Last Thoughts by the Tombstone Pizzas

I heaved my shopping cart past Plexiglass containers of peanuts, almonds, and pecans, and swung toward frozen foods. I felt self-righteous; I always do when I gird my loins for a trip to Cub. All of us Cub shoppers smile smugly: we recognize our superiority for saving those pennies—patiently unloading cream cheese and orange juice and broccoli at the check-out, buzzing them down the conveyor belt, bagging them and hauling them to the car. I half expect someone to stop me (between the two sets of sliding doors where the hundreds of carts are jammed together) and perform a little ceremony, knighting me for my splendid service to family and country, saving pennies, nickles, and dimes.

I maneuvered around a heavyset woman, who was parked near frozen pizzas, head bent over a gray plastic coupon box that hooked over the cart’s red handle. A coupon shopper like her really deserves recognition: She had clipped and sorted and actually found her coupons to bring to the supermarket, and might even manage to buy the product that corresponded with the fine print on the coupon. I rolled on a few feet, halting in front of the frozen peas. Green Giant or Birds Eye?

Then I heard a sharp whine and a body hit the floor. I spun round to see the coupon sorter sprawled by her cart. A man dashed over from dairy products, loosened her collar, and felt for her pulse. I ran down the aisle searching frantically for a green Cub apron. “Quick, quick,” I shouted. “A lady’s collapsed by the pizzas! Phone 911.” The green apron raced for the phone. Voices buzzed:

“What happened?”

“Someone’s collapsed.”

“Is she all right?”

I walked back slowly to frozen foods where a small crowd was gathering.

We waited a few minutes until the paramedics elbowed in, efficient and breezy. Their heads clustered above the tattered gray coat and aqua polyester trousers that looked so undignified spreading from her bulky body on the beige linoleum. One paramedic lifted his head, glancing quickly at the other, his eyes speaking “too late.” The message passed through the group.

“Out of the way, out of the way,” he ordered, avoiding the eyes of the crowd, embarrassed by failure. They heaved the large bundle onto the stretcher, rolling the beige blanket from the feet over the head. The four men, like pall bearers in navy uniforms, carried her solemnly down the aisle past displays of Lemon Pledge and stacks of red, orange, and green Shasta cans.

I stepped back to my cart. How could I buy peas when death had broken, lightning-like, into Cub Foods? Should we all take off our shoes, or stand silent, heads bowed, for 60 seconds?

Even as I pondered her cart, full of bargains, an uncomfortable-looking employee strolled up to it, desperately trying to look casual. He nervously put his hands where her hands had just been and wheeled the cart away.

The next wave of shoppers, who were sorting lettuce and choosing onions across the store, would not know that someone had just died there. The beige linoleum and the frozen pizzas looked just the same as before. That bothered me—not so much that it happened, but that it was so quickly erased. None of us want to be reminded of death, of our mortality. We want to pretend that if we eat reasonably good food and visit the doctor occasionally, we’ll live forever.

Was she ready to die? There, in front of frozen pizzas, her last thoughts must have been, “The Red Baron 11-inch is $2.98, and the 10-inch Tombstone is $2.75, but I’ve got a coupon if I can find it here …,” and then Bumph! One instant she was toying with one of life’s most trivial decisions, and the next, she was jerked out of time.

This woman had no opportunity for reconciliation with a daughter-in-law she may have despised, no chance to show courage as the doctor announced cancer, no moments to reflect on issues that loom larger than pizza, pennies, and coupons. Friends and family could say at her funeral, “She died doing what she liked to do most … no suffering, no pain … death was instantaneous.”

Maybe that’s our problem with death. In our society, we want instantaneous, painless, thoughtless death. Most people would vote the ideal death to be climbing into bed one night (at about age 78) and not waking up the next morning. A close second would also need to be instantaneous, so that we could say, “At least she (or he) didn’t suffer …”

We shudder to recognize death’s slow or swift approach. When we heard of the Challenger accident, we were comforted by the immediacy of death. We imagined a proud, exhilarated crew suddenly, instantly insentient. Months passed before we got the horror story: The crew probably knew for one full minute that they were crashing; they retained consciousness for 60 dreadful seconds as they hurtled oceanwards. Death was not immediate: The pilot said, “Oh, oh.” We will never know what the one minute felt like; we reel from the horror of that moment, which announces our face-to-face rendezvous with mortality.

Our forebears held a different horror of death: terror of an instantaneous death, when a person was caught unawares and given no minute, no hour, no week to reflect, to reconcile, to rethink. This sounds foreign to us, because we live and breathe within a different world view. Earlier generations embraced a richer world peopled by the unseen and intangible; ours, by comparison, is a paltry, material world, where “what you see is what you get.”

Shakespeare portrays this older attitude toward death in Hamlet. The young prince of Denmark is outraged by his father’s death. (His father fell asleep on a pleasant afternoon in an orchard; while he slept, poison was poured into his ear.) He simply never woke up—by our standards, he died an ideal death. Hamlet’s understandable anger grows to an uncontrollable fury because the death is unexpected. Hamlet realizes that his father has been robbed of the opportunity to prepare for death.

We, on the other hand, prefer to avoid confrontation with pain and death. Other generations had no such option, because disease, hunger, and death loomed as ever-present realities. Even the tiny child could not be shielded, as her baby brother died of flu, her father of an infected wound, her aunt in childbirth, or her granny of old age in the upstairs canopy bed. We hide death and pain away from ourselves, and hope, ostrich-like, that they will disappear. At a funeral, the beloved is dressed and made to appear alive; at the graveside, there is no real hole into the cold, hard ground—plastic grass protects the loved ones from that uncomfortable reality. Every new research breakthrough, for cancer, Alzheimer’s, or AIDS, helps us to breathe easier, as if we have received a personal reprieve from facing our death.

We need not see death; instead, frozen pizza, houses, jobs, and cars engross us as all-consuming realities. And we hope that the ads are right, that these things will bring us happiness. But deep inside us, something tells us that these playthings are as delicately precarious as a house of cards. As a center for life, they are the lollipops and teddy bears of a childish dream. We are told the reality in the liturgy for Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Our attempts to avoid pain and mortality are dreams, dreams that will inevitably fade as reality breaks through, the reality of death on the cold linoleum at Cub, or in the fiery furnace of a Challenger accident, or on the gradually cooling sheets one morning as the sun rises.

Mary Ellen Ashcroft teaches part-time at the College of Saint Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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