OUR DEATHS
A couple years ago, I wrote a column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy called My First Death. It was about the first death I experienced. I was a kindergarten student at St. Hedwig Parish School. One of my friends and his mother were run over by a drunk driver while waiting for a bus by the Congress theater on Milwaukee Avenue. The death touched me a lot. I was 5 years old and knew nothing about death and dying until that death.
What I didn’t know then was that my first death wasn’t going to be my last death.
Yesterday, I got a phone call from a good friend, a Chicago friend I’ve known for 60 years. He is dying and wanted me to know. We talked about the books we loved back then, science fiction novels. Those books brought us together, strengthened our friendship with their dreams for tomorrow and the world to come.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that call. I woke up about 3 this morning thinking of all the people close to me who I’ve lost. I never knew my grandparents. They all died before I was born, but I’ve lost so many family members I’ve known: My mother and my father, my wife’s dad, his two brothers, my sister Donna’s husband Dennis who I knew since we were teens growing up near Humboldt Park, my wife’s sister’s husband Bill who loved to sing and play the guitar.
And then there are my friends. 2005 and 2006 were bad death years. I was in my mid 50s, and it was like the world wanted to teach me what was coming. Three of my colleagues, people I taught with when I was a university professor, died. Two died of cancer; one was a suicide. Then two of my best friends from childhood died.
That was almost 20 years ago. The dying hasn’t stopped. Friends die, family members die. Writers who I’ve read and met and grown close to die. People I know only on social media die.
All those dead, and you and I both know they won’t stop.
—
Years ago, after my parents died, I wrote a poem of hope, a poem that spoke of my hope that someday I would be with my parents again.
Here’s the poem:
In Heaven
I will sit around the table
eating poppy-seed cake
and drinking coffee
with my mom and dad.
They will tell me all the things
they were afraid or forgot to tell me
when they were alive
But this will take only a moment
—real explanations never take longer
than that—and then my parents will turn
to the only questions that really matter
to the living and the dead.
Was the road hard?
Did you miss us?
—
The poem appears in my book about my parents Echoes of Tattered Tongues.
The article appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, Chicago’s Polish Daily.
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