AFTERWORD

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers

flow in the right direction, will the earth turn

as it was taught, and if not how shall

I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,

can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows

can do it and I am, well,

hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,

am I going to get rheumatism,

lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.

And gave it up. And took my old body

and went out into the morning,

and sang.

—MARY OLIVER,
“I Worried”

LATE THAT NIGHT, after two men from the funeral home had taken her body away just as smoothly and unobtrusively as promised, I sent a message to everyone who needed to know that Margaret had “died peacefully at 1:15 a.m.”

It is what one writes, it’s the standard phrase, like ending a letter with, “Sincerely.”

Dying, or “passing,” as so many people prefer to call it, is a process, death the completion of the process. The truth is that I don’t know whether Margaret died peacefully or not. She died quietly . . . after the death rattles her breathing slowed and grew fainter until it stopped.

Over the last few weeks of her life, her body, as Donna Engle predicted, started to shut down, whole systems simply failed, the body closed down organ after organ trying to preserve the spark of life at the core for as long as possible. Breathing, and with it the heart, are the last to stop, and then we are gone, to wherever or nowhere. Whether the experience was peaceful or not, who can say? Certainly, we all want a peaceful death, a painless transition into the unknown, and perhaps Margaret had one. I hope so.

It took Margaret almost exactly a year to die, if measured from her diagnosis until her death, but of course the process had begun years before, with the first appearance of the melanoma and her hesitation to have it biopsied, the enemy was already within the gates. Perhaps even five years ago it had already been too late to stop it from digging in somewhere in the body until it was ready to metastasize.

One is left only with questions. Should she have had the patch on her cheek biopsied instead of covering it with makeup? Most certainly so. Should she have been told that she needed to have a PET scan once a year after the melanoma surgery? Very likely, but perhaps we should have thought of it ourselves. Was it worth having the second brain surgery after the tumors returned? Hard to say; she would have died sooner, and perhaps more unpleasantly, without the surgery. Certainly Margaret was mistaken to choose radiation instead of a second brain surgery when the tumor returned—she ended up having to undergo the second brain surgery anyway, and by then it was too late, she only lived for two months after it.

We should have moved faster, we should have done this, we should have done that, perhaps Margaret should have been pushed harder into trying immunotherapy once everything else had failed, but you can’t push someone further than he or she is willing to go, and by that time it was clear to Margaret that whatever happened, the life she knew wasn’t going to come back, she wasn’t going to ride with the wind in her hair again, and she had the courage to recognize when she had had enough. One can torment oneself endlessly about what we might have done, but ultimately the person who has the cancer has to decide if and when to surrender, and do it knowingly, without guilt or blame.

At some point after the second brain surgery and the Gamma Knife radiation, it was clear to Margaret that she wasn’t going to get better, that the equivalent of a miracle at Lourdes wasn’t an option, and she decided she was going to die at home in her own bed, with her cats beside her, and who can say that she was wrong?

Not me.