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My mother died over the weekend, technically as the result of complications from an operation, but mostly as a result of being 89 years old. In other words she died of life.

Twenty years ago my father died all of a sudden, of a stroke, which just confirmed to me that he had ended his life as he had lived it, lucky to the last moment. Dad was greatly overweight and had been for 30 years, and we had been haunted sometimes by the fear that he would have a stroke and wind up incapacitated, half-paralyzed perhaps, and largely bedridden for years, as had happened to his father before him. Instead, he basically said “I’m done,” dropped the body, and moved on to whatever came next.

Mom didn’t leave like that. She went through years of gradually increasing debility, gradually encroaching loss of independence. Fortunately her daughters were there to preserve her from ending up in an institution of some kind, but still I know she regretted the gradual loss of her privacy and independence.

Only in America (so far as I know) is it automatically considered to be a tragedy if someone dies, no matter how old they are, no matter how sick. I guess we are supposed to live forever. Years ago we said goodbye to my friend Ed Carter in the way that he proposed: we each took a glass of champagne and gave him a “bon voyage” toast. That’s the way I feel now, a great sense of relief on mom’s behalf. I imagine her Thanksgiving Day including the thought: “thank God I’m through with that! It was interesting while it lasted, but it was getting to be a bit of a drag. I wonder what’s next?”

You all know that the only important thing in life is the love you learn to give and receive. Deaths are good occasions for us to remember that.

Happy holidays, friends.

Friends,

So here we are at Christmas, 2004. We’ve already burned four (or five, depending on how you count) percent of the 21st century, and it was only a couple of months ago, seemingly, that we were watching, shaking our heads to try to absorb it, as we left the twentieth century.

That December 31st, we were wondering if the Y2K bug would end civilization, or would at least massively disrupt communications. To this day, it’s undecided whether the scare was totally unwarranted or whether the massive preparations and retrofitting that took place saved us. Either way, the scare brought front and center to all our minds the interconnectedness of the world, as nothing had done before.

I am old enough to remember the first communication satellites that first made possible instant two-way communication between continents. I remember the first pictures of the earth taken from space. (It may be hard for my younger friends to realize that there was a time — in our lifetimes — when no one had ever seen a photo of the earth as a full sphere. The closest we had, till then, was high-altitude shots from balloons or airplanes.) And I remember those shots of the earth as a lovely blue-green marble in the depths of space, taken by Apollo astronauts circling the moon, with the cold dead moon as foreground.

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