R.I.P. Uncle Orelle

Another conversation I may have to have with my triplets someday is about how our family handles death and other bad news. I am 37 and have never been to a family funeral. Our family seems to be blessed with longevity. (And by blessed I mean still around to moan and groan everyday about still being alive.) My grandmother celebrated her 102nd birthday two weeks ago and until late Wednesday night, all eight of her children ages 82 down to early 60s were still alive.

My uncle Orelle passed away after a several months long battle with cancer - a condition I am told he was never told he had because his children did not want to upset him. My grandmother, who was never told that he was ill, will also not be told of his death. She is very lucid, her memory is fine and still physically able to take care of her own personal needs with some help from family. But the fear is that if she finds out that her 70-something year old son is gone, she will not be far behind. What story will they come up with for my grandmother, I wonder. And considering her children are in a life-long feuds that mean not any one of them speaks to more than one or two other of their siblings - can they even come together long enough to pass on a plausible lie as to why she doesn't hear from this son?

Another person who will not be told of this death is one of Uncle Orelle's own daughters who has been in the hospital for a couple of months, faring poorly after a botched c-section. It doesn't matter that I think this situation is pure insanity. As my shrink told me yesterday - this is none of my business. I agree and am watching this all play out from the sidelines. But I wonder how I might explain to my children someday how some grownups in their family make conscious decisions to tell boldfaced lies. I suppose I could couch it in terms of caring and concern for the person being lied to. But then how does that balance with my intent to also teach them that illness and death are natural parts of life?

I was pondering all this yesterday while playing with the triplets and listening to my mother crying down the hall. Then I remembered a dream that I had many years ago. In the dream, I sat in our backyard atop a wooden fence that ran the length of the entire block, separating single family houses from an apartment complex. Next to the apartment building, in a large blacktop parking lot, lines of cars weaved around in a funeral procession. The funeral was for my mother. I bolted upright in bed, sweating, panting and crying hysterically. To this day that dream was the most vivid I have ever had. I ran down the stairs and pushed open my mother's bedroom door. My crying woke her immediately. I told her about my dream. She told me not to cry, that Haitians believed dreaming of a person's death was a very good omen. It meant that person would have a very long life. "I will never die," she told me.

I was eleven years old and with all my heart and soul I believed her because I needed to believe her. There was nothing more horrifying to me then than the thought that I might lose my mother. A few years later my mother was laid off from her factory job. Newly divorced from my stepfather and having five children at home to support, she did what so many men in my family had done - she became a yellow taxicab driver in New York City. This was in the mid 1980s, height of the crack epidemic. Not a week would go by it seemed without a news report of a cabbie being stabbed or shot in a robbery. Every night that my mother worked I sat on our living room couch in the dark, staring out the window onto our quiet suburban street waiting for her to come home. When her taxi pulled into the driveway a few minutes before midnight - always a few minutes before midnight - I would dash up the stairs and into my room. When she made her rounds of the bedrooms, checking on her kids, I would be huddled under my blanket pretending to be asleep. Never did I ever tell her how worried I was that one night she might not come home. By then I was a teenager and I understood and accepted that my mother would not live forever. I never held it against her that she told me otherwise. That lie allowed me to sleep peacefully when I needed it to. That lie made me feel safe.

I know now that if my three came to me and asked about my death, I would pull them into my lap, look them in the eyes and tell them "Mommy will always be with you. Mommy will never die." Thinking about this now, I can imagine the fear that my mother must have felt. It is a fear that I now have. What if I tell my children that I will always be with them and then die before they are old enough to understand why I lied to them? But carrying this fear around with me seems a small price to pay to give my children peace of mind and a sense of security for as long as they may need it.....