Prime Time - Jane Fonda [130]
The truth is that none of us can know what kind of death we will have or when it will occur. All we know is that we are all terminal. It could come instantly or be long and painfully drawn out. I may not be able to communicate at all when the end comes. But I am learning about the growing practice of palliative care and the amazing people, like Joan Halifax, who are trained to be with the dying and bring them and their families comfort. I will want to know someone like this who can be present with me and my loved ones when my time comes.
I’ve had a talk with my children about how I want them to deal with my body when I die. I hope my passing won’t occur in a hospital, although for 80 percent of us in the United States that’s how it happens. If that’s where I end up, I want them to stand up to the nurses, take my body, clean it up, wrap it in a shroud, and put me into a hole at my ranch in New Mexico and cover me with earth. Simple as that. I want to be recycled, especially since I read somewhere that burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year, and cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.2 I’ve tried to live light on the planet. Why die heavy on it? I’ve told my children that I want a simple gravestone, though—something that my children and grandchildren can lay their heads beside. I like graves and headstones—always have. They give a tangible presence to the spiritual realm. I’m sad that Dad was cremated but never buried. Having a gravestone to sit by and touch would make it easier to feel as if I am with him.
I’m leaning against Jane Fonda’s gravestone in the cemetery of Fonda, New York.
I’m glad that I am thinking about all this even though, if I’m lucky, it may not happen for another twenty or thirty years! I’m grateful for this time when I can drive the four-wheeler around my ranch in New Mexico with Malcolm, my grandson, who, at this writing, is eleven years old. I explain the things I’m doing on the ranch so as to be a responsible steward of the land. I tell him why I’m cutting down so many of the trees on my property: how trees have become too plentiful ever since we stopped allowing forest fires to burn, so that now there isn’t enough water for the expanded forests, the meadows have shrunk, leaving less grass and shrubs for wildlife, and bark beetles are turning landscapes into brown wastelands. I explain that we leave the chipped wood on the ground to mulch and hold water, and how, in nature, things have to die so new things can grow. I tell him that one day that land may be his and his siblings’ responsibility, so he needs to pay attention. I hope I am instilling early the sense of the finiteness of things and the preciousness of time.
Letty Pogrebin, in her book Getting Over Getting Older, wrote “We teach our children to tell time, but not what to tell it.”3 I want to teach Malcolm and Viva what to tell time—that everything will someday end and that every day, every hour, every moment of time matters.
In 1982, my father died three minutes before I arrived at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. When I came into his room, I could see that he was gone but I desperately wanted