IS IT DEATH?
January 2005
The New Year is traditionally about new beginnings, but this holiday season has for me been filled with a sense of endings, with the news that someone to whom I was once very close to died December 30, 2004 of lung cancer. Like my friend and colleague Terry Smith, who died from a fast-growing cancer during the holidays a few years ago, Scott was only 50. His death is a total blow to all who knew him, especially as the cancer was apparently not diagnosed til near the end, despite repeated trips to the doctor. His symptoms were written off as part of his problems with MS until it was too late.
Adding to the gray fog of misery and death that surrounds the new year for me, one friend's father died at the start of December, another friend's mother is dying of cancer, and the father of yet another friend died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on January 2, possibly while a former neighbor visiting from Alaska was describing to me the death of her friend and co-worker as she took part in search-and-rescue activities just before the holidays. Mentioning this to my friend Ben, he told me he too had a friend close to death with cancer. When the Boxing Day tsunami news and the continuing devastation in Iraq are added in, New Year 2005 already seems pretty old to me, and hazy with death and grief.
As David Landazuri mentions in his article in the LSA News for January 2005, I've been singing shape-note music off and on for a number of years. Despite a full schedule I was able to attend some of the Eugene Sacred Harp Singers' January 2 "sing" at Cozmic Pizza. One thing about the Harp music—it doesn't beat around the bush about death. Death, and the Christian hope of resurrection, heaven, glory, seeing Jesus, and so on, permeates every song.
On that Sunday, someone called number 122, "All is Well". The song begins "What is this that steals upon my frame? Is it death? Is it death?" Thoughts of my friend overwhelmed me as I sang the words. I sang loudly since I felt so much I would otherwise burst out crying. I am not a Christian, yet I found some consolation in the words assuring that "All is well! All is well!". The very sound of this music and the feel of it in your body as you sing can lift you into another realm with its vibrations and power. I found it very healing to sing that evening. The beauty of music is part of the beauty of this world my friend loved, but when I sing there are moments I know it goes beyond this world as well.
If not for Scott I might never have:
My friend was a naturalist who spent long hours in the field and the lab. He was fortunate enough to be able to make a life doing work for which he had a passion. He was also an adventurer: he lived in India when his father was there doing research, he hiked a long stretch of the Pacific Crest trail alone one summer while in college, and he and his wife were married in Jakarta, Indonesia. In his too-short life he knew cities and wilderness, grew giant pumpkins and tiny asters, and experienced the joy and frustration of fatherhood. In the lives of all those who knew him, whether long ago or in the moment of his death, the music of his life and memory will live on.
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And in June 2005.....
I do not ever remember a year when so many people within a couple "degrees of separation" from me have died: relatives, friends, and relatives and friends of people I know. My favourite uncle, Ray Leber, died aged 79 on June 4, 2005 (oddly enough the same day of the month that my father died in 1998). The uncle of my life-long friend Iralene coincidentally died the next day. The father of a co-worker had died suddenly the week before, and my friend Mary had recently lost one of her best friends to breast cancer.
My uncle Ray spent his life helping others. He was a social worker by profession; after he retired he volunteered with the Lambda Letters Project and with his church; he had studied to be ordained. That had been his first goal as a young man, but he had set it aside. Being well-off, he was able to help others with money as well as with time; in addition to giving a hand up to a number of family members over the years he gave away large sums to deserving organizations each year, and left his large estate to charity. I am grateful that I possess a big cutting board he and his partner Sidney Eisenberg and mother Harriett Leber had used, which I remember as a child, and a cuckoo clock which has been in the family for over a century. I spent a lot of time staring at that clock whenever we visited my uncles and grandmother. I think of them whenever I chop fruit or vegetables on the big heavy oak board, or glance at the clock with its dark carving, just as I think of my father, Robert Leber, whenever I pull out one of his heavy iron frying pans to make dinner. My father and uncles were good cooks, and the sight of Ray's old cutting board brings back the smell of coffee dripping and scrapple frying in the Sacramento kitchen when my family visited.
My uncle was a good-looking man who, like my father, lost his hair while still very young. Photos from the '60s onwards show his wardrobe of toupées; he had blonde, red, and I believe brown ones when younger, and settled into a lovely silver one which made him look very distinguished in his later years. He loved to travel, and spent as much time as he could travelling or cruising with a group of five longtime friends. He was very sociable, and a loyal friend, and the 75th birthday party he threw was remarkable for the number of people who had known him for more than four decades.
Ray emailed me earlier this year to let me know he had already reserved space at one of his favourite restaurants for a big 80th-birthday bash. His death was a sudden surprise. He had originally planned to be visiting us on the weekend of June 4, and my husband and I had spruced up the place, vetted area restaurants, and thought of many things to ask him. I miss my uncle, and I miss the conversations we were planning. I regret the questions I was waiting to ask had not been asked sooner. Now I'll never know the answers. I dread the years ahead when other friends and family members must take the long road away from this life and into what comes next.
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Harriett Smith January 2005