Reflection about Death
Jack Owicki
November 2, 2003
Palo Alto, CA
Anita Callaghan died at age 13 of influenza in Rochester, New York, in 1929. She was something of a prodigy. Anita was two years ahead of her age in school and was a good enough pianist to have performed publicly and to have enrolled in the nearby Eastman School of Music.
Of course, her death was a terrible blow to her parents. But they never recovered from it. For years, each Sunday afternoon was devoted to grieving over Anita’s grave. Anita’s father loved to sing and play the piano. He never again did either after she died, though he lived to be 93.
The chief victims of this unresolved grief were Anita’s sisters, a pair of identical twins four years her junior. They had dwelled in Anita’s shadow before her death, and the shadow persisted afterwards. Bereft of a normal relationship with their parents, they turned inward and to each other. They developed hard emotional shells of self control. They did not show pain, especially grief.
One of the twins was my mother. A good woman, a loving woman, but subtly twisted by her parents’ inability to deal with Anita’s death. I believe that I, in my turn, would be a rather different person had Anita lived: more at ease with myself and with others. Isn’t it strange how death reaches down through the generations to mold us?
My mother idolized Jackie Kennedy because she had not cried at her husband’s funeral. And, by God, after her beloved husband died on their 39th wedding anniversary, Lois Owicki did not cry at his funeral either. I was 35 at the time, and I was no Jackie Kennedy.
My father’s death was the first time that I had been forced to confront my own mortality. When he died, I became next in line. I felt that very strongly, and I still feel it.
Susan and I were living in Berkeley at the time, and I was scrambling for tenure at the University. Though I visited my parents’ home in Michigan more often than usual over the 14 months of his ordeal with stomach cancer, I wish I had spent more time with him. Nevertheless, I was able to say a full goodbye to him, and I was present when he died in his home, having been cared for tirelessly by my mother. I wonder how many of you have been present at the death of a loved one. It’s hard to talk about.
Several years later, I developed some stomach problems of my own that were worrisome enough for my doctor to order a series of x-rays. Early on the appointed morning I appeared at the clinic, having had no breakfast except a barium milkshake. While I was waiting outside the x-ray room, I fainted dead away. The nurse who revived me tried to comfort me by saying that this was a common reaction to fasting and to the barium shake.
But I knew better. I had fainted out of sheer terror that I, like my father, had developed stomach cancer. My stomach problem turned out to be nothing terribly serious, but it did teach me that I wasn’t dealing with death at all well.
In the twenty-some years since my father died, I have experienced other deaths, including my mother’s. Death seems more normal and less terrifying now. I don’t think I would faint again under circumstances similar to my x-ray visit.
That’s some progress. For me, it’s part of a decades-long process of emotional accommodation to the inevitable. Accommodation tempered with a passion for requiem masses, which I think is my way of spitting in the face of death.
None of this has much to do with my rational mind, except in an unhelpful wayÑI can’t see any reason to believe in an afterlife. Instead, I agree with Omar Khayyam [I read part of the Rubaiyyat during the service] that there’s not much to understand about death except that it’s the end of the only life we’ll have. And so I’m trying to make the most of what I yet may spend.
