When It's Your Time To Go, It's Your Time To Go

We were all doomed, and my mother knew it for sure.

“When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” she would say. The first time I heard it from her was around 1980, when we watched the movie Meteor, which was about the certain destruction of the entire planet. It had Sean Connery in it. He and his team worked around the clock to find ways to divert a meteor the size of Texas that was mere days away from pulverizing our cute little civilization. Mom just shook her head while she watched.

Mom: “No point. When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

She repeated this over and over. I was nine, and not nearly ready to go.

Me: “But they’ve got missiles! They can blow that meteor to smithereens! Earth is saved! Huzzah!”

Mom (teeth clenched, jaw grinding): “Sssssstace. When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

Me: “So they should just give up? Wait to get ka-blammed by the meteor?”

Mom: “I don’t know what to tell ya. Let them try if they want. People should feel good about themselves.”

Me: “But it won’t matter.”

Mom: “Not one little bit.”

Me: “Okay.”

In the movie, Earth was saved. I tried not to be smug.

Me: “Huzzah!”

Mom: “Movies aren’t real.”

She went to do the dishes.

***

Even at age nine, I could see a problem. The woman whose job it was to keep me alive had taken up a blatant fatalism that I feared would not work out well for me:

1. I start to choke on a chicken bone from her unspeakable soup. She watches impassively as I gasp for air, pound my chest, turn blue, and sink under the table.

2. She retrieves the newspaper from our steep driveway without a second look as I point my skateboard into heavy traffic.

3. She glances up wordlessly as I prepare to leap from the roof of the auto parts store next door, aiming for a stack of mattresses inexpertly placed on the ground where I hoped to land.

4. Desperate for something edible, I try to start a fire in our hibachi grill with a box of coal I found in the basement, and the gasoline for the lawnmower. She looks out the window at me, kneeling in front of drenched coal, striking match after match, then turns away.

5. Our motor home loses its brakes on the hill overlooking Hoover Dam. She shrugs as we careen uncontrollably toward the lake, the dam, and its killer submerged turbines.

***

There was no hope of getting a straight answer out of my mother, so I went to her sister, Aunt Sissy. She was surprisingly down to earth, and to this day remains the only person I could really count on to explain my family to me.

Me: “My mom says that when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go. Why?”

Aunt Sissy: “Because it is.”

Me: “You have got to be kidding me. You too?”

Her black eyes were impish.

Aunt Sissy: “Has anyone ever gone after their time to go? Has anyone ever gone before their time to go?”

Swell. A logic argument. As if my mother was using a line of reasoning that was exquisitely Spock-like. Spockian. Spock-esque?

Me: “I’m not buying it. She made it sound as if there’s no hope. No way to save yourself when death comes rolling your way.”

She let me off the hook, and explained.

The women in my family on my mother’s side all lived into their late nineties. Some stellar exceptions, like crazy Aunt Rose or Aunt Hchachel, made it to one hundred and beyond, freewheeling, demented, incontinent, uncomprehending, but alive. The men, by contrast, died young from stupid accidents.

The quick summary: Women in my family could say “when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go” with Buddha’s serenity, knowing that their time could be as long as a century. It was cop-out fatalism.

It’s also what the women said when the men in my family invariably killed themselves off by some of the following means:

1. Crushed by a tractor when mowing the lawn. Grandpa, aged 55.

2. Falling off a grain elevator. Uncle Hymen, aged 46.

3. Playing golf in a thunderstorm. Uncle Louis, aged 57.

4. Not putting his glasses on before taking his pills and dying from the wrong combination. Cousin Shlomo, aged 43.

5. Electrocuted while trying to steal his neighbor’s cable. Cousin Stuart, aged 51.

My mother delivered the bad news like this:

Mom: “Remember your Uncle Louis?”

Me: “No.”

Mom: “SSSSSSSSSSSSSSStace. Of course you do. Uncle Louis. Aunt Hchachel’s husband. His daughter is the zaftig blonde. Stella. Sheila. Stephanie. Whatever. Stace! Come on. Louis!”

That was way too many shrill names shouted at once.

Me: “No idea. Did I ever meet him?”

Mom: “No. They lived in upstate New York.”

Me: “So why would I remember him?”

Mom: “Stace. He’s your uncle!”

Me: “So what about him?”

She flapped her hand.

Mom: “Oh, he’s dead.”

Me: “I miss him already.”

Mom: “You’re just like your father. Why you gotta be such a smartass?”

Me: “Because I’m just like my father?”

Mom: “That’s what I said. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

Me: “So. Uncle Louis died.”

Mom: “Yes. That schmuck. He was playing golf with his buddies, the goyim, in a thunderstorm. Lightning hit the tree he was under and a branch got knocked off and hit him on the head.”

How many rules did that violate?

1. Playing golf.

2. Hanging out with goyim.

3. Taking refuge under a tree in a thunderstorm.

4. Failing to look up at the loud cracking sound of the branch separating from the trunk of the tree.

Me: “So wasn’t it a little dumb of him to be out golfing in a thunderstorm?”

Mom: “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.”

Me: “Ah.”

Since all parenting, in part, is the distillation of lessons from above, here’s what I learned:

1. Hire others to cut your grass.

2. Get your grain in its fully processed form.

3. No golf. Also, avoid non-Jews, thunderstorms, and trees.

4. Read your prescription bottles and instructions carefully.

5. Pay for cable.

Words to live by. For a hundred years. My plan: demented, freewheeling, uncomprehending, incontinent longevity.

I’m not leaving the house again.