Life in a Year: Saying goodbye to the cycle of life - San Jose Mercury News
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Life in a Year: Saying
goodbye to the cycle of
life
malevolent adversary. The Grim Reaper, armed only
with his killing scythe, has been a formidable
metaphor for death since the Middle Ages. It's an
image that modern doctors, armed with high-tech
weaponry, sometimes boast to patients that they can
"beat."
By Bruce Newman
[email protected]
And they're not the only ones. Most of the world's
religions promise some form of eternal life —
reincarnation for believers in Hinduism and Jainism,
everlasting life in heaven for Christians — reducing
death to a sort of transformational stage: The body
perishes, but the spirit becomes immortal.
Posted: 12/25/2009 03:58:59 PM PST
Updated: 01/05/2010 09:46:02 AM PST
By the time Joe Hargett got there, it was too late. His
daughter Michelle was gone.
That was the soothing phrase that people would
use later, as if it could remove the sting from the
way she died. The truth was that — despite hourly
morphine infusions that helped dull her
consciousness — the last night of Michelle's life,
she moaned with every dying breath. It was only
when Carol Hargett realized her daughter had
stopped crying out in pain that she urgently
summoned her husband.
"You've got to come now," she told him. It took Joe
Hargett only a few minutes from their condo a mile
away to reach his daughter's Los Gatos apartment,
but by then Michelle Hargett Beebee, 43, a single
mother of three, had died.
Several days before her heart stopped beating, her
body riddled with cancer, Michelle asked, "Dad, am I
dying?" When he told her yes, she said, "Can you
make it faster?"
In Western culture, we celebrate the "miracle of
birth," but death — the subject of this final
installment in the Mercury News' 12-part series,
"Life in a Year" — more often is viewed as a
"People look forward to the birth of a baby as a
joyful experience, but I'm thrilled when they have a
wonderful death experience," says Barbara Bugatto,
a nurse with Pathways, a Sunnyvale-based hospice.
"That's just as joyful, really. And we're all going to
go there. The human body will disintegrate, but the
memory of a person's life to the people who loved
him will never die."
As she lay dying in her Sunnyvale home this week,
Kathleen Bennett's body was disintegrating before
her eyes — the wasting effect of abdominal cancer
she had battled for a year and a half. A month ago,
when Bennett, 71, was asked whether she had
embraced her own death, her reply was typically
feisty. "Hell, no," she bristled, her chin stuck out
defiantly. "I got things to do."
But now, her entire body radiant with the cancer
that gave her CT scans a malign incandescence,
Bennett was trying to find a way to say goodbye to
her family. "You don't say 'I love you' to people," she
explained. "It's not something that we ever did as a
family. When I started that, everybody got tense.
They'd go, 'Well, I feel the same way about you.' "
To make sense of death, we try to find meaning in
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it. But whether it comes too soon or arrives late,
after terrible suffering, any meaning we bring to it is
strictly for the benefit of the living.
life. Sometimes they're afraid the patient will think
they're giving up on them. Hospice is not giving up,
it's just another form of support."
Some deaths simply overwhelm our capacity to take
them in. When a spouse dies, we say they are
"widowed"; when a parent dies, we are "orphaned."
But when a child dies, what you will hear at the
funeral is that a loss so monumental offends our
understanding of the life cycle so much that there is
no word in our language for it.
George Peacock was ready to give up long before
his body finally did on the morning of Dec. 4. At 98,
he was unflinching in the face of his own death, but
could not summon it to suit his need. "I am old, and
I am tired, and I want to die," he said in midNovember. Peacock had lived so long that his 71year-old son Stephen had become his neighbor at
The Villages, a sprawling senior community in
south San Jose.
Ready to go
In some ways, a good death is a miracle: Of the 2.4
million deaths recorded by the Centers for Disease
Control in 2006, heart disease and cancer killed the
most Americans, and violent deaths — accidents and
murders — combined to produce the third-highest
death toll.
America's death rate has declined by nearly half
since 1960, which suggests those doctors who duel
with death are at least holding it at bay. But that
hasn't changed its inevitability. The U.S. Census
Bureau calculated that "death care services" such as
funerals and cremations are a $15 billion industry.
Hospice care, which stresses the relief of pain in
patients whose illnesses the medical community has
deemed "terminal," has been slow to gain acceptance
here, probably because the abject surrender that
death requires is difficult in a can-do country.
"The medical community has a difficult time saying
the word hospice," says Bugatto, who coordinates a
team of home-care nurses, medical social workers
and spiritual counselors to help her Pathway
patients prepare to die. "Sometimes the doctors are
reluctant because of their own feelings about end of
Behind sallow skin and sunken eyes, the man who
managed the San Jose Merchants Association and
Credit Bureau for 15 years until 1962, and after that
owned the Peacock Christmas Tree Farm atop the
Santa Cruz Mountains, had all but disappeared
beneath the swaddling that had brought him full
circle back to infancy. "I have to wear a diaper. I
can't go anywhere. Life is no fun anymore," he said
as a hospice nurse fussed over him.
In the next room, a large framed photograph
showed Peacock when he looked like the secondlead in a John Wayne movie, a Montana cowboy with
a wide smile and his whole life ahead of him. "He
was somethin' else," said his daughter Mikell
Peacock, 62. "Yes, he was."
But that George Peacock had been lost on the long
trajectory of his dying. He had outlived Marjorie, his
wife of 29 years. "I don't know quite whether I'll
make the spot, but she'll be in heaven if I get there,"
he said. "I'm happy to go. And I am super-ready."
The best mom
Until the suffering began, nobody in Michelle
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Beebee's family was ready for her to die, least of all
her. After being treated all summer for a peptic
ulcer, she received the results of an ultrasound test
from a nurse, who didn't tell her she was dying but
did end the counseling session with a prayer.
Bubbly and popular with customers when she
worked at several of her parents' restaurants in
downtown Los Gatos — including the popular
gelato shop, Dolce Spazio — Michelle recently had
been pursuing a degree at De Anza College, hoping
to become a special education teacher.
There was so much lost time to make up for with
her three young children — Austin, 16; Aubrey, 13;
and Alex, 10 — following what her parents refer to
as "the dark years." She had voluntarily entered a
drug treatment program in 2006. She wanted to get
clean for her kids, especially Aubrey, who was born
with Williams syndrome, a chromosomal disorder.
"It was hard for Michelle that she wasn't going to be
here to see things through with Aubrey," says Joe
Hargett, 69, who will raise the two younger children
along with his 66-year-old wife. Michelle's exhusband, who lives in Tracy, has custody of Austin.
Carol Hargett cannot shake the memory of her
daughter's "inhumane" death, which the nurses from
Vita Hospice in Newark were prohibited by law from
hastening. "I can put my cat to sleep," Carol Hargett
says. "If I could have, I would have let Michelle go
out without pain."
"She asked us," Joe says. "The last 72 hours of her
life, she asked several times."
By the end of her life, Michelle was receiving so
many powerful drugs that she experienced doublevision, then lost her sight entirely. Ten minutes after
she finally slipped away at 5:20 a.m. on Dec. 7,
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Aubrey suddenly appeared in the room by her
mother's bed.
"Why she would wake up at 5:30 in the morning, I
don't know," says Carol, who asked if she knew what
had happened. Aubrey said no. When Carol told her,
she started crying. It was decided that Aubrey
should leave with family friends, but she abruptly
announced that she wanted to do one more thing
for her mom before she left. She disappeared into
her bedroom, emerging seconds later with a
necklace from her jewelry box.
"She went over to her mom," Carol recalls, "picked
up her hands, put the necklace underneath, stood
back and said, 'Mom, you are the best mom, and I
love you. It's OK for you to go because I don't want
you to be in pain.' Then she turned around and
said, 'OK, I'm done.' "
Ripples of life
The circle that had opened at Michelle's birth was
now closed. "I was with her when she took her first
breath," Carol Hargett said. "And I saw her take her
last." Her parents had watched with wonder as she
took her first baby steps, calmed her when she cried
at her first day of school and felt like they were
launching her into the world as they watched her
leave for the high school prom.
No matter how long it takes for the life cycle to
reach its conclusion, every circle ripples outward
through jobs and romances and children in ways
that no one at the beginning can foresee.
When Bill Snyder was born in 1925, his father gave
the doctor who delivered him a shotgun in trade.
Now there are times when Snyder feels the only
thing connecting him to life on earth is the long
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tube that tethers him to an oxygen tank, like the
astronauts he used to help send into space as an
engineer at Hughes Aircraft. At 84, Snyder lives at a
Millbrae nursing home, where he cruises around on
a small electric cart.
"I'm not really enjoying life," he says, pulling out a
typed list of all his medical ailments: gallbladder
surgery, congestive heart failure, angina, and the
implantation of a pacemaker and an artificial hip. "As
far as I'm concerned the golden years aren't so
golden. I got pills comin' out my ears, and just
getting dressed poops me. There are times when
you feel like you'd pull the plug. But not too often."
furniture and talk to the animals. "She says "cat"
and "dog", not "mom" and "dad,— says Zoe"s
mom, Wendy Riggs. "Interesting." She is also the
object of adoration by her brothers Alex (shown
here) and Ben. In this final installment: A painful
death leaves loved ones looking for answers,
while a retired Christmas tree farmer, a cancer
patient and a grounded aviator await their fates
in hospice.
Life: month by month
As a young man, Snyder piloted a two-seater
airplane. He took Mary flying on their first date, not
realizing she suffered from motion sickness. She
married him anyway. When she died, he took her up
one final time, scattering her ashes to the four
winds. Now he sits and wonders who will fly him
into the heavens.
January: Birth
February: Childhood
March: Puberty
April: Teen Years
May: College
June: Wedding Day
July: First Job
August: Parenthood
September: Divorce
October: Middle Age
November: Old Age
December: Death
Find stories, multimedia from the entire series
at www.mercurynews.com/life-in-a-year.
Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.
died green
When Snyder's wife, Mary, died in 1995, he had
little interest in a life without her. She was the one
person he could always talk to. "Matter of fact, I still
talk to her," he says. "Sometimes I feel like she's
right here."
About the series
The daily news cycle is filled with sound and
fury, but often overlooks the lives of ordinary
people. During 2009, the Mercury News
published a story each month about the events
that make every life extraordinary, beginning
with the birth of a child -- Zoe Riggs -- in
January. Now nearing her first birthday, Zoe
likes to scoot up and down stairs, cruise on the
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People in this country go to their final reward
using 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid each
year, and are buried in caskets that require more
than 30 million board feet of timber, according
to the Green Burial Council. Cremations are on
the rise (up from 27 percent in 2001 to a
projected 36 percent next year), but according to
an Environmental Protection Agency estimate, so
is the amount of mercury (320 pounds) pumped
into the atmosphere annually by crematoriums.
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