"You guys have a cool house," she said as I showed her around. "It would be cool to have something like this someday."
"Yeah," I said, "I'm really lucky."
I am lucky.
When I was a kid, my family usually lived in rentals, military housing, or apartments. My parents were unhappy with one another, and our home got volatile from time to time. When I left home, I lived in a lot of dumps. A couple of times I got these amazing caretaker jobs when I got to live in these amazing places, but most of the time I lived in what were affectionately called "garrets." Whenever I could, I house-sat. It looked like I, as an artist and transient, chronically underemployed single lesbian, was going to live my whole life in decrepit "student-style" housing. I had a messy personal life punctuated by difficult romantic affairs and sporadic mental health crises. When I slowed down enough to think about it, which wasn't often, I figured my life would be a short one. I couldn't imagine living the way I did as someone old. I couldn't imagine my crazy self seeing 40.
So when I did turn 40, I felt like I had gotten away with something. I'd started taking care of my health and had an almost regular job. I had good, loyal friends and a good home with a woman I love. By merely surviving I had gotten away with something some of my old friends hadn't.
Long before I was 40 I'd had friends who'd died. They were called "tragic" and "unnatural," these deaths of young people "before their time." The causes of these deaths were violence or drugs or AIDS or breast cancer or suicide. These were deaths about which you could think--and I often, desperately did--"if only." "If only he hadn't gone out that night." "If only she'd found it earlier." "If only...." As if these deaths had been mistakes, were aberrant, might not have happened at all.
Then the year I was 40, my parents died. When my mother died, the death certificate called it an "expected" death. We had discovered her colon cancer when I'd gone down to see her the previous summer. I was able to quit my job and go care for her during the last six months. My sister was there a lot too, and my brother came down to be with mom when he could. Chris, who is a nurse practitioner, was able to be there sometimes too, including the night my mother died. I was, as much as I could have been, prepared for my mother's death. But when the phone rang a month later and I learned that my stepmother, dad's wife of 20 years, had found him suddenly dead, I was not prepared.
I was blown away by my parents' deaths. There was something about burying my parents that sobered me. These were the people from whom I had been made, the generous, troubled people who had loved me into living. But as devastating as their deaths were to me--and I was devastated, barely functional for a while--these deaths were not "unnatural." They were the deaths of old people at the ends of their lives. They were "natural." My parents' deaths made me realize that death is ordinary.
My parents had some miserable years when they were young, but they got to get through their crazy years and live long enough to be happy. Now when I try to imagine them, I do not think of the hard things from the past, I think of them in the last years of their lives. I think of my mom in the garden in the little house she was able to buy when she retired. I think of her and me and Chris and the two gay guys mom considered her other sons laughing over a meal. When I think of my dad, he's at his table in the den squinting at a crossword puzzle, his wife on the couch behind him with a book.
I'm glad my parents got to be old before they died. When I think of my friends who died before they got to be middle-aged, I feel sad for them. My dead friends died before they got to have the "someday" of the fairly stable, contented middle age my new young friend, Jed, sees when she looks at the home I get to have with my lover, the gratitude-filled life I have lived long enough to live.
