Mortality Whispers

I've been lucky in this life. For decades I was healthy, physically able to do just about anything I wanted to do--except, sadly, be the Tribe's catcher ... Their loss.

Mortality was a flaw possessed only by others. I experienced the deaths of two great-grandparents, three grandparents. My father lived until November 1999. And my mother didn't pass away until this past March; she was 98. And as long as my mother was still alive, mortality, I foolishly, arrogantly believed, had nothing to do with me. Not directly. I mean, I may be ... older ... now, but my mom is still alive.

But Mortality has a way of casting his shadow on all of us. As I've said, I've been lucky. But others I've known--cousins, aunts and uncles, friends, former students, so many others--have felt that Dark Presence long before I've had to.

Even when I got my first cancer diagnosis in late 2004, I didn't really think Mortality was all that involved. Just a bit of bad luck. I'd win the battle.

And for nearly fourteen years I've kept Mortality away, ignored his knocks on the door, his shadow in the window, his breathy whispers in my ear.

But he is one insistent fellow, Mortality. Like a robo- or spam-caller. You block one number; he'll try another--and another--until you, sort of recognizing the Caller ID, pick up the phone and hear his voice--and know his voice. Such a familiar sound, though if you've been lucky (as I've been), you've never really heard it before. Rather--you didn't know what it was when you heard it. You thought the voice was talking to someone else ...

But now, Mortality is a regular visitor. I open the door. I pick up the phone. We chat ... a lot.

But--so far--after our friendly little encounters, he will leave. And I close the door, but I no longer bother locking it. Pointless.

I've realized (as I should have long ago) that I am just a part of a long, long, long procession. Some of you know that I've been long interested in the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-99); my own great-grandfather went up there (found a little--bought a farm with it, a farm the family would later lose in the Great Depression).

And as I look at those famous pictures of the Chilkoot Pass--over the mountains separating Alaska from the Canadian Yukon Territory--I realize, of course, that every single person in that procession is now gone. Some found gold; some found heartache; some did not survive the journey itself. But now ... they are all one.

Their children are all gone. Their grandchildren are (probably) all gone. And their great-grandchildren are next. It's just ... the way it is ... It just takes some of us (like me) a long time to realize we are in that procession ...