Death lingers in my family like a foul stench. Arrogantly mingling in the crowd of weary souls, smug, almost laughing...as it tortures us, dancing on our lips...absorbing what remains of the oxygen. Our breath catches as we wait for the end...and suddenly this ravenous enemy disappears, taking nothing. The rush of life overwhelms our lungs and we're torn between being grateful for the gift of more time and anxious for the moment when the teasing ceases.
It's like a play of monsters...each has their role...each one has a purpose and all equivocate destruction. I am but a member of the audience...watching, anticipating the moment when the mission is successful...and the target has been annihilated.
We've come to this culmination over and over...telling ourselves...this is it, this is the moment when we start over, when the scar replaces the life that once breathed exultantly. We prepare our hearts, train our minds, strengthen our bodies for the transition...but it never comes. We weep with exhaustion and delirium. We protest, we ask questions...how can he persist in this losing battle? How is he still...breathing...when the pain is blinding and the misery is all-consuming? How can we bear witness to it...over...and over again? How many times can we sit beside the phone, fearing the sound that translates...finality? How many hours will we hold the frail hand, watch the rise and fall of a chest...counting the seconds between breaths...20, 40, 60....until time continues and the movement ceases?
To long for the continuation of life and simultaneously plead for its ending is the most evil paradox.
This is beyond medical remedy, beyond hope, beyond healing...it is too....late.
It feels wrong to want this episode of demise to conclude. The precise moment it does, ripples of grief will overtake my family. Their lives will take new meaning, adapted function... Like a person who has endured amputation, they will have to learn to walk again...it will feel different, it will feel abnormal, it will hurt like a bitch...and there will be no escape.
I wonder which is worse...having a life abruptly stolen...or watching it waste away...writhing in the cesspool of macabre...aching for and yet fearing the end?
…................
I wonder if my grandfather has contemplated these morbid thoughts as he feels the tingle of death on his lips.... Is he afraid? Is he ready to slip away into history and become a memory to the rest of us? Or is he white knuckling his pill bottle, screaming with a voice that has waned with fatigue...desperate for one more moment to live with abandon, to breathe exultantly, to love wholeheartedly?
Are any of us really prepared for the journey that comes after this?
“I'm about to lose my mind...you've been gone for so long...I'm running out of time. I need a doctor, a doctor, a doctor...I need a doctor....to bring me back....to life.”
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