Life is about beginning the journey without knowing the destination
If you do it right, though, it can be a helluva ride
I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few days ago, a friend from Seattle spent the night at our house. She’s a counselor with a unique perspective on life. Though I don’t get to see her but, once in a great while, I always enjoy talking with her. Much of what’s happening in our lives seems to run on parallel tracks, and her perspective is something I’ve come to value.
Our conversation on this occasion was about being at the point in life where we’re losing friends and loved ones. She’s probably 57, give or take, and I’m 63, so, yeah, we’re definitely at that point…and it SUUUUUCKS. There’s no way to prepare yourself for what happens when you reach this age, but it’s one of the things you learn when you arrive.
And there’s not a damned thing you can do. It’s part of the package.
Of course, the good thing is that we’re still on the sunny side of the dirt, so we have that to be thankful for, but the truth is that none of us are getting out of here alive. All of us will be dragged out feet first eventually; only the timing is TBD.
I got my first taste of what was ahead for me when my father died suddenly in June 2020. He dropped dead in his yard outside Sparta, WI, probably of a heart attack or a massive stroke. Whatever it was took him quickly, but it was still a shock.
Getting the call from my youngest brother was the one comical moment of the whole episode. It was about noon on a weekday, and I was getting ready to shower. I was standing buck naked in front of my bathroom mirror with shaving cream on my head when my cell phone rang. When I saw my brother’s name on the caller ID, I instantly knew precisely why he was calling.
I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.
Jimi Hendrix, The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love
Two days later, at the viewing, my father was laid out in his old Army Reserve uniform. Standing next to his casket, I looked at him and wondered what conversations we might have had if he hadn’t suffered a massive stroke almost 30 years before. Would we have talked about the first 18 years of my life, which were virtually constant verbal (and no small amount of physical) warfare?
Would we have discussed all the now pointless internecine conflicts in which we were too stubborn to back away from our entrenched, carefully reinforced, and impregnable positions? Or all those years during which compromise was virtually impossible and scorched earth was the only conceivable strategy? Each of us knew at some level that we’d never win, but we had to burn things to the ground to ensure that any advantage for the other would be hollow and miserable.
I said my goodbyes and left my college class ring in his casket before they closed it up. I have no idea why I did that, but I felt like some part of me needed to go with him, even though we’d never been particularly close.
No answers were available…not that I’d been expecting any. When we laid my father to rest on that hot and humid July morning, I still wondered what might have been.
What if we hadn’t been so stupidly stubborn? What if we’d managed to realize what we had in each other? What if my father had recognized that I was a unique individual and that he didn’t have to understand, only accept, the person I was becoming?
So many questions. So few answers. But that’s what happens when you forget to stop and recognize what’s truly important. I was too young, immature, and stubborn to understand. My father was, at times, too immature to be the adult in the situation. Plus, he was just as stubborn as I was (the apple didn’t fall far from the tree). As the adult, he should’ve been the one to wind things down, but he could never see his way clear to take a step back and use his maturity to calm things down.
My father was the reason I never had children, but I promised myself that I would do adulthood better. I’d be the best, kindest, and most compassionate person possible. That plan hasn’t always worked as well as I might’ve liked, but I think I’ve improved with age.
I’ve also had to deal with a significant amount of pain and loss, which is a byproduct of finding myself in middle age. People get sick, people die, people leave your life, and it sucks- but it’s what happens; it’s the cycle of life.
Never run directly into a tree while kicking yourself repeatedly in the nuts.
Ben Shapiro
Last week, I received another lesson in coping with the cycle of life. Erin was an oncology nurse practitioner for about 30 years before going to work for a pharmaceutical company earlier this year. I don’t know much about oncology, but one of the things I did learn from Erin is that, despite your best efforts, people die, and that’s just the way it is. You do your best to treat patients as effectively as you know how, and you hope for the best. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, there’s no rhyme or reason as to why.
There will be times when you do everything 110% by the book, leave no stone unturned, try everything within your considerable knowledge and power…and still lose a patient. There are occasions when the human body doesn’t react well to the treatments available for a particular disease, and no matter what a physician may throw at it, nothing changes. Sometimes, patients die despite whatever heroic efforts may be undertaken to save them.
It happens, and you can’t change it. You can only accept it. Sometimes, people die.
Even worse, the treatments can be, and at times are, what kill patients. In oncology, there’s often a fine line between therapeutic and toxic.
And there’s not a g*****n thing that can be done about it.
Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.
Charles Bukowski
Last week, Erin and I were in Minnesota visiting my family. Part of the reason we were there was because of a family member who’s in hospice because her cancer hasn’t responded to treatment. She’s OK now; at least her pain is controllable, so she’s able to get through her days, but there’s no telling how long that will continue to be true.
For all the time I’ve known Erin, cancer has been an abstract concept, something that happens to other people. Now I’m dealing with a family member who’s seriously ill and may have only a matter of months. I want to respect her privacy, so I’m only going to refer to her in general terms, but this is someone I’m very close to. Her passing is going to leave a huge hole, not only in my family but also in her church and the small town in southeastern Minnesota in which she lives.
When we were visiting with her, she was far less interested in discussing her cancer than she was in what needed to be done to prepare the path for those she’ll be leaving behind. She’s a planner and a caretaker, and even now, when she could understandably be feeling sorry for herself, she’s focusing her energy on others. And even when she should be focusing on what time she has left, she taught me a valuable lesson.
She told me that she gets through her days by focusing on ten simple words:
Don’t let fear of tomorrow ruin the joy of today.
For someone who has every reason to be frightened of tomorrow, she’s holding on to today, which is admirable in ways I’m not sure I can find the words to describe.
Live in the moment because it’s all you have.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.
Gilda Radner
We spent several days talking to her, aware that she’d be dead sometime soon and yet not quite being able to wrap our heads around that. What do you say to someone who’s dying? We didn’t ask her that, but she told us that she deals with her cancer daily and doesn’t want to spend what time she has left focusing on it. She wants to live, not focus on dying. She’ll have to do that soon enough, so she wants to live while she can.
Fair enough. There will be plenty of pain, emotional and physical, down the road. Being two time zones away, there’s not much we’ll be able to do save for lending moral support. We’ll call now and then to check in and see how things are going. If there’s anything they need, we’ll do what we can to provide it. At some point, I’ll get a phone call, either shortly before or just after she passes and I’ll be on a plane back to Minnesota within 24-36 hours. My job will be to take care of my 82-year-old mother for one, two, three weeks…no one knows; we’ve never been through this before.
Man, this sucks. A million and one thoughts are running through my mind, and precisely none of them are helping me to make sense of this situation. She has a strong faith in a benevolent God, and that’s helping her to endure her disease and impending demise. I don’t share her faith, but I admire and respect her commitment to it, as well as the strength it gives her.
I can’t for a moment begin to put myself in her shoes. Even though, on an intellectual level, I know life is finite, it’s a challenge to comprehend the end as being mere months away and the product of disease. I can’t imagine what that knowledge must feel like, nor what I would do with it if I were in that place.
Eventually, life hands us a verdict no appeal can overturn. At that point, one can only hope their bones aren’t creaking under the weight of lives unlived. I feel fortunate; I can say that I’ve had the opportunity to live a life I could never have expected or anticipated. I haven’t been cheated when it came to opportunities. In that respect, I’m a fortunate person.
I have a good life, a wonderful partner I love dearly, a good home, fantastic friends, and a family that loves me. Sure, there are still things remaining on my bucket list, but it’s a LONG list, and the odds are pretty good that when my time comes, there will still be line items I’ve yet to cross off. I think that’s a damned sight better than reaching the end of the list and realizing there’s nothing left.
I know I’ll get that phone call, but I hope it won’t be for a few months. Whenever it does come, I’ll do what needs to be done and what I’ve promised. The circle of life keeps turning, and sometimes it sucks donkey balls. But that’s part of life, and as we age, this will become a more frequent feature.
As I said earlier, the good news is that we’re on the sunny side of the dirt…and we should enjoy it while that continues to be true.
Live life. Love hard. Because eventually, our time will come to be on the wrong side of the dirt.
As a wise and learned friend once told me,
Life is hard. Wear a helmet.
(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)
