Billy, Jan, Mike, and Dianne

When Megan’s dad passed in September, I wrote a piece in honor of him. Doug, Megan’s fiancé and my bestie, sent it to his mom, Jan, who read it and then subsequently subscribed to my Substack. I was immediately elated to know she’d subscribed. The thrill continued when she’d “like” a post or leave a comment. It is not lost on me that my writing isn’t for everyone, so the acceptance of your bestie’s mom feels like being an outcast pre-teen on the receiving end of esteemed adult praise.

Jan passed away last night, leaving a newly engaged couple as two halves of a new orphan, and I am crushed for everyone. When Jan and I first met a decade ago, Doug informed us of our mutual love for the movie Overboard. Jan also adored Troop Beverly Hills. Both these movies have been on TV in the past two weeks, and I made sure to sit a spell with each, enjoying the emotional makeovers of both.

When Doug, the oldest of three, was young, Jan would secretly allow him to stay up late and watch Hart to Hart with her. He never went into detail about those moments beyond expressing the surreptitious happiness of it all, but I pictured it a cozy vignette of mother and son. Around those same years, I was also watching Hart to Hart, and imagining Robert Wagner as my dad, either because of a slight resemblance, sans the swagger, or maybe because absence causes confusion.

It was when Jan and I first met that she told me of her affinity for the poems of Billy Collins, a poet I don’t recall giving much attention to until then. Whenever someone shares their favorite poet, it’s as if they are sharing a secret, a tiny bond.

Megan told me once that Jan referred to child-Doug as “busy,” and Megan and I laughed and laughed because to this day, Doug is a very busy bee - from podcasts and music to haunted houses and construction paper art, he’s always got his hands and brain in something.

I wasn’t close to Jan and didn’t see her as often the past five years as I did the first five years we knew each other, but we’d share holiday cards, and Doug – the best of the winged messengers – would always say “My parents said to say Hello to you!” If you ask Doug to relay a greeting, you can be guaranteed of its delivery. Jan was one part of the pair who raised their first-born busy boy into the grand man who would become my bestie,  and I am ever grateful to them both for that.  

Doug and Megan flew to Florida today on tickets they’d purchased one day before Jan’s passing. So often, we believe people should be by the bedside of their loved ones as they die, but after I dropped Megadoug at the airport, I thought about sitting vigil at my stepmom’s dying. She was tiny, clenched, and unresponsive. With a bald head atop a braided body of pale skin, she appeared a flower bulb plucked too soon from the earth and left out to wither and dry. No amount of graham crackers and cocoa from the nurses’ station could calm my nerves as I huddled in the recliner next to her. But while it was only three nights until Dianne finally passed, that image of her imbues all my earlier memories. When I picture her in the kitchen making ribs, chicken, lady peas, or any other gourmet version of the country food she grew up on, the memory morphs into the catatonic, faraway vision of death.

Being present at death may not be overrated for some, but it’s certainly not necessary for all. Our loved ones know we love them, and when they reach the place they intended themselves to be, they can see through the transparency of dimensions that are opaque to us, and they are assured of our love and devotion. Billy Collins wrote an expansive and equitable poem on the hereafter called The Afterlife, and I believe Jan is in the celestial choir smiling on forever.

The Afterlife by Billy Collins

While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.

They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals–eagles and leopards–and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

(And some just smile, forever on)

Billy Collins, from Questions about Angels

• Some versions include the smiling on forever, and some don’t, but I prefer the parenthetical at the end.