecedented, avoidance-based yearning of mine were made real?
But of course, even I grudgingly admit that this is not happening. This being brought emphatically home, in that not unexpected death in Philadelphia, after which I feel as though a huge chunk of my life has broken away, like one of those massive icebergs calving off the edge of Antarctica, leaving behind it an aching emptiness that, I fully expect, can never be refilled.
So, I will continue to make use of the black tweed jacket, or perhaps some more light-weight, summer stand-in, in an increasingly frequent series of somber occasions, when long-separated friends and acquaintances will gather, and chat, and perhaps not even consciously notice that they're each wondering... "Who's next? Will it be him? Or her? Or..."
Until, of course, it's suddenly, but not remarkably, my turn to be the dead one.
Intelligent Design, indeed.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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