November 7, 2011
Leave it to Steve Jobs to depart this world with words of wonder. In another context his last utterance would have been overused slang, a reflexive expression lacking meaning. Oh wow. Not so with Jobs as he slipped slowly toward death. Immediately after gazing at his family and then staring past them, he said: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
His sister, novelist Mona Simpson, related the final words in her moving eulogy, published in the New York Times. Simpson’s use of all caps indicates that Jobs spoke with emphasis and even enthusiasm. She offered no clue about inflection or tone. It’s natural to assume that Jobs, guru of technological artistry and paragon of steroidal perfectionism, was describing with joyful awe what awaits beyond the veil. Mere words might have been his greatest creation of all, delivered without marketing fanfare and free to all. Was the Triple Wow a reassuring wink about the answer to The Big Unanswered Question? Or was Jobs elated not by what he saw ahead but endorphins secreted as people journey toward death, chemically easing their passage? We’ll each know soon enough. In the meantime, let’s go with the wink.
A sudden medical problem nearly a decade ago made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. Inside a Costco of all places and near a woman cooking meat samples. Croaking at Costco wasn’t my idea of death with dignity, especially with shoppers rushing past to score the woman’s free food. They looked as if a corpse sprawled in the aisle wouldn’t deter them. Luckily the symptoms faded, and I finished my shopping trip.
Today, strolling through a nursery that supplies plants for my small but lush goldfish pond, I thought again of death. If everything ended now, this would be a fine and fitting place. A brief item in the newspaper would read: “Police said nursery workers at Hughes Water Gardens found him in a greenhouse, floating face down among giant tropical lilies. When they turned him over, he was smiling.”
Who wouldn’t prefer a last breath scented with the earthy smell of water alive with greenery rather than that of sizzling fat at Costco? Or see as a last sight the veined symmetry of Victoria lily pads rather than the meat cooker’s inadequate hairnet? Then again, no one gets to choose.
“It’s his time.” A doctor said this twenty-three days ago. He was speaking to my father’s wife and one of my two brothers. Down the hall in the emergency room, Dad was slipping away.
Gazing into still waters aglow with exotic plants and flowers, I wanted to see a reflection of his face, not mine. I wanted to go back fifty years, back to our lake, my brothers and I kids again, taking turns launching from Dad’s slippery shoulders. I wanted to see him looking skyward, squinting into the sun to follow my arc, the rise and fall that he began. But I felt only a memory. It was his skin that I remembered.
Tonight on NPR’s “Philosophy Talk” I heard this declaration referring to death: “The world as I know it will cease to exist,” and then there will be nothing.
When I heard this somber reminder of what everyone fears, I was in the car on the way home. I had been drinking wine at a downtown hotel with my youngest brother and his wife, in Portland from Florida for a criminal justice conference.
They talked of a friend, also at the conference, who had miraculously survived kidney and brain cancer during the last dozen years. They described how battling the disease had changed his outlook on life — for the better. Read More
Insane, abandoned, and anonymous. This describes many people who lived out there lives at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, 
starting in 1883 and into the 1970s. Their cremated remains were put in numbered copper canisters and stored.
But time and chemical reactions have turned them into art after death, art challenging perceptions of what it means to die. Acclaimed photographer David Maisel has documented the stark individuality blossoming from each person’s remains.
In an essay, Maisel, who gave me permission to publish one of his pictures, writes:
The canisters ask us to consider ‘What happens to our bodies when we die; what happens to our souls?’ Matter lives on even when the body vanishes, even when it has been destroyed by an institutionalized methodology of incinerating the body to ash and categorizing it by a number stamped into the lid of the ashes’ metal housing. Does some form of spirit live on as well?
I’ll consider those questions when I see Maisel’s “Library of Dust,” his Portland Art Museum exhibit that opens September 1. My context will be the remnant of my mother’s ashes that haven’t been scattered. I’ve divided this smattering into three tiny piles, stored less evocatively than those of the insane, one each for my two brothers and me.
In life, my mother might have found Maisel’s questions too weighty. But she would have laughed at the idea of resting, at least temporarily, in my three-year-old son’s discarded plastic Play-Doh containers.
I need to find something copper that would better suit her aesthetic tastes until the time inevitably comes for her to mix with me.
Some news stories I can’t get out of my head. They keep reverberating with questions.
Take the post-mortem wishes of two men, one an astronaut wanting to return to space, the other an actor astronaut wanting to go there for the first time. Read More
Odd what catches one’s eye. In Saturday’s Oregonian, a story about a man’s death at the coast invited a quick read. Why I’m not sure. The story was terse, as such stories usually are and have to be because of limited space: a for-the-record summary of another tragedy, another person dying too young.
This morning I read a piece written by the man’s close friend, posted on an indispensable web site about Portland’s robust food and drink scene. (Both men are/were restaurateurs.) A dispassionate account with passion roiling beneath the surface. Read More
