Dying Sucks

I’ve just spent some time in Branson, and at the risk of sounding incredibly precious, I have to say, I learned some things. About life. About loss. About death. You know. Things.

Branson, in case you didn’t know, is a scrubbed-clean, Bible Belt-approved, glittering entertainment mecca nestled in the heart of limestone country in southern Missouri. I’ve been going there since I was a small child visiting relatives in the Ozarks, and I’ve watched it grow into the Vegas doppelganger it is today. It’s neon and glitz. It’s over-the-top. And, it’s Wholesome with a capital “Whole.” Maybe a capital “Some” too.

“You can take a three-year-old to any show in Branson,” said the impossibly homespun tour guide on my “Ride the Ducks” excursion. “And we’re pretty proud of that.” As we splashed into Lake Taney Como, a chorus of approving quacks tumbled from the lips of my fellow riders. It’s the Branson version of Beatnik finger-snapping.

Think “variety show.” Think “the Osmond Family Revue” and “Sing Along with the Oak Ridge Boys.” Think Andy Williams’ Moon River Theater. Think, me, in desperate need of a cocktail.

Then there’s Cathy Rigby, who is now installed in a sparking, ginormous, citadel-looking theater in a hill, playing Peter Pan. Her 30-foot tall image, emblazoned on the side of the building, is visible for miles, and is reminiscent of what public aesthetics must have been like under Mao.

And it’s Cathy Rigby who is really garnering attention down in Branson these days, despite the city having recently built a new airport, a handful of new churches, a convention center and a lakeside, franchise-happy development known as “the Landing.” My first clue about Rigby-mania came whilst at lunch at Joe’s Crabshack on said Landing.

Joe’s is probably about as close to Vegas-y as you get in Branson, with its drink specials and all (drinking in Branson is kind of like smoking in a lung ward, but somehow Joe’s has made it their “thing.” They even offer beer.). Then there are the servers, with their too-tight T-shirts, incongruously tacky double-entendres (“save a fish: eat a fisherman”), and apparently mandated line-dancing, every time “Stayin’ Alive” comes on. Which is often.

Amidst all of this devil’s work, my server was having an excited conversation with the table next door about the Peter Pan show. “She’s wonderful,” she gushed. “just such a great message, you know?”

This was echoed by the guys in Bass Pro, in overheard conversations in the streets and by the checkout girl at the outlet mall (BTW, I haggled the Coleman guy down to five bucks for a camping cook-set with defective packaging. I’m not proud).

“Seen Cathy yet?” was the refrain. “The message, the message!”

And the message, of course, is eternal youth. I suppose it’s a compelling one, particularly considering that I did not even realize that Cathy Rigby was still alive, let alone able to zip around on stage in a flying harness.

This all laid me flatter than Andy Williams’ last face lift, because the circumstances under which I came to Branson were not happy ones. I was there to face the slow loss of my beloved 92-year-old grandmother, who I’ve looked up to and admired and had a special relationship with my entire life. And there, in Branson, in the shiny, happy, Cathy Rigby-never-dies zeitgeist of it all, her life just seemed so... fleeting.

Also, the whole Branson thing – like Vegas, it’s where formerly rabidly famous people go to peter out their careers – just made me think about the nature of legacy. It reminded me that we live in a world where increasingly, the measure of your life is quantifiable in some way, where everything is bled out into the whistling corridors of the Internet and digital communications, where average people live on in the form of blogs and e-mails and recordable communications like texting. Which never die, really. Like the Ark in Indiana Jones, these snapshots of the person are filed away in a cavernous warehouse, or data center as the case may be. So maybe Average Jane doesn’t get the Rigby-style Soviet-chic 30-foot poster to live on in, but there’s nonetheless a body of communications that act as a sort of legacy.

Unlike most people I know, my grandmother, Polly, is a woman that never tweeted, never wrote an e-mail, never sent a text message, and certainly never blogged – though she has some stories about growing up in the Ozarks that are blog-worthy for certain. Remembering her and keeping what she was alive in some way for the grandkids and beyond will be a function of the imperfection of memory. She doesn’t have many letters that have survived, either. And in some ways that will force the creation of a better-rounded picture than one built solely from recorded digital ephemera. Or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

Not to go all Proust on you, dear readers, but I realize that it’s important to not let her loss become lost in translation. While modern communication lives forever, it's easy to forget that we don't.

Summer is waning and where I live, the sunflowers have all wilted, though the zinnias and the mosquitoes are sticking around to remind me the season’s not over yet. And I have uploaded pictures of them a mere six weeks ago, in full flower, to Facebook. And forgive the wrist-to-forehead melancholy for a moment (paging Camille), but it just seems an apropos metaphor for what has become a season to reflect on loss. And this:

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