When I Die

A little more than a year ago, my friend Jim died in his sleep. He was 43, and two weeks away from adopting newborn twin girls with his wife, Nancy. I won’t say that Jim was my best friend, if only because he had a lot of friends who would claim him as such and I have no more right to that claim than any of them. But he was a damn good friend, and had been for more than 25 years.

Jim and Nancy lived next door to Jim’s parents, in a house Jim built before he and Nancy met. It’s an amazing place, full of thoughtful and carefully crafted details. I put in my share of hours during its construction, and one day, as we were working on some task or another, Jim showed me a photo of the slate stone flower he’d fashioned at the roof’s peak.  I remember asking Jim why he’d gone to the considerable trouble of making the flower, when no one would ever see it. “Someday after I’m gone, someone will be up on this roof and I want them to know I cared,” is what he said. I said nothing. I mean, what the hell could I say to that?

After his death, Jim’s family did an amazing and unusual thing: They left his body where it lay, in Jim and Nancy’s bed, for three full days. And Nancy invited anyone and everyone to come say goodbye. Or hello. Or whatever they wanted. I remember sitting on the bed with my friend, crying my friggin’ eyes out. I remember how at first I’d thought that maybe I couldn’t do it, couldn’t handle seeing his body like that, in his bed, exactly as he died. I remember thinking that I couldn’t imagine how his family could just leave him there and open the door. But sitting there with him, and gathering with so many of the people whose lives had somehow become intertwined with his (and it was a lot), I realized I couldn’t imagine it being any other way.

Three days later, we lifted Jim into a homemade coffin and buried him on the land. That was another thing I wasn’t sure I could handle and yet another thing that, having done it, I couldn’t imagine not having done. Two weeks later, I was at the hospital with Jim’s family and a few friends, awaiting the arrival of the twins Nancy would adopt.

That was a year ago. This past winter, Nancy decided to sell the house; it’s off-grid, at the end of a long gravel driveway, heated by wood. In other words, not exactly the ideal place for a single mother of newborn twins. So last Friday, a handful of friends and neighbors moved Jim’s body to a country cemetery only a few miles from the house. It might have been another thing I wasn’t sure I could do, but this time, I knew I could. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, in any sense of the word. But at 8 a.m., I showed up with my shovel and a few of us suited up in protective suits, and we started digging. It was, for lack of a better term, one of the most-real things I have ever done.

The whole experience with Jim has made me think about how we handle death in contemporary America and how detached from the process we’ve allowed ourselves to become, and what a loss this detachment is. At Jim’s memorial service, which was so well attended there was an entire building full of folks who couldn’t fit into the church, my friend Paul said something really simple that’s stuck with me. He was addressing Jim’s family: “Thanks for giving death back to us.”

Death is an inevitable part of life; we all know it, and yet sometimes it seems as if we don’t know it. Or, at the very least, we don’t allow ourselves to fully acknowledge and appreciate it. Damn straight it’s hard. Damn straight it can feel as if it downright sucks. But I know for a fact that my gratitude for Jim – for his quarter-century of friendship, for the examples he set of compassion and generosity and simple caring – was fed and watered by my experiences surrounding his death. It sounds a bit trite, but there’s really no other way to put it: I’m a better person for it all.

When I die, I want what Jim had: I want the simple comfort of my own bed for a day or two. I want my friends and family to come calling and then, when they’ve had enough of that, to stick me six-feet into this stony soil. No pomp and circumstance and, I’d like to think, more laughter than tears. Just a bunch of folks, getting together, taking death back.