I never read “On Death and Dying.” I actually learned about the five stages of grief from Bob Fosse’s film “All That Jazz.” Roy Scheider’s character literally flirts with death and keeps envisioning some bad standup comedian doing a riff on the five stages of grief-
What if you knew you had just a few months left to live on this earth, and in those months, you looked around at the life you’ve built–I mean really looked–at the things you’ve surrounded yourself with to give you comfort, inspiration, beauty, convenience.
Last night (after we’d spoken only an hour earlier), my mother called me out of the blue just to tell me she loved me, and “Happy Mother’s Day,” and when we hung up she didn’t say her usual “speak to you later,” but instead she said, “bye.”
Whenever we get off the phone, we tell each other we love each other and my mother makes a point of saying, ‘Speak to you later.’ She says it every time, sometimes more than once. It’s a promise, and it’s a prayer.
I started 2016 pretty damned consumed with myself. Not selfish, per se, but I was fighting personal demons, struggling with breaking bad habits, trying to come to terms with difficult truths
It was about fifteen years ago this month that I sat on our backyard porch with a cigarette in my hand and tears streaming down my face while a woman whose name I will never recall outlined for me by phone the extent of our three-year-old son’s “significant disabilities.
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