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I'm Hadditt

~ 87 year old Marylou Shira Hadditt, born a Southern Belle-Jewish Princess, is a civil rights and political activist, lesbian feminist, mother, grandmother and writer who says, “I want to share my stories before I die."

I'm Hadditt

Tag Archives: death

Kaddish Poem

21 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by hadditt in Family, Memoir, Poetry

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Tags

aging, death, grief, healing, Kaddish, losing a mother, loss

July 17, 2015

The old woman looks at the calendar. A frightened child, barely 14 years old, cries within the old woman.  Crying because both the old woman and the sad little girl remember that Friday, July 17th is the day and date her mother died so many years ago. Images, sounds and smells, faces and touch surround the old woman. She finds words, words melting into childhood remembrances, twisting and turning, becoming a poem. The old woman is me, sending the poem into the ether, releasing the child for all times.

THE SCREENED PORCH EVENING

The heat of the summer day
settles down on the evening with a crush.
The child chills her thighs
against the cool of the red clay tile floor.
She chews the end of her pigtail.
Waiting.

The Grandmother sluffs the porch swing
with her slippers
back and forth
back and forth
Waiting.

The Grandfather smokes
Between-the-Acts miniature cigars
hiding,
hiding behind the
Saturday Evening Post.
Waiting.

Cicadas cry from the oak trees.
Waiting.
Lightning bugs flash a signal
an alarm
Waiting.

The screen door slams open.
The Father, immobile in the doorway,
“The waiting is over”, he says.
“She’s gone.  7:15 tonight”.
He collapses into the arms of
the Grandmother, his mother.

“She’s gone”.
The Child’s Mother.
My Mother.

I stretch my legs, my arms
my chest, my cheek.
Finding the cool comfort of
the red clay tiles.
The cicadas cry.
Lightening bugs glitter.
Only me –
Alone.
Chewing my pigtail.

Friday, July 17, 1942

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Midwifing a Death

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by hadditt in Memoir, Sonoma County, Uncategorized

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Tags

aging, death, dying, preparing for death, Sonoma County

January 15, 2004

MIDWIFING A DEATH

By Marylou Shira Hadditt

This is about death – a more forbidden word than ‘sex’. About death and an extraordinarily profound experience. I drove up the Coast to spend a day and a night with my friend, Page who had terminal liver cancer. The day was sunny and bright – the winter rains made the moss on the redwood bark shine like neon and the familiar route 128 took on new dimensions. Page had rented a house on the sea; she wanted to wake up in the morning to see the ocean once more before she died. The house was in Albion, (adjacent to Salmon Creek bridge where I’d had my car accident twelve years ago. Page was with me in the aftermath.)

The Albion house, was a gem of a California home. All floor to ceiling windows and redwood rafters and exposed beams. The house sat right on the edge of the headlands. One could see the ocean from every room in the house – Page’s large king size bed looked both to the West and South where a series of seaside monoliths caught the breaking waves. Even with the windows closed, we heard the sounds of the surf all night long. There was a quiet and peacefulness, both inside and outside the windows.

Page astonished me. An intense person – we are alike in many ways- one of which is often not being sure of ourselves. In bed in her bedclothes, she was a different woman. Clearly, without hesitation, she voiced her needs and desires. “I need your help”, or “I don’t want your help just now” — all voiced without “could you please” or “would you mind”. She told me and another visitor that it was time for us to go, She wanted the last half hour alone with the sea. Page could not have been that direct two months ago. There had been a transformation.

The transformation of her acceptance of death. She did a lot of reading about death, she asked friends to bring her poems and stories; I read to her from Whitman, “and to die is different from anyone supposes and luckier.” She asked me to repeat “luckier” several times. I read a fable about Eros and Death, getting their arrows mixed up with one another – love with death and death with love. Another fable of a Maori woman who shed her old woman’s skin. Page liked these simple fables. There were precise, no ambivalence. Page told me about a breathing meditation: on the inhale, the breath encircles the heart giving it protection from fear, but she admitted, sometimes the fear sneaks in. Page surrounded herself with dying and death, not sadly, not mournfully, but in gentle peaceful acceptance.

As I look back now on our two decades of friendship, I feel blessed to share dying as we share our living. I drove back to Sonoma County, not with sadness, or grief. I drove with an uplifting feeling, one might even call it grace. As I drove through that cave of redwoods along the Navarro river, turned on the Mendocino NPR station, – there was Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ. The nobility and holiness of that music, the grace of the redwoods, the shadows on the roadway: these embraced me. In love — and perhaps the grief, like Page’s fear, will sneak in from time to time.

Page-image-fixed

Page Prescott was the midwife for her own dying. She saw what needed to be done and went about doing it. Shortly after the days at the Coast, three days after her 70th birthday, Page chose not to eat and not to drink fluids. She was inviting death to come to her. She selected a cardboard casket and asked friends to decorate it. During the next week and half, she made certain to say all her good-byes. Eleven days later, she slipped quietly away in her sleep with family and friends nearby to ritually cleanse her body, prepare for cremation.

Two weeks later I had a wonderful dream. I am standing in my garden when a bright red World War I monoplane flies over. Page is the plot, wearing an old fashioned pilots cap. She leans out the window, calling, “Tootle oooh! Bye Bye” and sails off.

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