If It Didn't Suck....

A brief interlude from my rantings. This is the opening of a memoir I have written. Feed back would be greatly appreciated.


I have often heard people say that they wanted to die with dignity. What does that mean? Illness robs of this, as does advanced age. So how does one die with dignity? I ruminated long and hard over this saying as I stood in the cramped cluttered kitchen of my Aunt Harriett who had expired hours earlier. Looking around the small sparsely furnished one and one half room apartment, there seemed to be only a fleeting vestige of a life lived. It seemed hollow, sad, empty, and that is what it was. I was estranged from my Aunt for quite some time, but she was a big bold and brash woman who was always overbearing. While her boisterous and almost always obnoxious personality managed to attract many people to her, she had no close friends, and so, like many people, died alone in her lonely little apartment.

She was sitting at the window in the kitchen overlooking the debris filled courtyard and was in the process of peeling a grapefruit when her heart exploded. Or at least a blood vessel in her heart had burst. That is what the cause of death was, a pulmonary embolism. It came on suddenly, quietly, and without warning. Now I know sometimes Doctors say, that someone did not suffer when maladies like this occur, but do they really know? Pain for no matter how brief a moment when it strikes is, depending on the severity, sufferable. So I hold little confidence in the words of someone who tries to comfort the living by saying that their loved one did not suffer. I am sorry if you were disillusioned and by no means take my word for it, it is merely my opinion. Though sometimes I am inclined to believe it only insofar as that life is so cruel, so arbitrary, that when one is about to be deprived of our only gift, our life, and if we are alone when it happens it should be without pain. Without suffering. That would not make it all right but it would make it fair. Though I know no one ever said life was fair. But don’t get me started about that.

I wondered about the fairness, or the justness, of someone dying in their kitchen, slumped over on the windowsill, looking as though they were merely napping. I wondered about that and about what legacy a person leaves when they die. I thought about a sonnet by Shakespeare, that discusses the love he had, and says as long as the poem exists, people will know of the love and that their love and memory will live on. What happens when someone has no family, no loved ones, no friends. Is it as though they never existed?

My mind was filled with a myriad of disjointed thoughts as I looked through the apartment for paperwork, insurance, any valuables that lied around, anything that would prove her existence to the world. While there may have been something before, there was nothing now, because before I was notified a neighbor had discovered her body, called me, but before I arrived I knew that everybody in the building had come in and ransacked the place. I only knew this for certain because of two things. Three actually. Her television was gone, and her Harriett ring, worn on her left ring finger was not on her hand. She had gotten that ring on her 18 birthday and never ever took it off, it was now off her finger for the fist time in forty years. The final clue as to the grave robbing ghouls being there first was that her new linen was stripped from the bed, no where to be found. Only a bare, broken and stained mattress, no laundry basket with the linen. Nothing. That too was gone. So is this the remnants of dying with dignty? To have your bed clothing stolen, and the ring you loved so much wrenched off your hand? Does anyone no matter what kind of person they were in life deserve this in death?

For as much pain as my Aunt caused me and her family, which included my grandmother, who died years prior, and my mother, whom I recently just lost, she lived a rather short, unhappy life riddled with illness. I did not know all about her, but I knew enough about her through my mother and through the summer I spent with her some twenty years prior. I was eight years old and my mother had a new boyfriend. His name was Fred and he drove an ambulette. So, since she just started to get serious with him she wanted to spend time with him, and figured that summer would be coming up, I would be out of school and she could pawn me off on my Aunt. I know that may sound harsh, but that is what it felt like she was doing. I had hated my Aunt, mainly because I was afraid of her. Her volume level was permantely broken so she always yelled. She wasn’t hard of hearing, she just liked to yell. She liked to yell, and she liked to hit. So I feared her. I guess the hate didn’t come until later, until after that summer, and that was all I could think about while I stood there, alone, in the middle of this apartment, looking at a sad woman who caused much sadness. I was eight years old and I was about to stay my Aunt for six weeks that summer.....