Iris

when my nana returned home from the hospital and was laid on the bed in the room with the biggest window facing the street, she asked, while she was still able to articulate full sentences, that my family play Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma in the time before her death.  this music was to ease her transition.  I was too young and too scared to visit my nana more than one or two times after she returned home.  my father and younger sister spent a great deal of time with her during this time and were close by when she passed.  they wept while Pavarotti sang, next to my father's gentle sister Missy and the nurse who had cared for her.  i now wish i had spent more time with her even when she could do little but sleep.  she was such a radiant person.  she was the daughter of Italian immigrants and must have kept the recipes from the home country.  every Tuesday she spent the whole day cooking the most delicious pasta for dinner that night.  my father, mother, sister and I, along with my father's many cousins and one Uncle Norm, a lovable curmudgeon if there ever was one,  would come to her house in Berkeley every Tuesday night to argue about the price of groceries, how best to fix a leaky faucet and national politics.  but the real reason they came, why we came, was not the pasta or the lively discussions.  we came for my nana, Iris, and her glowing life.  we came to be next to her glow, to be a part of it, to feel the warmth.

is falling asleep each night practice for dying?  even if we sleep in the same bed with our partner, at some point we roll over into our own darkness and must face the transition from being awake to falling asleep alone.  we fall asleep, we fall, we let our bodies go limp and tip from the edge of the highest skyscraper scraping the top of the sky and we close our eyes and let gravity pull our limp bodies over the edge and begin the fall, our muscles cease to flex and the air currents pull our arms and legs and torso, slowly rolling, putting up a hand as if to ask a question and then a leg and foot pulled up upside down head snaps back and we roll again, falling downward, and it escapes, the fear the anxiety about sleep about death escapes, and our whole bodies make peace with the falling and slow tumbling until we reach a place...and the observer on the street with his head craning to see, sees something and then nothing, and Pavarotti is on stage in Paris perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, the only thing every perfectly done by a human, wailing the final lyrics, "vincero! vincero!" "we shall be victorious!"

my nana, laying on her bed with eyes closed, knowing she is very close to death, has a moment of terror.  she is painfully aware that her life is ending.  she will soon slip into sleep and be protected from this fear in the haze of the final transition.  but for this moment she is lucid and the fear strikes her body.  it is a visceral, deeply emotional fear.  there are no accompanying thoughts. it exists in a flash of bodily discomfort.  but then she hears the music, which has been playing since the beginning, and in that moment the music washes over her.  she is comforted by the voice and the orchestra and the fear dissolves.  there is only acceptance and meaning, the knowledge that she lived a purposeful, wonderful life and protected the ones she loved with her radiance.

Pavarotti "Nessun Dorma"

bravo.

with a belly full of love,
Anthony