A very smart professor once told me that anyone who has lived through a late-November day in Buffalo knows they are going to die someday.
Buffalo's beautiful Indian summer gives way to biting winds and constant clouds, vibrant trees are stripped of color, and darkness appears in the early afternoon. Even thought you knew it was coming, desolate winter arrives a little too suddenly.
The opposite feeling should set in around this time of year as days get warmer and lighter. But this past week has felt like late November in Buffalo - two drawn out death sagas have reminded us that we are all going to die someday.
The morbid, minute-by-minute deathwatches surrounding Terri Schiavo and then Pope John Paul II reflect our anxieties about death - our control of our own ending, and perhaps, the ones we feel guilty about causing.
The picture on the cover of Tuesday's New York Times speaks volumes about the morbid fascination around the painfully slow death of Pope John Paul II. The pontiff's lifeless, pale body is being carried through a sea of people - one would hesitate to call them mourners, because most are holding up a camera.
These people represent the millions of viewers who glued themselves to a television this weekend, watching images of the ailing pope's bright window in an otherwise dark building, fascinated by the possibility the light would go out at any minute.
News channels looped footage of an ailing pope struggling to speak in his final days, while anchors pontificated about what John Paul was thinking or doing or saying; as soon as he died, news outlets scrambled to interview people who were in the room. The media isn't stupid - they know what fascinates everyone about the story, Catholic or not, is the portrait of a human being in the last hours of life.
The fascination is instinctive -I wasn't able to tear myself away from the coverage, even though I am not exactly a practicing Catholic. Part of the absorption with the end of the pope's life was that it gave us a vivid picture of what it's like to die. The people with cameras in St. Peter's Square weren't just trying to capture a historic image, but an image of their own death.
Our nation also watched in grim fascination as Terri Schiavo - or rather, her body - slowly withered away. This spectacle foreshadowed the deathwatch over the pope, but was different in many ways.
Polls show most Americans just wanted Terri to die in peace. They didn't want the death to be drawn out or political - many would have preferred her death to be a private affair.
It's interesting to look at who didn't want her death to be private, the religious activists and politicians who were obsessed with saving the brain-dead woman's life.
Many of those fighting to save her life were the same ones who so willingly support capital punishment, even as more and more Death Row inmates are found to be innocent. They are the same ones who cheerlead for the "War on Terrorism," despite all the lives lost.
Their contradiction is mystifying - when the life is just a collection of cells in a womb, or a brain-dead woman in a shell of a body, the life must be saved. Otherwise, they don't seem to care.
The people who want to remove the feeding tube "want to establish a culture of death, and not life, in all areas," said one protester outside Schiavo's hospice.
That quote seems to be truer about the President Bushes of the world, rather than those who wished that the body of Terri Schiavo could pass away peacefully once the person inside was gone.
Perhaps this protestor was inadvertently projecting criticism of his own beliefs onto his political enemies. Maybe a subconscious regret is at play when Bush desperately tries to save Terri's life.
Or maybe that's taking amateur psychology a little too far. But it's an interesting question. Either way, I feel safe saying that those who wanted to save Terri's life are very scared of dying themselves, and would feel a lot better if they were in charge, not nature, and could save a life.
Part of the beauty of a November day in Buffalo is exactly that you see nature's cycles in action, and realize you are a mortal being subject to the same forces. I embrace cold November afternoons, and I think it was healthy to watch with fascination as the pope moved into death.
Those outside Terri's hospice probably want to move somewhere warm and sunny when winter comes around. I think it's healthier to face the fact November is going to come eventually, and there's not much you can do about it - other than value the summer while it lasts.
