NOT in the slow lane YET Blog
The blog is about living life after 70 with joy, resilience, and purpose. NOT in the slow lane, YET is a source of positive, helpful advice encouraging people to set and achieve goals and find joy in life. The blog will cover personal experiences and thoughts and concerns. Topics of blogs will be health, retirement, fashion, travel, and living in continuing care retirement communities. The blogs will be short and appear at least once a month on my website www.nadineblock.com or by email if you choose. Come walk with me.
A love letter to the earth: A green burial.
Steve, my oldest son, died May 11, 2024, after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 63 years old. I was heartbroken. He was a handsome, brilliant, and complex person. As he chose a green burial and shared his decision in a beautiful story, I found I was still learning from him.
As I think about his life, memories that are poignant and bittersweet come to mind. I will never forget his hearty laugh as a toddler. He laughed so hard his face turned red and he fell on the ground. When he was barely a year, I cup hooked his crib to the wall so he couldn’t push his crib from the wall and climb out. At two, he climbed over the crib bars before dawn and came to our bedroom. He shook us, “I want bekpus (breakfast), NOW!” He was already a force, not to be denied.
Steve was a kind person. He sat with his father and brother and held their hands as they were dying. Always generous, he gave well-chosen and thoughtful gifts. A brilliant student, he graduated from Columbus Academy, and earned degrees from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He worked as an associate attorney for Latham & Watkins in New York for a brief period before taking over as the chief financial officer and general counsel of a home-textiles firm that he, his father, and brothers founded in 1984. He loved to spar with family members (and anyone else) on any topic that came up. He usually won an argument on merit, or he would win by outlasting his opponent.
He was a deep thinker and a beautiful writer. He wrote the following story about a walk in an Icelandic Churchyard that led him to choose a green burial. His writing was distributed at his interment and Celebration of Life.
“On the Importance of Churchyards”
I took my son Declan fishing in Iceland in June. Before heading up to Akureyri for the fishing on the Laxa river, we had a short layover in Reykjavik where we walked to the National Museum from our hotel on Austurvöllur. Our walk back passed Holavallagardur, the “new” city churchyard commissioned in 1838 after Víkurgarður, the original burial ground, ran out of room for more Vikings. Declan, 20 years old, and anxious to return to the comforts of the hotel split off and continued without me. I told him I would see him later and passed through one of the low slung gates that open onto Su∂urgata Street.
Almost twelve months before our visit to Iceland, I had been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. The cancer had spread to the lymph nodes in my pelvis and to my hip, pelvic bones and lower spine. It couldn’t be cured and would kill me sometime relatively soon. Everything had changed in a way I wasn’t ready for. For a long time after my initial diagnosis, and sometimes yet today, I’ve felt like a walking ghost. I pass a teenager or young parent on the way to the pool or at the market and do not feel part of their world. They will live and I will die and it feels as if this winnowing has already been done. It is a moment of heartbreak, fear and longing that threatens to stretch to eternity. And then it passes. I return to the living for while. Such is dying and so the Holavallagardur invited my visit in a way that, fortunately, Declan could not fathom.
As I walked along the shaded gravel paths, I felt an overwhelming sense of the sublime; a connection to everything and forever but also a a connection to a very specific place. Every gravesite was shaded by an urban forest of rowan, spruce, willow and poplar trees. Moss grew across the grey headstones and up the black tree trunks in emeralds, viridians and burnt umbers. I strolled along grey gravel paths boarded by a riot of chartreuse grasses flowers and ferns over the gravesites. Redwings, goldcrests and buntings kept up a medley relegating the bustle of traffic on Su∂urgata Street to unobtrusive background noise. Every piece of granite or marble spread out before me marked the place and often told the story of someone who came before. They were a community of the dead, not sentient perhaps, but sharing the experience of life’s joy and pain every one of them. I would not be the first to die and so I was not alone and this was comforting.
The last grave I passed was for a teenage girl who had died a few days more than a year before my visit. Her photograph was etched on a metal plate affixed to her headstone. She had been very pretty. Newly planted flowers grew on her grave and a candle flickered next to her headstone. I stood heartbroken. The loss of death belongs to the living but their grief might be most acutely felt by the dying.
Once, I expected that I would want to be cremated and my ashes scattered. But now I feel like I want a spot on the earth that connects me to the living and the dead; somewhere, in my fantasy, where my wife and sons and maybe a friend or two can come each year to share a shot from a pewter hip flask and pour one for me, a place where maybe others will come and be reminded they are not alone. Last weekend, my wife Dana and I visited Fernwood, beautiful cemetery on the Mount Tamalpais ridge near my home in Marin County. As we walked around, I had the same feelings that connecting me to our shared human experience as I had at Holavallagardur. I paused to read the headstones that tried to encapsulate the lives of those below, each word connecting those who went before to the earth and sky and the living.”
Steve was buried in a white shroud in the green part of a cemetery at the foot of a coastal California mountain. The ground is dry, with little grass and many small stones that slide downhill when walked on. Coast Oak, Live Oak, Blue Oak, and Douglas Fir trees shade the hilly area. A linear nature mandala made lovingly by his artist wife covers the gravesite.
An almost constant wind blows through the leaves, the only sound on this quiet and peaceful site.
A small marker on Steve’s grave, chosen by his wife and children, says, “Supersteve.”