Tip one back for Janet Begley R.I.P.

People die every day. Every year we lose millions. Most will pass on unknown. Some, like Indy 500 winner Dan Wheldon, who died at 33, in a car crash in this year’s race, go too soon. Others, like the CBS radio man Norman Corwin, who lasted to 101, take more than the average share.

Who else of note died this year? That’s easy. This was a big year:

The man who made Apple richer than the U.S. government, Steve Jobs, lost the battle to cancer at 56. Bert Schneider, producer of Easy Rider, lasted to 78. Easy on the eyes Elizabeth Taylor was 79. Peter Falk, Lt. Columbo, was 83. 12 Angry Men director Sydney Lumet was 86. Seductress Jane Russell was 89. Andy Rooney, famous in America as out-spoken complainer on 60 Minutes, was 92. Betty Ford was 93. Fitness guru Jack Lalanne practiced what he preached and he made it to 96. George Whitman, legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co. owner who helped struggling writers, made it to 98.

Smokin’ Joe Frazier, the first man to beat Muhammad Ali, was 67. The much maligned minority owner of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders Al Davis was 82. Bubba Smith was 66. Macho Man Randy Savage was 58.

Amy Winehouse, sang until she burst at age 27. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Gil Scott-Heron was 62. Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons was 69. Blues guitarist Hubert Sumlin was 80.

The defector daughter of Joseph Stalin, Lana Peters, was 85. It was a good year for seeing dictators and extremists get off the main stage: Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, somehow made it to 69. As did the absurd dictator Moammar Kadafi. There may be something in that. Osama bin Laden was 54.

What about he who helped rather than hurt? Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped those in pain pass on was himself 83 when he went. A staunch fan of his to the end, my grandmother, Janet Elizabeth Begley died this December 11th at the age of 81. By her measure she had lived way too long, having finished what she was here to do long ago. If she were here now she would probably purse her lips and wonder sarcastically what all the fuss is about. She who taught me that “it’s five pm somewhere in the world,” would also be having a wee bit of Scotch.

If the newspapers weren’t crumbling from the same failing infrastructure her old-school Republican bones decried whenever she had tippled said Scotch, and obituaries didn’t cost in the thousands of dollars, what hers would have read was: Janet Elizabeth Begley née Sturtevant, of Canby, Oregon passed into the luminiferous aether sometime after nine a.m. on December 11th, 2011 due to failure of a heart that could finally take no more, stemming from a successful procedure to repair a broken hip. The second child of Cecil Sturtevant and Mary Ferris, and little sister to brother Donald, she popped into existence in Redlands, California on May 27th, 1930 (a younger brother, Peter Gumble, would be born more than a decade later). A tumultuous juvenility ensued through the Great Depression into a rebellious adolescence during World War II and early motherhood in the Baby Boom saw her deliver two children, Greg and Lari, into the world with her biker husband, Larry Nickens―a U.S. veteran―, whom the Fates did not deem a lifelong mate. Though it was not to be a simple life for single-mom Janet to raise her babes in the Leave It To Beaver ’50s, through her sacrifice and fortitude in the face of a still sexist America, she became a registered nurse and somehow managed to pave the way to a chicken in every pot and two cars in every driveway kind of life for her kids. It was not until the mid-sixties that Janet would meet the love of her life in Darrell ‘Jack’ Begley, whom she would love and live with for the rest of his life, in their adopted hometown of Long Beach, California. Now with a daily fatherly influence, the children grew up mostly healthy and mostly strong, and coupled with her brothers, gave Janet many nieces, nephews and grandchildren to love and care for. She quit her job as a nurse and dedicated her life to being the familial matriarch, a job which she adored, as she cracked wise about it with a thin brown More cigarette in one hand and a vodka soda in the other.

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s she saw her kids’ kids give birth to more kids and as her family grew, she and husband Jack moved throughout California to battle a wearying recession and her family’s annoying disposition for not staying put. Her son’s untimely death, a bout of lung cancer and even the burial of her husband Jack could not close the valve of her heart’s desire to beat on, and helped her live her last years in semi-rural northern Oregon, a climate for which she was not made. She breathed her last breath painlessly―after 81 years piled full of equal parts love and loss, pain and joy―slipping into a deep sleep from which she would never wake.

I would like to think that she would agree with Vaclav Havel, the recently deceased playwright president of former Czechoslovakia, whose motto was “May truth and love triumph over lies and hatred,” but I know that Marx’s famous “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members,” comes closer to her own worldview.

Raise your glasses people, for she is survived by her brother Pete, daughter Lari and lots of little ones still not staying put.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2011 at 07:50. It is filed under Blog and tagged with Janet Begley RIP, Notable Deaths 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.