In the Fullness and Richness of Time

Last week, I attended the funeral of Remedios “Mima” Cabacungan, who died at 102. I’d never met Mima, but her daughter Reme and I cross paths every year at our parish’s 5 a.m. Simbang Gabi Masses that lead up to Christmas.

Mima’s life sounded like a whirlwind–milliner, teacher, lumber industry expert, beauty pageant organizer, fundraiser, stage producer, actress. She was described as gentle yet passionate. One of her friends talked about the day “Mima chose to leave this earth.” It was December 21, the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, a date associated with powerful women in mythology.

That phrase–“chose to leave this earth”–has stuck with me. What if it turns out we do have some influence over when we die? After all, God’s a gentleman. What if He actually asks at least some of us, “Are you ready? Would you like to come Home?”

My grandmother Mary Organist Smith’s passion, other than her family, was shopping. She lived downtown in my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for most of her close to thirty years after my grandfather died. Some of my best memories of her involve shopping. We wouldn’t necessarily buy anything–she wasn’t a spendthrift–but oh, how she liked to see what the stores had.

Any wonder, then, that when she suffered what proved to be a fatal stroke at eighty-three years of age, she was shopping at K-mart?

At the end of “Cabaret,” Sally Bowles sings the title song, which includes a passage about Elsie, a former roommate who “rented by the hour” among her other misdeeds. Sally notes that despite the neighbors’ disapproval, when Elsie died, she was the happiest corpse Sally’d ever seen. “When I go, I’m going like Elsie,” Sally sings.

I’ve been thinking since Mima’s death what I’d like to be doing when I die. I’m not planning on going anytime soon–I’m 54 and in overall good health–but I’d like to be doing something fulfilling and meaningful, with people I respect and love physically or mentally present. Maybe it’d be while I’m writing. Maybe it’d be at a prayer group or Mass. Maybe it’d be at dinner with my sister.

But I do know, as Liza Minnelli now sings when she performs “Cabaret”: I’m not going like Sally–dissolute, arch, wisecracking and, at her core, all alone.