The Last of Everything

The Last of Everything

I've been thinking about this title and what it really means to me for quite a while now, years really, but an event that took place this weekend made it's meaning clear to me and why I had to write about it. I've often thought about "the last time," the last time we make love with a partner, the last time we eat with a friend, the last time we say, "I love you," the last time we say, "good bye." I've thought about these things for many years but it is the last man I dated who brought the questions to the forefront once again and until this weekend, it was remembering the last time we made love that occupied my thoughts and the context of the title. Where we were, what was said, the feelings, the emotions, the intensity. I really didn't think it was going to be the last time and I guess that's my point, we often times don't have a clue that it is the "last of everything."
This weekend my closest friend, a woman I have know since I was 20 and she was 18 lost her lover of 5 years. It was unexpected, incredibly brutal and possessed of a finality that made any question of his return impossible to contemplate. He was riding his bike with his cycling club when an eighteen wheeler semi-truck filled with dirt drifted into the bike lane and clipped his left arm. He was knocked off his bike and thrown into the path of the truck which hit him, ran over him and killed him instantly.
Susan, my friend, was inconsolable. Saturday night she got the news that he was dead. After she went through the first bout of hysteria she called me and I rushed down to be with her. I spent the night holding her and talking to her about her years with Sandy. She kept saying, "thank God we made love last night, thank God it was so wonderful, thank God, thank God."
And so it is with me, I think of my friend Doug, how we had a stupid fight after over thirty years of friendship and how we didn't speak for two years before finally being brought back together by Susan. Once we were speaking again we couldn't believe we had wasted so much time. We started back with our weekly lunches at a favorite restaurant and our daily phone conversations (he lived in Santa Barbara and I in L.A.) that sometimes lasted minutes, sometimes lasted hours but always included us laughing, God did we laugh!
And then one day I dropped him off at his car after lunch. I told him how great he looked, lean and fit in a new pair of pants and shirt given to him by his mother. As I drove to the gym I got a call from his assistant telling me that Doug had had a massive coronary in the elevator at the design center not ten minutes after we had said good bye. They brought him back to life but his brain was gone and as I waited in the emergency room with his family they brought out those same clothes that I had just complimented him on, they were shredded now by the paramedics as they fought to get to his chest, his heart, and they handed them to me. And all I could think was, thank God we had the time we had, thank God my last words to him were, "I love you Doug" and thank God it was a smile on his face that I saw as he said, "I love you too Rolfie."
And that's how it is I guess, we think we will always have a next time. I can cite so many other examples, my sister kissing her husband goodbye and getting a call twenty minutes later saying he was dead, his car smashed into a phone pole at the far end of a curve in the road that he just couldn't negotiate. My mother saying, "I love you sweetheart" and dropping dead hours later of a heart attack; my friend Michael saying, "let's go for it" as he turned the crank on the morphine drip that would forever ease his pain from the ravages of AIDS in a time when there was no hope. Always a next time.
I don't mean to be maudlin, I really don't but it's the truth I'm talking about here and each of us will be touched by it at some time, in some way for one reason and one reason alone. . . we are all human. So often I close my letters to friends and family with the words,"take none of it for granted, not even the bad stuff" and this is why. We never know when it is the last of everything.

AS I WORK THIS LIFE
I know that what I do is design and build gardens for people. On the face of it that sounds like a pretty cut and dried sort of thing to do, not a particularly emotional or spiritual thing. In truth though, it is often so much more than walls and arbors and gates and water features and whatever else might be involved on a particular site. Many times, not always, but many times I will walk into someone's garden and the first thing that comes to mind is to ask, "when did it happen, when was the break up, the death, the divorce, the job loss, the illness, when was the survived event." But I never ask, I wait, I listen and most of the time it comes out, the moment when on some level the decision to save the heart was made. What I see is the aftermath and it's familiar to me, I've been there. I believe that when we go through a terrible emotional or physical experience like what I've described we pull in, we hunker down. I've read and heard that when a person falls through ice into a cold river or is left outside in freezing weather the body automatically pulls blood out of the extremities and into the area of the heart, releasing what isn't essential for survival to save that which is. So the garden falls into disarray, or the car goes to pot, or the daily trips to the gym dwindle down to none, all of those things that don't seem essential disappear until the heart is healed. . . and it will heal. It will be forever changed, altered by life itself but it will heal. I think that's what I witness, the thawing, the rebirth, the aftermath, the realization that the storm has passed, emotional survival is assured and life can go on. The neglected garden becomes a statement that a new beginning is at hand and while the eyes that see it, the heart that feels it will be different, they WILL see it, they WILL feel it. In realizing that I am being asked to be a part of that rebirth, that regeneration, I am humbled. I am honored and I am humbled and I am completely awed at the strength of the human spirit and how it can survive.