September 10, 2016 | My mother, bless her soul in heaven, always believed that death visited in threes. I quietly dismissed the superstition as a bunch of malarky. Sorry, Mom.
In our neighborhood, in the past three weeks, three lovely women have passed away, all incident to either advanced age or lingering illness. My mother, bless her soul in heaven, always believed that death visited in threes. I quietly dismissed the superstition as a bunch of malarky. Sorry, Mom.
I like parameters. Where are the parameters? Does this number of "three" mean three people who live close to one another? Dependent on location? Or is it within a family? Dependent on relation? Or is it within one's social realm? Dependent on a common acquaintance? Because it seems inconsistent that every obituary page carries news of more than three deaths in any given city on any given day. One single viewing of a newscast blows the "three rule" out of the water (or is it out of the grave?)
It doesn't take much effort to move outside one's personal bubble to find many more than three families dealing with death. I'm also uncomfortable with the absence of a time constraint. How long is the time limit when counting up the three before the count is reset? Because my mother died in May of 1996, my cousin died two weeks after her, and then my brother died in October of that year. Was that my mother's three? My cousin's three? My brother's three?
Now that I've adequately thrown suspicion on my mother's superstition, I have to admit that I've begun harboring one of my own.
The first death in our neighborhood "three" occurred on August 30th. A wonderful 96-year-old woman - exemplar of the town and matriarch of the neighborhood who served as docent at the local art museum for 60 years as an avid spokesman for their causes. She married during WWII and moved across the country to relocate with her husband's family - a modern day Ruth. She raised her family of five. She made herself indispensable to the neighborhood. She was well loved. She was my friend, as is her daughter. She reminded me of my own mother, who married during the war, sacrificed for family, and taught her posterity the importance of etiquette and the power of a proper table setting. At 96, everyone said, "She had a good life. It was time." But her death still made me sad. My heart still ached to lose her. My heart still ached for my friend who lost her mother.
On August 30, three years ago, there was a death in our family. My nephew's wife, only 38, passed away after battling chronic pancreatitis. She was one of my best friends, along with being my niece-in-law. She was in the midst of raising her family of three daughters, who are close in age to my daughters. We talked on the phone about raising girls. We swapped recipes. We planned vacations. We went on date nights with our husbands. Even though she had suffered through countless pain attacks and hospital stays and IV meds, she always found a way to bounce back, until August 30, when she died, all alone, in her bed, while her family was at school and work. That August 30 was devastating. Somehow, I'd convinced myself that she would always find a way to bounce back, that she would raise her family to adulthood, that we would swap funny grandkid anecdotes and exchange recipes and refinish furniture and make quilts and plan vacations, that we would both die old 96-year-old women who'd done it all, when people could say we'd "lived good lives and it was time."
So, you see, when, three years later, to the very day, my 96-year-old neighbor died, the small August 30 square of my calendar turned an ashy gray. August 30th is now cast in shadow. For me, the day holds sadness and grief and shock.
Now, the trouble is, these two superstitions are melding in my mind. If death visits in threes, is there also something about this date and threes? Will there be one more of my loved ones who will die on that day next year? Or the next? Or the next? The first two deaths were three years apart, so, perhaps it will be another three years - 2019.
You realize this is going to make me anxious, right? This is where I have to force myself to watch the news, read the obituaries, and ground myself in the logic that death comes when it comes, and no one knows the date. In order to move my lingering worry away from something so innately slippery and elusive, I must focus on the only way I can counteract the sting of death - with the only antidote known to me - by living my life while I have it to live.
They call life a gift. I concur. Life is a gift. No exchanges. No returns. We must rip it open and make the most of whatever's inside.
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