Death Doesn’t Wear A Mask

At night I wear black sweats and black t shirts because if I die in my sleep and things start leaking I want to look my best. Also, I spray my favorite gardenia perfume all over me in case I die and I smell, and the fan next to me is always on. If you don’t have a fan on when you die, you’ll smell real bad. I also wear a black scrunchi on my ponytail. To make sure everything will look clean even my sheets are charcoal gray. I don’t buy black sheets because that’s too vampire like, nor do I wear black nail polish, but I do wear dark burgundy on my toenails because my toenails are yellow and brittle.

Death is a sure thing, but why don’t we believe it? Believe that like age, death will happen to all of us? Not only do I wonder where we go after death, but it’s not knowing how I’ll die that bothers me. Since the pandemic death is imminent. On television we see men and women of all ages and races and genders and walks of life on respirators, dying from the Covid. We see doctors, lawyers, health care workers masked up like aliens, and body bags stacked in tents, waiting to be buried. Am I inside a movie? Or am I living inside an alternate universe? I feel terrified.

Death is on my mind. I write letters to my daughters to be opened after my death and I insert drawings in the envelopes along with my paper butterflies.

Death is expensive. I had to go to a funeral. There were thin white doves flying around, and crapping everywhere, while an Ethtopian priest mumbled jumble. Red roses wilting were strewn everywhere and then afterwards, part of the class A package deal, there was an elaborate and expensive hotel lunch with hours of videos about the deceased, while people at the tables got drunk, stuffed their faces with salmon and kept on talking about who died and what a horrible thing death is.

Until now at 83, I’d feared death. A few years ago, when my darling sixty-five year old brother died, he was cremated. When the Rabbi brought me a velvet bag filled with his ashes I was surprised how heavy the bag felt. Is this what all the fuss is about? How we end up? All we are?”

“I want to be cremated,” I say on face time to Moo Moo Milstein. “I don’t want to end up in a wall like Poe’s cat, or in the ground with the worms.”

“No cremation for me,” Moo Moo Milstein says. “Bunny Burstein’s rotten kids got her ashes mixed up with her dog’s ashes. So she’s buried in a pet cemetary. Heather Nathan spent a fortune on that face and she wants to freeze her head. She’s put up a six figure deposit in Zurich.”

“So her face will float in a bin forever. How horrible.”

I’ve seen my father dead at sixty in a coffin and when I touched him he felt like cold stone. I wondered if we turn to stone. I’ve seen my mother die intubated, my sixty four year old brother die intubated my close friend bravely die from cancer, and many friends die in hospice.

Now I’m hearing about the neighbors and acquaintances who died from the Covid.

The hardest death I experienced, was seeing my daughters beloved Black Lab Fred was put to his death. I felt his hard breathing, saw the pain in his eyes, and when he died quickly from the quick injection, his stuffed bee, his favorite toy still in his arms, I felt death’s adversary, grief.

Why can’t we all die that way?
Dr. Kavorkian is a hero was a hero.

And those who want to die that way can go to Oregon to die.
I see hope in death.

In our culture, we’re so hung up on ageism that anyone under sixty who dies, we lament: Too young to die. If someone over sixty dies, we lament “Well, it’s time.”

“She led a good life.”

“There’s something better ahead.”

The other night, in my dream I was standing in a shadowed room next to vase of orange pale orange roses. in a room facing me was a too sunlit room with urns. I was wearing my lilac silk dress with black feathers draped in my hair and a purple silk mask. There was a man who was tall and blonde and he invited me into the room. I wouldn’t go. I held on to the wall so I wouldn’t go as the man was very enticing and had a wonderful voice, but he wasn’t wearing a mask.

“Maybe the man was death. How do you feel about that?” asks Dr. M, my therapist on zoom.

How do you think I f eel? I feel fucking shitty. I have too much to do. To resolve. To learn. Books to write. Paintings to paint.. I think he was trying to pull me into death.”

“Why do you feel that?”

“He wasn’t wearing a mask. Death doesn’t wear a mask.”

“Why didn’t you talk to him?”

“Well, I wasn’t ready. I’m not ready. I want to find love before I go in that room.” I pause. “My lovely friend with stage four ovarian cancer called me from the hospital. She was just told that she had only a few weeks to live and was going home to hospice. She’s only sixty and lovely and has a lovely family, too. She said that she doesn’t fear death, that it’s her time to go, and that she felt this surge of hope and almost as though someone is helping her make the journey. She gives me hope.

BarbaraRoseBrooker-Author/journalist/activist/

This piece is from her latest book she is working on-The Corona Diaries And Other Things-

Her latest novel Love, Sometimes, published Feb 2020, Post Hill Press/Simon Schuster is in all bookstores, on Target, Amazon and other online sites.

You can see her recent TV appearances an\]d podcasts on you tube and on www.barbararosebrooker.com