Memento mori was something of a Medieval motto.  How could it not be?  They had Black Death and other plagues, climate change and crop failures, and numerous wars including civil and Thirty Years’ and Hundred Years’.  Modern American culture, on the other hand, denies death with all the might and main of the medical establishment and the advertising industry. Death denial has a really long run for many of us.

Death denial runs aground on the rocky shore of reality when you have a loved one in a nursing home.  Assisted living has more or less graciously given many of the infirm elderly a safe haven. The people who have to remain in nursing homes are very sick, in ways that medicine can’t fix. If every day there isn’t the day of the dead, it’s close.

In that situation, sudden death starts to look good. I’ve heard people who have loved ones in nursing homes, or who themselves are in poor health, say as much.  It’s been on my own mind . There is much to envy about people who die doing what they love, pass away in their sleep, or even die in the bosom of an assisted living facility. Less than before, though, and probably less than ever in human history, sudden death is not the norm for the aged in America.

Mom’s nursing home had a Halloween party for everybody in both the Assisted Living and the nursing care sides of the facility.  The décor involved what you expect at Halloween and staff were in costume.  In the back of my mind I wondered about the propriety of having that kind of party theme in that kind of place, but everyone seemed to enjoy it.  One of the nurses told me that it always perks up the nursing care residents to get out of their usual floor to a different area with different people.

Maybe Halloween in a nursing home works like the skeletons in Mexico’s Day of the Dead.  As I understand it, the dancing skeletons and sugar skulls reminded people of the inescapable truth, more like the Middle Ages than America, that death was part and parcel of daily life.  The Roman Catholic church fused an Aztec death festival onto the Church’s own Days of the Dead – All Hallows Eve, All Saints, and All Souls. Those days existed on the Church calendar for good reason and had European Pagan roots as well. The paradoxical and vitally important effect is that remembering death affirms life.

There are times and there are places where you can’t deny death.  A nursing home adds the twist that some of these frail, sick, demented, slowly dying elders seem to be  neither fully alive nor finally deceased but some of both.  Half dead is one way that can strike the visitor.  Another way it can strike the visitor is halfway home.   A year from today  on All Souls’ Day, many of those  old souls in Mom’s nursing home will be gone: out of pain and indignity, out of dementia, rejoined with Mother Earth, returned to the nearer presence of God – however you describe this ineffable hope.

This is a collect for the Commemoration of All Souls from the 1929 Scottish Book of Common Prayer:

ETERNAL Lord God, who holdest all souls in life: We beseech thee to shed forth upon all the faithful departed the bright beams of thy light and heavenly comfort; and grant that they, and we with them, may at length attain to the joys of thine eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Yesterday was the Twelfth Day of Christmas – the last day of the liturgical Christmas season;  today is Epiphany.  The days of Christmas definitely had their delights as far as I am concerned.

• The Blue Christmas service at my  church, St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Houston, was designed for people who might be grieving, bereft, or just grimly stressed, and was reverent, thoughtful, beautiful and holy.
• Everybody in Houston got what we wanted for Christmas:  RAIN!
• An owl in a university tree:  when my Rice Alum friends Becky and Marc and their son Beto came to town, we walked around the Rice campus and located one of the Screech Owls that roosts in the trees outside the West entrance of the Library.  The treetop was swaying in a stiff breeze.  Becky commented, “For the owl that must be just like sleeping in a hammock.”
• My dear friend and former colleague Ola gave me P. D. James’ Pride and Prejudice murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberly, for Christmas.  What a joy to have an enjoyable  and distracting book to pick up and read over the holidays!
• My friend Kristin came from Washington DC to stay a few days.    She nested in my guest room a.k.a. the better half of my living room.  She enjoyed turning on the lights in the Christmas tree at night and when she had to get up early a couple of mornings for meetings.  Not many guest rooms come with a full-size Christmas Tree!
• I like my tree too.  According to my friend Bethe, whose family came from Poland, a Polish Christmas tree is one so decorated that you can’t see any tree. After upgrading to a 7 1/2′-footer this year, since I now live in a condo with high ceilings, I have a Texas Christmas Tree: bigger than it has to be, with spots of local color and lots of elbow room.

• Another friend, Lila (and there’s a theme here:  I am wonderfully blessed with friends!) is recuperating from surgery and, being an industrious person, itching for constructive things to do.  She’s proofreading the dark fantasy novel I just finished.  Wow!  Proofreading a book is a long and detailed job, and almost impossible for the writer of said book, who is much too close to the story to see the typos.
• I read the novel too as a prelude to the last editing pass.  I only caught about 20% of the glitches Lila did, but I found a slew of structural fixes to make, and I enjoyed reading it.  It’s a dark fantasy set mainly in the 1880’s Nevada and Utah Territories.  Now, on about the overall fourth (and in places six or seventh) draft, I think it really works.
• New Year’s Eve was a delight with Kristin and Lila and Lila’s husband Jim and my friend Eileen and her husband Gene at their home in Friendswood.   They live in a residential air park and just being there ups the quotient of fun had by all.  Jim made eggrolls, Eileen made Chinese dumplings and hot and sour soup, we greeted the New Year on Bermuda time, and everyone got home before midnight and before the local revelers hit the road.
• I made a pecan pie from a recipe in the November issue of Southern Living Magazine.  The Holidays are a grand time for modern takes on traditional food;  and  Southern Living, when it really connects with a New Southern recipe, hits it out of the ballpark.  I was wondering about some of the recipes in the December issue which tilted toward more avant garde fare.  My eyebrows shot up at the recipe for Sweet Potato Latkes in a section of new Hannukah food. But a good friend and colleague assures me that sweet potatoes make for extremely tasty latkes. Mazel tov!
• For those of us who didn’t have to go out of town, the holidays mean time for home improvements if desired.  I tackled a stack of memorabilia, some of it from Mom’s house when we sold the house, and the rest of it remembrance material from my adult life.  This was all stacked in a corner with some full plastic tubs holding up part of the stack – meaning no way to assess the contents of said tubs without taking down the stack.   That problem is no more.  I integrated a small file cabinet and four plastic storage cubes into the stack and now it works (and looks!) much, much better.
• New Year’s Day came with a morning of crystalline coolness and clarity. I was driving back from Church and saw a hawk thermalling over Greenbriar and Rice Boulevard.  I had my car’s sun roof open.  While parked at a red light I saw the hawk’s  flight feathers shining at the edges of its wings and its red-tinged tail glowing in the sun.  The hawk thermaled higher and higher.  What a great good luck sign for 2012!