RULES, TRANSITION AND DEATH
I went to Heinrich‘s and Elke‘s house yesterday evening after going nowhere on a gloomy day. They are going to a funeral today of a childhood friend of Heinrich‘s who Kathe also knew. It is at some distance and Elke has a boot on her foot and Heinrich can‘t drive in the dark. It gets dark at 4:30. They hope to be home at 5.
We talked about death and about the ways in which we shut ourselves off during the pandemic in Asheville and compared that to Germany.
Germany is a land of more order and more rules than the United States. In public in Swannanoa we had rules about masking indoors and asked people to be vaccinated for indoor events which some people followed and some didn‘t. We resented those who didn‘t but didn‘t do anything. But in Germany I have not entered a public building without a mask. To go to church or to a funeral you have to be preregistered and on a list or you can‘t get in. You also have to show proof of vaccination and then have to sit wide apart. Funerals have been conducted outside the church with only 25 people allowed. Restaurants require proof of vaccination for entrance and ask you to register using the Luca app on your phone so that you can be traced if someone infected comes into that restaurant. Even at the outdoor Christmas market there were roaming checkers in uniforms telling everyone they had to be masked, unless eating or drinking. So Germany, which has a rising rate of infection has much stricter pandemic rules. Negative Covid tests are required for practices of the flute group and other events.
But indoors in their own house Elke‘s family have gathered for meals around a big table with no one thinking of wearing a mask as they enter the house. People who know each other and care about each other are always unmasked in private. For a year and a half in Swannanoa we had no unmasked family events. We always ate outside. Thanksgiving this year was outside on a warm day. And yet it is pretty clear that the greatest danger to any of us is from someone in our intimate circle, a child going to school or someone whose work brings them into contact with people, infecting the rest. So in public the Germans are much better protected than Americans, but in private it seems to me that except for relying on vaccinations and knowing that your group of friends and family is vaccinated, Germans seem more vulnerable than the groups that I was a part of in Swannanoa.
Heinrich is 90, Elke has severe lung inflammation at 82, I am 84. We are all vaccinated but none of us can afford to get Covid, although we agree that we are at an age when people die and if one of us dies of Covid it will cause less pain to others than if we were much younger.
We talked some about death. They have suffered two deaths of close friends in the last week. Many of my good friends have died, most of my immediate family has died, Kathe has died. We are entering the time of life where if you live long enough most of the people you care about will be dead. Heinrich says he worries about the risk of infection at family gatherings such as the one we had on Sunday, Elke says that she doesn‘t. What will happen will happen and she isn‘t going to worry about it. But we are all very aware of death, not just those around us, not just our own impending deaths, but we are all three very aware of death itself. It is inexplicable that we are here to begin with, have our moment in the sun, and then die. Everyone. We‘ve always known in an abstract and theoretical way that we would die. But now death is with us every day including our own deaths.
This is my last day in Germany. Tomorrow I will take the 6:10 bus to the Celle train station, have 7 minutes or less to race to track 4 for the train to Hannover and then be off on the plane on the way home. Today Elke and Heinrich are off to the funeral of Peter van Theiling. Except for getting a negative covid shot and pack I have nothing to do. It is one more gloomy, cloudy windy day. I might take some photographs. But mainly I am just hanging around.
And that is what Elke, Heinrich and I are doing. We are hanging around and waiting for death. There is nothing much that we have to do. Our families love us and try not to think of our deaths or their own at all. But somewhere inside they know that they are waiting around, too, for the word that one of us is about to die.
We are all in a kind of an in between place. I am half way in Germany but something within me has already turned to America. The reason that I don‘t have anything to do today is because I have already let go and am already in my mind racing up the steps to track 4 in the station and wondering what I will do in Munich. I am ready to be welcomed home and to sit in my comfortable house again.
If I were a believing Christian my last days here on earth would be a period of marking time before entering heaven where I would be promised not only eternal life but fullness of life with all my old friends there. I would already have made the transition in my mind, just as I have made the transition to Swannanoa and just be waiting around.
I am marking time before death, not knowing what will come next, but suspecting nothing will come. I think that when Kathe was dying and her body was shutting down little by little she knew she was dying but her body also sensed that it was dying and was preparing her. I don‘t think she was frightened. Her body and she were making the transition from life to death and once you‘ve made the transition, letting go is easy. It is easy for me in this small transition from Winsen to Swannanoa, and it will probably be that way when it is my turn to go through the door of death that we were all gathered around when Kathe went first. I will soon follow. Somehow the transition is not hard to make, something inside us turns from facing one direction and faces in the next and we make the transition peacefully, as ready to go as I am ready to go to Swannanoa tomorrow. But it is still inexplicable.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 