Avocado and Arugula Omelette
I made this omelette on 3/27, but am just posting about it today. I didn't want to not post about it, because the dish was so pretty to look at--don't you agree? Keshav likes avocado, so I feed it to him as often as I can. Fortunately, he also likes spinach and arugula so he gets his greens. There is no spinach in this dish, but there is no reason why I could not have added it.
I am not sure why they called this an omelette, since it is not folded over the ingredients. Maybe the idea is that it is an open-faced omelette. As my mother used to say, it makes no difference inside your stomach!
Did you know that there are a couple different spellings of the word omelette? I am too lazy to investigate why this is so, but I suspect it has to do with the French origins of the word, and how it is "Americanized" in different ways. I like the French spelling because it is more elegant, and anything that makes eggs more elegant is a good thing.
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The other night, Keshav said he did not want me to leave him. He says this often, and sometimes it is done in a humorous way as I walk out to go to the grocery store, his "Don't leave me!" communicating both love and dependence. Does he love me because he depends on me, or does he depend on me because he loves me? No matter--both are valid.
But this time he was not joking, as I found out moments later when he appeared to be crying. When pressed, he told me that he does not want me to die. Okay, so that was a leap.
They say that one thing we all know for sure is that we will all die. This is true. What most of us don't know is when we will die. My brother told me once, perhaps in jest(?), that he intends to live only to the age of 80. He implied that he does not want to deal with old age and the troubles that can come with it. I have not followed up with him about where he is with this declaration, but I have to wonder if he has a date picked out on the calendar. I wonder if it would be a relief to wake up on the day of death and think to oneself: Today's the day.
We like to know things, don't we. But I am not sure if knowing when we will die is knowledge that we need in order to live a good life. Or maybe it is. There are stories of people being told they have "six months to live" and making those months the best of their lives. But I think we can live a good life by consciously choosing to live a good life, regardless of how long it goes.
I have told Keshav in the past that there is no guarantee that I will go before him. At 63, I would like to be around for another 30 years or more, as long as I don't degrade too much physically or mentally. If I did live this long, Keshav would be in his 60's--an age where he would be vulnerable to things like heart issues and such. If he doesn't continue to eat the greens I feed him, who knows what state his health will be in!
Some couples get around this by making "suicide pacts", and while I can see the appeal of this, I don't think it is the solution for everyone. The question is, does life have any value after a partner has died?
The simple answer for me is yes, of course it has value. Grief and solitude can lead a person to deep and meaningful places in their relationship to themselves, others, and life. The complicated answer is that life has no value until value is assigned to it, ideally by the one living it. And this is where I think Keshav may find himself to be stuck. He currently does not see any value in life after I die.
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There is a blogger I follow whose long-time partner died a couple years ago. These guys were together for nearly 60 years! Since his partner's death, the blogger regularly claims to get a "sign" that his partner is "there", via a bulb on a string of Christmas lights that comes on from time to time despite being burnt out. While this is a romantic and comforting idea, the blogger writes how he is certain this is his dead partner communicating with him.
While this guy has the right to believe whatever he wants to believe, I find myself rolling my eyes every time he writes about this, because I find it to be a rather childish way to respond to the death of a loved one.
What's so hard about recognizing that when someone dies, they are gone? My own mother has been dead now for nearly 20 years, and we were so close that I could sense the day she died even before anyone told me. But in all the time since she died I have never had experienced even the slightest suggestion that she is still around somewhere, trying to communicate with me.
I wish she was. I miss her all the time. I want to tell her things about my life and my marriage that I can't tell her because she is not here. But that missing does not make her appear. The missing I experience is a process that informs my relationship both with life and death--reminding me that everyone's time on the planet if finite, including mine. These hands, these legs, these arms will one day not be needed anymore by the body they are attached to that has died. I look at my hands as though they are my hands, but they are really just hands, albeit ones that I use.
When my mother died, I flew up to see her body before she was cremated. She lay on a rolling table, dressed in white, with her hands folded one on top of the other over her middle. I looked at those hands, which I knew so well. How many times had those hands held me, comforted me, spanked me, fed me, reached for me, wiped the tears from my eyes. But they could no longer do any of these things, because the blood that gave them life was no longer flowing.
I didn't want to leave the observation room where her body was because I knew that I would never see her hands again, they were scheduled to be cremated the next morning. I could not bear that thought, but then I wondered, would I try to save my childhood home from demolition if my family no longer lived there? Would I have any claim to it? Did I have any claim to my mother's hands?
I didn't. She would not belong to the Earth.
Before I left the room, I asked the attendant for a cutting of her hair, which I still have to this day. Perhaps it was selfish of me to withhold this cutting from returning to the Earth, but I don't care if it was. The Earth doesn't need it, but I do.
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I will tell you one thing I know for sure. If I do end up dying before Keshav, there is zero fucking chance I will come back as a bulb on a string of Christmas lights. I will have lost the right to influence his life directly; any influence I continued to have on him would have to come from his relationship to his memories of me. Trying to "give him a sign" would not be respecting his ability to hold my death. He may not believe he can hold it, but his decision to marry me suggests that he probably has given this some thought.
Conversely, the most respectful thing one can do for a deceased loved one is to let them be dead. Honor their life by the choices you make in living yours, and in this way you keep their memory alive, which is the best once can do. Anything less disregards the opportunities that death can offer for those who are left living.
I don't know that any of this will comfort Keshav when the time comes, if indeed I do end up dying before him. He might prefer that I appear to him in the form of a burnt out bulb that continues to twinkle. But I know that I won't be doing that because it is not even remotely possible as a real thing. So whenever he feels the need to spend time with me, he can always come back to these essays. My hands won't be there, but my handprint will be. He'll find me in the words.
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