Writing about Death and Murder

One of my son' John's graduation pictures.

Bittersweet October

                                  Against bittersweet October fields

                                  shrouded purple and gold in memoriam for you,

                                  you who will always remain eighteen,

                                  the hitchhikers waited scorning funeral black

                                  for jagged jeans and jaunty gypsy skirt.

                                  Backpacks, guitars and exuberant youth

                                  on their way to a concert of the Grateful Dead.

                                  Are the dead ever grateful? Are you?

                                  You who were born too late and died so young,

                                  would have enjoyed these relics

                                  of the searching, seething sixties

                                  as did I who was born too soon.

                                  The hitchhikers and I talked of relevance

                                  and the meaning of life,

                                  but on the meaning of death

                                  they were silent.

                                  We parted ways

                                  they to continue on in the sixties,

                                  and I to return to the present

                                  and duty,

                                  and responsibility,

                                  and my aching need of you.

 

My son Joey posed for the cover of my first book - minus the pitchfork.

As a mystery writer I’ve murdered more than thirty people in my Catherine Jewell mystery series and my short stories. I don’t go into gory details. Only the body is discovered and the mystery starts with who did it. A short while ago I got an email from Steve Force, a member of my local writers group, who was reading my first book, and he wrote “I can’t believe you’re so heartless and cruel to murder Alma.” It made me smile.

However, while considering what to write for this blog, I got to thinking not about murder, but the people I’ve lost to death. Maybe that’s why I actually get teary eyed about those people I kill on the page unless they’re a really nasty person.  I lay awake thinking of the deaths of those I’ve loved because this past Friday, my ex-husband died at my son’s house next door from cancer and diabetes. 

Jim in my backyard with granddaughter Sami & her husband

He was lucky enough to have our son, Joe, our daughter, Susan, and granddaughter, Sami with him. He’d been more or less out-of-it for days, but right before he died, he held out his arms to Joe, and according to Sami, who was there, too, he mouthed the words “I love you” to Joe as they hugged and then turned to Susan and did the same thing and then staring at something on the ceiling, quietly passed away. Earlier, our daughter Mary in California called and Susan held the phone up to his ear, and he mouthed the words “I love you” then, too. Hospice had recently come in with help, and a family member was with him days and nights all the time, as well as a nurse’s aide during the day. On Friday morning, I stood beside his bed holding his hand talking to him for two hours. Sometimes he opened his eyes slightly, and when I told him I had to go to the bathroom, he clasped my hand tightly and wouldn’t let me go until my daughter slipped her hand into his in place of mine. When I came back he grabbed it tightly again.

How young we were then.

After two years of going together, and thirty-one years of marriage, he’d left me, which he soon regretted. It’s been more than twenty-seven years since our divorce. After the first year or so, I got over my anger and been quite content living on my own. When he came north on visits, I was always pleasant to him and his third wife, who died this spring. My son Joe went down and packed his stuff to send north, put his house on the market, and brought him to his house so he could care for him, I stopped almost every morning on my way to walk in the woods and brought him yesterday’s newspaper. We visited awhile, but never as long as he wanted me to stay. They were pleasant conversations sometimes remembering things, and he liked to talk about his years with his third wife in Texas and then Florida. When no one was available to take him to doctor appointments, I took him and to lunch, also.

John at the spring prom. He decorated
 the cane he used & was buried with.

Jim’s death is only my latest loss. Thirty-six years ago on Oct. 6, 1980, our oldest son John died from cancer at home in my arms. He was eighteen years old. I blogged about his death in an October 2012 blog about Life Changing Events. It’s in the archives for anyone who wants to read it. Losing a child has to be one of the worse things any parent can face, and I still think of him often, and write a poem for him every year as a memoriam in our local newspaper.

On a camping trip in Maine.

My parents died a year apart. They were wonderful parents and all my siblings and I grieved for them. We accepted Dad’s death because he’d had a serious stroke almost two years before and was in a nursing home unable to walk or talk even though he recognized us and knew what we were saying. When we came to visit, he always took our hand and kissed it.  Mom died a year later when she went in to have a heart valve replaced because the original pig one was no longer functioning. She didn’t survive the operation.

 

My daughter Susan with Megan.

On October 27^th, 1993, my granddaughter Megan, Susan’s daughter, died at the age of six years old.  An unknown tumor in her head burst. She went into a coma and stayed in a Pittsburgh hospital for about two months until she was sent to a local rehabilitation hospital. She woke up one night and asked for her mother. She was blind and wouldn’t have recovered her sight, but she knew her name, telephone number and address. She started physical therapy to learn to walk and they were gradually weaning her from her  trach for short periods of time. When she had trouble at one of the physical therapy sessions, the doctor wrote “Do not remove trach.” That night the nurse didn’t notice it, or the doctor hadn’t written it clearly, and the nurse removed it. She suffocated, was revived and sent back to Pittsburgh where she was removed from life support a few days later because she was brain dead. I was there with her when Susan made the decision.

My favorite picture of my brother an avid
gardener. 

In December 2010, my brother Jerry died. He was my sibling closest in age and the one I shared the most memories with. He was in an isolation unit after getting one of those hospital viruses. My sister-in-law and his two daughters and I would go in for brief periods all masked up in caps, gowns and slippers to visit him. On his last day, they let us stay with him all afternoon and evening because they knew he was failing. That day we talked to him and each other sometimes laughing as we told funny Jerry stories. Joanne, my sister-in-law, told him it was okay if he left. We sang to him off and on all afternoon and evening. If we didn’t know all the words to a song, we fit in la-de-da-das. Sometimes silly children’s songs or others, but right before seven o’clock, I suggested singing “On Eagle’s Wings” and when we got to “and hold you in the palm of his hands,” he breathed his last.

He’d donated his body to a medical college for research years before so there was no funeral. Instead a few days before Christmas, there was a dinner in memoriam of him at a local event center. Twice as many people as had been expected came on a cold and snowy day only a few days before Christmas. Many told their stories and memories of Jerry. It was beautiful.

The first dead body I saw was when I was five years old. My father’s mother was in a casket in their parlor. He picked me up to see her. I only vaguely remember it. I’ve been to so many funerals for family members and friends over my life time that I can’t even begin to remember all of them. Have I grown calloused about death? No, I accept it as a natural part of life.

After John died I read so many books about death and dying like Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s books, and two others that were very helpful; The Bereaved Parent, by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff, and Harold Kushner’s Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. They didn’t take away the grief, but helped me deal with it.

I love the month of October in spite of the fact it’s the month my son, granddaughter, ex-husband, and a close cousin of mine died.

I have to mention that my ex gave me an expensive gift a little over a month ago – a tombstone.

Go ahead and laugh. I did. It was a sweet and thoughtful gift, though. I will be buried–hopefully not for many, many years--in a plot next to my granddaughter Megan and son John, and close to my parents and numerous other relatives going back over a hundred years. I wrote the epitaph for myself; “teacher, author and poet” You should see the looks on people’s faces when I mention his gift. He’s being cremated with his ashes to be distributed with his 3^rd wife somewhere in Florida.

How do you deal with the deaths of loved ones?

What about writing or reading about murders? Does it bother you?