This month, the holidays notwithstanding, I’m thinking about death. Actually I’ve been thinking about death all year.

Thinking about death is not a joyful occupation but, for me, it hasn’t been a depressing one either. Thinking about death has felt necessary. The prospect of death keeps me focused on my purpose for being alive. My larger purpose is loving and caring for the people dear to me. My personal purpose is to write. When I say write, I’m referring not just to the act of writing itself but all that comes with it: revision, research, reading, to name a few writerly tasks. For my current project, scanning my great aunt’s typewritten letters and transcribing her handwritten ones. Getting documents in Armenian translated. Putting my ancestors’ lives into historical context. Writing is my art. Doing my art makes my day-to-day life meaningful.

And it hasn’t escaped me that my Armenian family memoir contains much death. The Genocide that took one and half million Armenian lives. The ancestors I’m trying to find. My beloved grandmother and great-aunts whose lives I’m excavating to better understand them and our family history. 

There are other reasons I’m thinking about death.

My sweet mother-in-law, 93, both her sons by her side, passed away in May.

My father, 84, had an embolic stroke in June which took away part of his sight in one eye. He called me while a friend was driving him to the ER. He hadn’t wanted to disturb me—I was at a local writing conference. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t come. I’ll call you later with an update.” Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the ER while he was still checking in. Tears came to his eyes as he hugged me. I spent the next twenty-four hours at the hospital with him.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I noticed my mother, 81, slurring her speech. I spent the next 48 hours in and out of the hospital, tracking her care, bringing Thanksgiving dinner to her and my father, who spent the holiday at the hospital with her. The hospital tests revealed that she had had a small stroke. With changes made to her medications, she was released. 

My parents are not going to live forever. But I’m not ready for them to go just yet. I’m not sure how to get ready. We don’t talk much about dying and death in general in American culture. We pretend all is fine until it becomes obvious we are not fine. I can’t help thinking conversations and preparation could make a difficult time less so.  

To that end, I’ve been reading Rachel K. Anderson’s Substack, Marking What Matters and her three-part post “The Spiritual Practice of Advance Care Planning.” You can start with part one here.

On my nightstand is a book, from a dear friend, Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley, hospice nurses. 

I turned 60 in February. That is when my thinking about death accelerated. It’s not like I hadn’t thought about death before then. But now there was death, or at least the end of my life in this form on this plane of existence, peeking over the horizon. I am certainly not ready to go—I need to finish my Armenian family memoir! I need to write all the essays and the novel I have put on hold until the memoir is done. I need to be here for the people dear to me.

Meanwhile, I will read Final Gifts. I will ponder the questions posed in Rachel’s Substack posts. And I’ll ask my parents some of those same questions.

Do you have a resource or thoughts about preparing for the end of life? Please share in the comments below.

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Thank you for reading! Writing is a lonely endeavor and your presence here brightens my day!