Dear Mary Ellen,

Dear Mary Ellen,

I went to bed at 11:30 last night and woke up to pee at 12:45 AM. I laid there for the next hour thinking about you and composing a email to you. Finally I got out of bed, put the coffee on and here I am at my computer.

Both Sue and I were hit hard your phone call. I guess neither one of us expected that verdict on you illness. Afterwards Sue cried and I sat outside on the patio silent and grim-faced. We both stared into nothingness. Life can indeed be cruel. You would think all the good service you have rendered to your mother and to your siblings who did not have to carry the load you carried with diligence and unconditional love, that your store of good karma would fill a Wisconsin silo by now, and part of that storage would be a long life and a chance eventually to travel, like we had talked about a few times, as reward for services over time. But things don’t always happen like they should. Instead of an active life in your sixties and seventies, a time of harvest for you, the dice got rolled and came up cancer at 53, which seemed to come on like a whirlwind, in a very short period of time. However, your accepting attitude impressed both Sue and I; and considering what the oncologist told you, it is better to look the disease straight in the eye and get to know it and forget about this hokum about fighting it.

Age makes no difference to whoever rolls the dice. I am 23 years down the road from you and your parents and my mother lived to grand old age, although maybe “grand” is stretching the truth. I check the obits in the local paper and it always surprises me how death strikes all ages willy-nilly, although the majority is usually the elder citizen. In short, it is best to be ready at all times, have your bags packed and your ticket punched. For some reason I think of the moment of death as the time to “grab the tiger by the tail” and hold on to see where it takes you. Why a tiger? Well, I have had several powerful dreams featuring tigers and my favorite poem is William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/in the Forest of the Night.” I also like D.H. Lawrence’s several renditions of a poem he calls “Build your Ship of Death” for your “longest journey” to your “wonder-goal.” I have read those poems over and over through time, as a kind of rehearsal for my own death, which at my age will come sooner rather than later. They remind me we are on our ‘little journey” now which is but prelude to the longer journey to what I think of as “the other side.”

Remember that we love you and you are constantly in out thoughts.

Jerry and Sue