All things death

When I was age four or so, I came by Tree-of-Knowledge level understanding, albeit in the most unpromising of ways. My junior high-aged sister had a little record player housed in an aqua carrying case. It — and the tunes it brought to life — were fixtures of my playtime existence in our 1970s basement rec room.

My preschooler taste in music skewed very “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and “Knock Three Times,” and I enjoyed an ample serving of this seventies fare while attending to the goings-on in my Fisher Price schoolhouse.

Among my sister *Melanie’s singles were Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” and “Debbie’s Last Christmas” by Nancy LaPlante. Two affronts to musical sensibilities (the second being peerless in that regard). As for Mr. Jacks, he ushered us through the stages of a dying guy’s farewells: to his childhood friend, to his papa, and to his love, Michelle.

“Debbie’s Last Christmas”…oof, what a cringey affair. What you mainly need to know for my purposes here is that 1) the ill-fated Debbie and I shared this childhood name, and 2) she died as a little girl, at Christmas.

“Seasons in the Sun” had me spellbound. I learned how to operate the turntable, thus acquiring the agency to send this song’s messaging to my preschool brain every three and a half minutes as need be.

In this way I learned, at age four, that there are goodbyes out there which carry the weight of all finality. And they are deeply bittersweet.

It wasn’t all that long before I settled on Memento Mori as my personal brand, first grader style. My take on it was, Remember my parents must die. I both loved and liked my parents, and the prospect of a final parting filled me with unquantifiable emotion.

Comprehending that they would be gone someday, I began to inhabit an anticipatory bereftness, if you will. I was vigilant. Today with my parents served as no guarantee of tomorrow.

Memento mori became a load-bearing tenet of my identity. Three years ago, I read a New York Times essay by journalist Alexander Nazaryan:  “A Hopeful Reminder: You’re Going To Die.” This was a 50th anniversary reflection on Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Nazaryan wrote:

Only by confronting our mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified.

Heartfelt thank you, Mr. Nazaryan, for such a vital analogy. I have fully incorporated it.

• • •

If I should happen to die today, I die a broken woman. Eight and a half years into a life of devastating relational cutoffs, I renew my contract with that understanding on a daily basis. The depth of my own yearning for repair cannot safeguard me against dying amidst rupture, because repair is not a solo proposition.

Our family, the Perrons, employs cutoff as a solution to interpersonal complexity and uncomfortable emotions that many members have not learned how to tolerate, so it seems. We as a people have been disastrously short on role models of repair. Better to just cling to the misery…it offers the comfort of the known.

At the time of my father's death, he had lived four decades cut off from his one brother, an estrangement not of his choosing. And he had lived over fifteen years of rupture with my brother Marc, his one son.

This was more symmetrical in nature. Both father and son had propelled it; both were deeply wounded; and both seemed to long for some measure of restoration without the least idea of how to go about it.

I have written previously of my mother Juliette’s death seven years ago. The estrangement between her son and her husband yielded the heartache she lived with from her mid-seventies until her death near age ninety.

Her relationship with Marc was the most grievous collateral damage of this father-son fracture, and it was only in her final years that she and Marc found their way to a few low-contact interactions.

My eldest sister Elaine contacted Marc to convey that our mother had been winding her way into her final year of life. Marc flew down to my parents’ Florida home for a brief, orchestrated visit with our mother; a farewell. My father remained in his study and did not engage.

Juliette and Marc sat close together and held hands. This mother told her son they would get to be together once again, in heaven. Relational cutoff, not of her doing, had placed her in an untenable position, and the consequences had followed her to her final days.

I wrote recently of the untimely death of my second eldest sister Paula; of how her death took place amid a senseless and miserable rupture between us. This is one of my brokennesses upon the others.

• • •

Four years ago, thus four years into the estrangement from my daughters Eva and Chloe — with my brother Marc’s recent death in his mid-sixties weighing existentially — I ventured to begin a low-contact email correspondence with my two adult children. The fact of Marc’s death had impelled me to attend to my own Good Death initiatives.

In a TED talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” palliative care physician and speaker Dr. B. J. Miller had provided me with the purest distillate: a good death contains a bidirectional gift, that of being “unburdened and unburdening” to those you love.

The products of this labor ask, by their inherent nature, to be passed to their beneficiaries. I embarked on a process, and two years in, I had my first encounter with this term: ethical will. Amid the efforts of my previous two years, I had been tapping into something rooted in ancient tradition without any prior familiarity with its intellectual lineage.

In a 2024 piece featured in The Washington Post, author and speaker Nancy Sharp offered that an ethical will captures your essence — via recollections, values, life lessons, hopes for the future generation, and so on.

On her personal website, where Ms. Sharp employs the approachable term “Life Letter,” she highlighted a distinction as follows. Your estate documents concern what you want your loved ones to have; your life letter (ethical will) concerns what you want them to know.

Very well. My ethical will had been underway. Over the past four years, this has become the channel of my love for my daughters. My love for them made tangible.

Many, ever so many of us parents, estranged or otherwise, will find ourselves running out of time to convey the things, whether large or deceptively small, that we would have liked to transmit to our children.

Maybe you have not lost the past eight years in which to do such things. That would be a difference between your and my experience thus far.

So much of my life-letter content would have liked to be shared organically and in person. Installed on the couch together with a beverage and a lap cat, maybe; the kind of moments that have gotten shut out.

Here are a few brushstrokes of a portrait. In this, my memento mori-infused life,  here is what it can be like to organize for my own death when so much of my life is owned by relational rupture.

I have raised my daughters’ awareness of certain health oddities and conditions that might be coded in the instruction manual of their maternal DNA  (though I hope like heck not). When they last saw me, my fingers were the normal variety. I have since developed the deformity that defined my father’s hands later in his life. And I testify that it’s a real bear.

I assembled a short and lighthearted piece for Eva and Chloe on “The French of my childhood.” My Franco-American parents’ primary home language was French in the Québécois heritage; the plain working-class vernacular of their own elders, mill workers in southern Maine. My parents are seven years gone, indeed their generation is now gone, and the French in my auditory memory continues to recede.

A special pet of mine, among the inclusions in this piece: cheval vert. The name Calvary — historic site of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion — had found itself drafted as a fine Québécois swear word in common usage, Calvaire.

In moments of exasperation, what my mother Juliette came out with was, “Oh, CHEVAL VERT.”  As a sanitized stand-in for Calvaire, it landed similarly on the ear, which is the point.

Once you’re old enough to do the translation on your own, and you realize that your Mom (with gritted teeth and a rosacea flush of frustration coloring her face) has in fact been saying Oh, GREEN HORSE…this becomes endearing.

I am not able to stomach the prospect of leaving here without having shared these slight glimpses with my daughters. Eva and Chloe, here are your maternal grandparents of fifty years ago. Here are the humans whose identity contributed greatly to who I am. To the person who helped produce you.

I have written before that, from the time my daughters’ father Brent and I parted ways onward, Eva and Chloe had perhaps a dozen weeks of time in my parents’ company, all told. And I have looked at the tragic aftermath of my daughters’ severing of my husband, Noah: it broke grandparent and grandchild relationships. Irretrievably so, because my parents died a year later.

For their scant eighty-ish days of contact time to provide a truly rich portrait of who their maternal grandparents were as humans — that would have been too much to ask. Over the past few years, I have assembled for my daughters a collection of vignettes I have written about each of my parents, Raymond and Juliette.

Eva and Chloe, in your grandfather Raymond’s final months of life, before he took his leave to join his “bride” who had recently predeceased him, there was a battered old toffee can on the shelf near his sleeping recliner.

I knew it from my childhood life, a house for the spare change. Homely, its red and gold coloring scratched and chipped. All those years of sorting out my milk money for school…not once had I bothered to ponder the origin of this tin.

I flew to Florida to visit my father on what would have been his seventieth wedding anniversary. And there was the shrine, alongside my father. A modest assembly of keepsakes arranged beneath my parents’ wedding photo. All these decades later, I finally put it together: their Quebec honeymoon, 1949. A souvenir of toffee.

I have shared with my daughters some images of the antique family photos preserved in my mother’s albums. My photos-of-photos, low quality though they are, capture the essence. As one example, early twentieth-century images of their great-grandmother as a small child; all solemnity and dark hair and pale irises.

My eldest sister is the steward of these albums, and I do not know the future chain of custody. I do not expect that Eva and Chloe will view such photos in person.

Even so, were I to expire, I will myself to believe that this event would lead, by however circuitous a route, to restoring my daughters’ connection — now eight years gone — with their Aunt Elaine. The one sister in their mother's life.

I am in the process of assembling my notes on a catalog of special items, potentially meaningful to my daughters someday, insofar as the items’ meaningfulness is brought to light. I had no living grandparents by the time that Eva and Chloe entered the scene, so their impressions of their maternal great-grandparents have come through me only.

My maternal grandmother, Mémère (Grandma) Dumont, was a mild-mannered lady who entered widowhood in her late sixties, the year that I was born. Mémère had a mid-century gossip bench, such was the term for it.

This bench was a chair and side table fused together, with a cubby shelf for a phone book. In my childhood, I sat many a time across from my grandmother as she and her rotary phone made their way through her daily phone conversation with her sister, Marguerite. This was a protected ritual of my grandmother’s day-to-day.

About seven years ago, this bench came into my possession. And it is precious to me. As I pass by Mémère’s bench in our home, I picture this mother figure, and then her younger daughter, Juliette. And then I picture myself.

I have been part of something, an unbroken thread to this point.

In Christmas season of last year, I made some new entries to the catalog in this living document; a pictorial guide with brief explanations.

Eva and Chloe, here is the recipe booklet, homemade both in form and content, which my Mémère Perron gifted at Christmas 1985. Here is the image of the flyleaf, her handwritten dedication to her eleven grandchildren.

Here is the vintage Dr. Seuss “Sneetches” ornament that you know. I never filled in, for you, this dimension of its sweetness. Your grandfather Raymond was almost seventy when he watched the “Sneetches” short for the first time — at our apartment when you, Eva, were in your second year. Tangibly delighted, he asked me, kidlike, to replay the videotape. This is a very Raymond ornament in spirit.

When my parents died, we children understood that we had the free will to discern what items would be kept or shed. We had the benefit of knowing the significance or backstory of the items that mattered. So I will continue to work on this guidebook of sorts. Eva and Chloe, this is a humble gift to you.

• • •

On the more administrative side of good death preparations…I will level with you, reader. This has been making my head swim. It turns out that, should I expire tomorrow, it’s going to foreground all of this relationship fractured-ness in some fairly messed-up ways. I can’t not see the absurdity of my situation.

I have communicated a request for cremation, and I have further asked that my cremains get blended with the ash-neutralizing additive. Once they are fully processed, I am ready for strewing at the memory-rich locations here in my native state. I leave the act of scattering to my husband Noah, and to Eva and Chloe.

And now, I call upon my brain to envision the scenario…Eva and Chloe fly out to Maine to participate dutifully in the dispersal of their estranged mother’s ashes. Does Noah, my excised husband and now widower, leave a Ziploc on the side step, with a Post-it note?  The contact-free handoff. Welp…Here’s your mother.

Eva and Chloe are the formal recipients of my personal effects. Is Noah truly expected to absent himself from his own home for a day or more, so that my daughters will agree to enter the premises?

To sift through my squirrel-stash of keepsakes; my nine pairs of readers sown around the house; the bottom of my handbag; my favorite wool hats and wellies; the books I have held onto for decades; the tangle of costume jewelry; the uncaptioned vintage photos stored in this box and that; the old notebooks; the tchotchkes they would not know the significance of, without Noah’s narration; the coffee mug that has served as a fixture of my daily existence, which they would not be able to identify in a line-up?

And there is the travesty to be served up in the obituary. Assembling a file of prospective obit content is widely considered an act of consideration toward the bereaved who will muddle through this task.  I subscribe to that thinking. Thus, I began an outline.

Though I did not draft the list of projected survivors, I did visualize it, and that was all I could bear. The names set so close together in print — my husband, my daughters, my sisters — just a few millimeters apart. Jarring case of mismatch with such life-destroying rifts, separating us by years of lost time and frequently by finality.

My daughters would not take part in a Memorial arranged and attended by my husband, the past eight years have made such things apparent. My Memorial gathering, were there ever to be one, would represent a scant handful of familial relationships, all splinters and shards. One final mirror held up to my earthly life.

Three years into parental estrangement, Noah and I worked with an attorney to establish our comprehensive estate plan. In need of selecting an alternate healthcare power of attorney agent — should Noah predecease me — I asked my sister Melanie. She agreed.

Ill-advised choice on my part.

Not one year later, she helped author my Perron family banning; a move not so compatible with the role of a health care agent.

I have allowed this matter to languish for the past four years…I let the department of my anxiety that lies awake thinking about such things go on a four-year lunch break.

My elder daughter Eva is now age 30ish. Given her current age and maturity, and given the past four years of steady low contact with one another, I ventured to ask whether she would be willing to serve as my HCPOA agent, should Noah predecease me.

Eva was not so much in favor.

I understand.

It’s just another data point among the past several years’ worth. This regards my exit, the final rite of my humanity. And I am starting to feel kind of, maybe, subhuman.

• • •

We are hemorrhaging time. It troubles my moral sense. That is my position.

Two years ago this month, I shared with Eva and Chloe the most significant installment in my ethical will, to date; a book of several chapters which I had written to and for them.

At the time of the writing, I knew that my sister Bridget was gravely ill, but details were withheld from me in keeping with a punitive gag order. I wrote the book under that pall, and when I revisit it, I am struck by its memento mori pulse.

In one area of this book, I acknowledge that I am deeply mindful of the sheer breadth of loss over all these years; the birthdays, the graduations, the wedding. Then I continue with these words, which I share below (lightly edited):

No less full of loss — and far more plentiful — are the day to day losses. Via this broken relationship, I have missed out on your bouts of illness, workplace ordeals, fender benders, deadline triumphs, favorite pop culture, misunderstandings with mates, canceled flights, mystery skin afflictions, zingiest comebacks, busted appliances, house-pet anecdotes, customer service nightmares, new haircuts, lost chargers, urgent care sh*tshows, successful recipes, scenic nature moments, extreme weather episodes, parking tickets, friend outings, 3 AM anxieties, cool eyeglasses, kitchen fails, weird neighbors, and favorite pictures of frogs.

And this too has its place in the catalog of losses: I would have liked for my adult daughters to get to know their mother, most especially for their own sakes.

Once a year, I buy myself a peach cup. Yep, you know the kind, with the peach slices all lounging in their syrupy medium. I do this not because I am sentimental about grade school cafeteria, but because it was the first food product I consumed following the lengthy labor and childbirth of my firstborn. The peach cup tastes like purest joy.

As far as I know, I never shared that with Eva.

So many things that have gone unshared. My daughters were twentyish, give or take, when this fracturing came to be. Up to that moment, I had not felt inordinately pressed for time.

*All names are fictionalized