Talking about death and dying is considered depressing, but there were a few things I was vividly aware of when my dad passed in 2021...
- at a certain point my Dad didn't want to go to a hospital again and his wishes were honored. My grandfather Opa died in his sleep when I was kindergarten. He ate dinner, read the paper, went to bed, had a massive heart attack while he slept, and never woke up again. That was my first experience with a death in the family. At the time, I thought that was so sad. Then I went on to experience dozens of deaths and realized that Opa was lucky. Really. There were no tubes, no monitors. No outrageous hospital bill. He had a meal and died in his bed without drawn-out pain or leaving his family in debt.
- dying without medical debt or ambulance bills is a luxury in America. The only way Opa could have 'died better' is if it was after the last meal on the last day of his vacation... and after charging everything to his credit card.
-Dad died in his bed with no tubes or outrageous hospital bills. And surprisingly, he didn't die from COVID even though he had almost no immune system left. We didn't bring home the virus to a very vulnerable person. We masked up and stayed away from people.
- dying and death is an art form. The clear-eyed planning, the rites, the preparations. It's something that should be taught in schools. There would be less depression if people in our culture could deal with dying/death as a natural process. Some times people are 'ready to go' and keeping them alive is the greater pain and depression.
-technology saved me a lot of pain! I was able to be there with my dad and mom because of zoom. There is no way I could have taken 8 months off in 2020-2021 to be down in Miami. I was working on two tv shows that met almost year around in NYC. The pandemic radically reoganized my life-to-work balance. And that means it reoriented me toward life-work-death balance. In March 2020 I got the phone call from an exec saying 'hey, how would you feel about switching to Zoom?' Now it seems almost hilarious, but I was vaguely familiar with Zoom. I got the link and signed up. Then I cancelled my booked flight back to NYC. If work was on zoom, I could stay down here a little longer. And that went on for several months. And this led to...
-thinking about if I just wanted to spend my life parked in front of a computer and working all day. This epiphany happened one day on zoom. A colleague was in the South of France. And she was working. She had her mornings and afternoons free and decided to spend a little extra time away from her apartment. It was like a wave of 'OMG's' went through the room. Suddenly people were popping up on zoom in upstate cabins, in the mountains of California, Spain. I started traveling. And the thought in the middle of a pandemic was clear: if death is everywhere...I'm not going to sit in my apartment and click away at the keys. Life is for the living. I'll wear two masks, socially distance, wipe down the armrest, load up on vitamin D, but I gotta get out and live. Death is so close!
-people change their priorities when death is so close. Two tv writer friends stopped answering their phones and stopped staffing. They sat down and wrote the novel that was inside of them. Other people started teaching. One told me that the pandemic made them realize their life was 'so small, so sad' and that they weren't going out like that! Fuck this shit. Drink, Screw, Travel!
-Dad always wanted to retire and travel around in a Winnebago. He talked about that a lot. When he passed I figured 'why wait to honor him and honor life. Let's go out on the road.' Life is short. Live.
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