The Way They Were

My parents each took an approach to the end of life that was indicative of the way they lived their lives.

My mother was a shy woman who had been pulled into a glamorous world in 1958 when my father, Peter Selz, became the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was my father, with his enthusiasms for people and art, whom my mother credited with “bringing the world in the door with him.” He was vibrant and ambitious, she the reserved, graceful woman at his side. With her long neck and high bouffant hairdo, she looked like a tulip. I was 7 when they divorced and my father left our family for new adventures in California. Though he went on to marry four more times and she never remarried, I knew from my parents’ constant reunions over a 40-year period, up until my mother’s death, that they continued to adore each other. Why then had they been unable to stay together?

By the time I discovered my mother was ill, it was too late for her to advise me of her last wishes. When she died, four years after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, I was relieved that her suffering was over. I donated her body and brain to the NYU Langone Medical Center, because her driver’s license indicated that she wanted to be an organ donor. I chose to have her cremated when their research was done. Five years after her death, her ashes still sat in a box in my office where I’d placed them as soon as they had arrived in the mail. Yet I continued to be haunted by the belief that I had failed my mother by not sanctifying her ending.

Unlike Mom, who was ambushed by dementia in her late 70s, my father has been obsessively preparing for his demise for the last 25 years. At 96 he’s drafted his own obituary, chosen the location for his service, bought his burial plot and picked out the rough-hewed stone to mark it — even having it installed with his name and date of birth carved on the face. All that is missing is his exit date.

For a long time, my father’s preoccupation with his final arrangements appalled me. An acclaimed art historian, he’d been immortalizing himself since as long as I could remember. But worse than his desire to monumentalize his achievements was his morbid fixation on his ending. A few years ago, in celebration of his birthday, Dad actually asked his family to gather with him at his grave site.

My sister, stepsister, the grandkids and I flew in from different parts of the country and met my father and stepmother, Carole, on the headlands of the Pacific Coast. Dad wanted to hike before the momentous visit to the cemetery. I guess he thought of his grave as a kind of summit, the end of a long journey. I thought it was a sad excursion, especially since it was raining softly. But Dad could be rigid about his schedule. A hike was on the itinerary, so hike we must. He was coughing, his emphysema acting up.

“I can do this,” he insisted. We compromised by choosing the shortest walk.

Treading along the path, our mood lightened. Under the live oak trees the sky was lavender, the rain only misting our cheeks. My father, with his slow gait, brought up the rear, not following so much as herding us along. The fog surrounded us like tulle. We couldn’t see up ahead. Except for my son, we were a flock of seven women being steered by an old man. None of us wanted to finish this brief hike.

But we did come to the end. We passed through a gate, and there we were in the graveyard. The rain stopped. The sun came out. While Carole and her daughter leaned against one another, like saplings in a strong wind, my father came and stood beside me. “What do you think?” he asked.

I looked from the vacant plot to my father. His eyes were both warm and distant. I knew he was envisioning us all standing here after he was gone. This was our dress rehearsal.

“It’s perfect,” I told him. Here he would rest on a crown of cliffs surveying the world.

Up until that moment, I’d assumed that funerals and burial ceremonies were rituals for us, the living, to help mourn our loss. But standing beside my father on the coast of the Pacific, I saw that they could also help the person facing death: a last request and a way to define his existence. A force of nature continually hurtling forward, my father needed to control and plan even for the time when he would no longer be among us.

As for my elegant mother, she’d let events shape her. She believed in providence and fate more than self-determination. Still, she hadn’t wanted to be left behind. Not when my father divorced her, not when I had to place her in a nursing home because I could no longer manage her care.

In considering the way my parents faced death, I finally understood the problem that undid them as a couple. He always barged ahead, leaving her stranded in his wake.

Yet my mother had managed to make her desire understood, at least to me. I’d brought up the subject of her funeral only once, asking, “Mom, what do you want me to do with your ashes? Do you want me to sprinkle them in the ocean?”

The cloud of her dementia momentarily lifted. Managing two words of reply, she whispered: “Keep me.”

Gabrielle Selz is a writer, art critic and the author of the memoir “Unstill Life.”