32.

JOYFULLY PREPARING FOR THE CELEBRATION OF DEATH

On February 5, my sisters and I gathered for our mother’s birthday to witness the signing of the “Do Not Resuscitate” form.

Not for her. That’s another story. She signed the DNR form for her computer.

“If this contraption starts to die one more time, that’s IT!” our mother declared. Our mother, the kindest woman on earth, the patient, loving, selfless saint who never gave up on anyone, who could breathe hope and health into anything. “I’M PULLING THE PLUG!” she yelled, eyes flashing, directly into her computer’s screen.

“AND I’M HELPING YOU DO IT!” Dad announced. Our gentle, compassionate dad, who rescues worms on the sidewalk and puts them back in the grass, who got up every three hours to feed an injured baby squirrel we found, who’s always been willing to go anywhere, do anything to help something survive. Dad was over it. We watched him sign the DNR for his laptop a few months earlier. Dad was ready for the end. Dad was almost looking forward to the day he could haul the lifeless electronics out to the curb.

We have all suffered too much.

The emergency trips to the Genius Bar, only to be told the fault was with our parents, not the equipment . . .

The long line of specialists we found to make house calls who got everything going again until the moment their techie vans pulled out the driveway . . .

The community college computer classes Mom’s taken over and over . . .

The instruction books Dad’s studied like a flight manual . . .

The desperate long-distance middle-of-the-night calls to my sisters and me: “I was trying to find Mollie Alstott’s address and I clicked the little gizmo on the right and then everything disappeared! It all went blank!” . . .

The hours and hours my sisters and I have spent trying to coach from across the country: “Just double-click on the contacts icon on the bottom . . . No! Mom! . . . the one with the little picture of the . . . What? You did what?? Now you need to drag it down from . . . What?? I don’t know where your cursor is! I’m in California! Can’t someone in Florida find your cursor???”

The user-friendly replacement computers we’ve bought our parents caused even more suffering. Everything about them was just different enough that the skills Mom and Dad had finally perfected were useless. The new, updated machines made them feel even more inept than the old, outdated ones.

Mom and Dad have friends who Skype with relatives in Europe every week. It makes them feel ashamed. They have friends who share photo libraries as easily as sharing popcorn. It makes them feel incompetent. Their grandchildren could do more on their computers when they were two years old than Mom and Dad can do at age ninety. It makes them feel like ninety-year-olds.

And so my sisters and I gathered around Mom’s desk as a special gift for her birthday. We laid the official DNR form in front of her, just as we had for Dad’s computer a few months before. We witnessed the signing of the form. We pledged that none of us would disobey either of their wishes and try to do anything to revive any electronics ever again if they started failing.

Mom and Dad looked so relieved.

“We hope our computers will croak together,” my kind, loving mother said.

“When one starts going, we might need to give the other one a little assist,” my gentle, compassionate father agreed.

“When it’s over, I will write the obituary,” Mom added. “On a nice piece of pretty notepaper with a ballpoint pen.”

“And I will put a stamp on Mother’s envelope, drive it to the post office, and hand it to a U.S. Postal Worker to put in the day’s outgoing mail so it can be delivered to the newspaper!” Dad cemented the deal.

“And then . . . ”—Mom smiled and Dad smiled back—“then things can finally get back to normal around here.”