My daughter is thirteen and I only just gave up the notion that if she got sick, it was my fault. Yeah people, that’s the kind of guilt I’m dealing with. Let’s get real! That’s the kind of power trip I’m on.

I’ve always had a kind of sixth sense in my role of mother. I had the foresight to eat organic and go sulfate free way before it was mainstream. I held my daughter back a year because she had a September birthday. I stayed home and provided a high quality, lightly scheduled childhood way before Maria Shriver touted it.

I’m a bitchin’ mother.

But as I grow older and death and dying creep in, I’m having a little problem. I’m not good at death. Or maybe it’s like hating spiders, I don’t want to deal with it! I cut my teeth on motherhood, put all my eggs in one basket, stepped right up to the red wagon and bought my ticket, hit it out of the park. I operated under the illusion that I controlled things but death is too wide a gap to sachet over gracefully.

My dog had to be put to sleep—let’s not Doris Day around, it’s not sleep, it’s death. I had to kill my dog. Yes he was fifteen and yes it was probably his time to go, but he was the most loyal, sentient being on this earth. I buried him in the backyard to be closer to us. We planted sunflowers over his grave to make it prettier, but every time I water them I imagine the current state of his decaying body. Even though three sunflowers bloomed out of his grave, it will never be pretty.

Then my friend Jay died tragically at 50. He was funny and deep, one of those people whose spirit will live on in my DNA. His memorial was held at a theater where we’d performed together. I imagined I would form a strong bond with everyone there.

But Lady Death had other ideas.

It was a ninety-nine seat theater but the Fire Marshall must have thrown caution to the wind. There I sat, along with over three hundred other people who had also performed with him.

There was a slideshow of his life. Old VHS tapes they’d dug up. Two hundred and ninety-nine of the guests related personally to it. They’d either gone to college with him or studied with him at Groundlings. I’d only known him a few years. They got the inside references and laughed and cried simultaneously. I could only cry because I feared only twelve people would show up at my memorial. The rest would just like it on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I have old VHS tapes too, but I’m the only one who knows where to find them.

After the ceremony I couldn’t get into a conversation with anyone. I ordered a wine from the bartender. The same bartender who’d served Jay and I at least thirty wines after the shows we’d performed in. He didn’t recognize me in the least. Or maybe he did. Jay was always teaching me things at that bar. Maybe today’s lesson was: death is the ultimate singularity.

I went home, posted a picture of Jay and I on Facebook and felt triumphant.

 But Lady death is NOT a lady.

 The next day I felt horrible. The memorial left me hating myself. Jay was obliterated from this earth, he was GONE. I had never dragged my inert ass to his improvisation class. I had planned to definitely go on Monday, but he had died on Saturday.

Lady death is a crack whore!

I read somewhere that you should respond to death, not react. Oh I’m gonna react alright, I may even throw something! How can anyone be an expert on death unless they’ve died and come back to life? And those hackneyed stages of grief are really pissing me off. Apparently, I skipped straight to the second stage of grief. What is this…a freakin’ board game?

So I went back to what I know. I’m a great mother. I love to cook and perfect recipes. I thought to myself, how would Julia Child do this? How many flat-ass soufflé’s had she pulled out of the oven before the perfect one immerged? She had the patience to omit a little here and ad a pinch there until her recipe prevailed. I thought, let’s review how I’ve dealt with death so far to learn what to omit:

 

  1. Being in a bubble of your own puffed up self is not handling death.
  2. Posting airy-fairy healing thoughts on Facebook feels inadequate, because it is.
  3. You can’t take a death boot camp.
  4. There is no self-help book that will magically put death in the past.
  5. There is no coupon code to cut down on the pain.

It requires empathy, which gets construed as “doormat” and in our “look how great I am even though I’m really not society” we don’t have much empathy on hand.

The only truth I could be certain of is that death of a loved one is a solo journey. You have to go right through the eye of the storm. There’s no avoiding it. It’s like being drunk off your ass, on your knees praying to the toilet goddesses, barfing your brains out. If you are lucky enough to have a loving friend rub your head and wipe your mouth, you will get through bouts of it easier. But all in all you can only go through it alone. Heave by heave.