When a lifelong friend died recently, his family asked me what of his I might want.
“Just his meatloaf pans,” I replied. They looked at me askance, responding as they always did, these people who would never accept him for who he was nor know him as some of us did.
His meatloaf pans, small and precise, defined the well-patrolled borders he’d refused to budge under his family’s failure to accept him as gay. To ensure I see them — and him — every day, I bake in one pan and keep my lipsticks in the other.
His family didn’t attend the memorial that we who knew and loved him held, where we celebrated him and talked openly about who he was. They will never know.
Another friend remains as disturbed by the scene of our mutual pal’s death as he was by the loss itself, when the family ringed the bed of our diapered and unconscious loved one, inviting everyone in the room to join an impromptu crowded singalong. “He would have hated it,” my friend said. Yes, he would.
Occurring back-to-back as they did, these events compelled me to consider how best to exit this life. Could I prevent being misunderstood or misrepresented, or prevent leaving others unprepared? Maybe. So, I planned a dinner party.
Scheduling the Date With Death Dinner began as a Doodle poll to friends who, I learned, had no advance end-of-life directives in place. Easy pickings, since no one I know had done more with the healthcare proxies supplied by their physicians than stuff them in a purse or shove them in a drawer. Experience has taught me that even when forms are filed, they are frequently misplaced. My own mother’s “do not resuscitate” order was repeatedly lost by the nursing home where she spent her last years, forcing me to resend it via telegram one memorable night. The Western Union operator sobbed into the phone while I comforted her.
I knew that the single question — “Do you have advance directives filled out and signed?” — would gather us. And once gathered, I hoped we’d go deeper. A sign-up for food went out to 10 of us. I’m old enough to know that everyone’s mother’s recipe file houses a funeral casserole, and that we’d all savored an infamous Death by Chocolate dessert. We signed up, cooked, and we were on.
Along with a lack of preparedness, criteria for the guest list included areas of professional expertise. Around the table sat a nurse practitioner, an experienced obituary writer and someone whose background in soil science recently led him to study human composting. This helped cut down on idle speculation and inaccurate information. It also provided great visuals, as we pictured ourselves being rolled around in 20-gallon drums full of wood shavings.
Instead of placecards, each guest was met at the table by a packet of information, as well as forms to be signed and witnessed. These included a fact sheet about healthcare proxies — yes, they can be transferred state-to-state — and a form to assign one; another form to document medical orders for life-sustaining treatment; and a copy of the “Five Wishes,” a set of plainly worded binding directives that provides talking points for dying on your own terms.
I opened the evening’s discussion with an acknowledgment that the people at the table are those with whom I am apparently going to grow old and die, that I love them and trust them, and that if we do this together, we might actually get it right. We ended the night signing as witnesses to one another’s directives.
In between, we exchanged backstories. My husband’s sister died when she was 23 and he was just 15. At the time, his father was the minister of a 1,200-person congregation in South Dakota, and my husband’s recounting of the funeral, heard throughout 35 years of our marriage, always served as a cautionary tale. In his telling at our dinner that night, he explained that the prescribed role of a preacher’s family included “displaying the certainty of resurrection,” intending to leave no doubt of his sister’s final resting place. This made their assignment even more burdensome, since her death came at a time when my husband’s father and his family were pivoting away from piety, no longer sure of their faith.
This tale repeated at dinner raised the question of our obligation to those we leave behind, both to plan and to grieve. Can we choose who we want in the room as we die? I hope so. Can we request a memorial picnic of fried chicken on paper plates? My 92-year-old friend did, and we who loved him were visited by a reminder of his greatest quality, his humility. Can we avoid a singalong we don’t want or designate music to be played? We can. I’ve always told anyone who would listen that I’d like William Bolcom’s rag, “The Graceful Ghost,” played on a good piano at my celebration of life, and while I’ve said it a lot, I’ve never seen anyone write it down. I think I just did that.
My father was a mid-20th century sportswriter. When he died, friends at his memorial recounted traveling by train as a joyous pack to the Kentucky Derby, covering the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the ’68 trials ahead of the Mexico City Games. Perhaps I had heard all those stories before, but offered as they were in that setting, and at that time, they allowed me to see his life and my role in it in context. While important to him, I came to realize I was a part of his life, not the entirety of it. As I age, I more fully feel the compounding grace of that distinction.
When considering my own death, I am reminded that at St. Lawrence University, my alma mater in upstate New York, a reunion tradition includes the chaplain reading aloud the names of those Laurentians who have died the year before. One day my name will be read in that chapel, and the great comfort that evokes always fortifies how much that campus is home to me.
My meatloaf-cooking friend and I sailed every chance we got. Our lifelong playground was any water anywhere. And when we were kids and one of the fathers of our sailing club lay unconscious and dying, his friends would gather in the hospital room, spread out navigation charts, place a knotted rope in his hands and talk him through a favorite course, sailing him to a peaceful death.
I had once thought death would always be like this; that people who both know you and know what you want will also do what you want when you die. Then I learned the truth: They can, but only if we plan and, as one member of our dinner party stated plainly, “Hand it in on time.”
Marion Roach Smith is the author of four books, including “The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life,” and teaches memoir online.
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