Tag Archives: dying

Death, dying, awareness, and perspective

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I have a poetry book I bought when I was a teenager. In it is a collection of life stage poems by a man, Rod McKuen. It is filled with simple poems about life and how we view life as we pass through the years. I am always amazed when I am looking through my very old things, and I come across this book and read a poem or two and reflect where I am now in relation to the poems.

What I am thinking about tonight however is an age old problem we all face, our impending death. I was thinking about death the other day, as I listened to a mother with four children yelling, and telling her children how bad and stupid they are. I was thinking…what would she prefer to tell them if she knew that shortly after she loaded everyone into the car and left the parking lot a fatal accident would occur where either all four children, or herself would be killed in an accident.

Would she be saying the things she was yelling at them, or would she be saying something else to them? Occasionally, I am at a loss with people especially the yelling woman as to what they would do or say differently, if anything knowing it may be last thing they ever uttered. In some cases people are so beaten down that they would not find anything good to say to their loved ones as their parting words. Others of course are so beat up that they would want to get in one last cutting remark as their parting shot to ensure that those left behind would know for the rest of their lives how that person felt about them.

Recently I learned about a person I know who’s Mother has become suddenly terminally ill with possibly only days left of her life. The family is with her at the hospital, or as many that can be there are at the hospital. Another person I know who is not family went there today to be with the family. I suppose that is a good thing they feel that way, but I do not know who I would want around in that situation who is not immediate family.

Suddenly the time they will have with their Mother is so restricted, between the things the doctors and nurses have to do to the dying person, the times of going in and out of coma states, and the other things that go on, it seems somehow selfish to me to want to be there to take even a few seconds of family time to satisfy my own ego, or sooth my guilt, if I had any.

The way I see it though is no matter how or what we feel, it is only right to respect the needs of the family. For me, that means I would need to be asked to be there rather than just show up and try to part of the process. I think others who can actually contribute to the process somehow, feel the need to go and do whatever it is they feel they need to do.

As for the person dying, it is a one way trip with a spot for one passenger only, it is not a family event in that respect. I see it as being born but in reverse. When we were born we may have been aware of the process in another reality, but we sure are ignorant of it in this reality. Dying must be about the same way. We are cognizant of the process here, but we are completely oblivious of what is happening to us as our body dies.

No matter what my personal feelings are, they are only my feelings. I can only speak about what is true for me. I hope when the process is complete, that all those involved received whatever it is they needed from the process. Death is never pretty, yet being left behind is painful for those weep and mourn for their own pain. It is important to find a way to put into the correct perspective. Without knowing and being aware of our own pending death, we often neglect to live a proper life – such as the woman yelling at her children over nothing.

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Baby to Adult to Dying, enjoy the whole trip

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I had an interesting thought today. I was thinking about growing from a baby to a young child. I have never seen truly happy babies during this stage of life. Most days are filled with frustrations of things they can not do yet. Most of the frustration is usually because their minds start to envision things their bodies do not know how to do yet.

From thinking about babies and the frustration they go through because their wants advances their abilities, that we in the end of our lives suffer from our bodies advancing our thinking! We do not remember the frustrations we lived through from about six months to three or four years old when we wanted to do something, but we could not, because we had not developed our fine motor skills yet.

Our diets change too as the years go by. One day we are walking along and it is lunch time. We think we want pizza for lunch. Our favorite pizza, the same combination we have been eating for at least twenty years now. We order, receive, and start to eat our favorite pizza. Suddenly it does not taste as satisfying as it did just last week when we treated ourselves to a slice of pizza.

Even our thinking changes in our later years. I can not speak for women, but for men, sex is the main brain topic from waking to sleeping, and maybe during sleep too. Men go through their lives talking with women in every conceivable circumstance, yet in their minds they are usually thinking about sex with the women of interest at the moment. It is just the way men are built. Suddenly one day a man realizes he is talking with a woman and something is different! It takes a few seconds, but he realizes that for the first time in his adolescent to adult life, he sees the woman in front of him as a person, not as a possible sex object.

Some parts of getting old are not so interesting or benign. For some of us little things we took for granted such as proper body function now quit working in the most humiliating, or embarrassing ways. We become incontinent. We become a gas factory that could probably supply the Country’s methane gas needs daily. We have trouble digesting foods that we used to love, or certain foods now give us a stomach ache.
 
When we think we can not take any more, the real diseases set in. We have high blood pressure, heart trouble, eye problems, back problems, pains and aches that come and go and sometimes come and decide to stay.

Most people of course do not find this time of life too enjoyable. How can they with their bodies falling apart? I am starting to wonder though how can we not enjoy this time of ending? Our bodies have given us great service for so many years, and they are now getting tired. Our bodies are now taking control of the end of our lives, and no matter what we would like to do about it, what we can do is mostly limited to observation.
 
Our trouble is we can not just observe, we have to observe with opinion and emotion. I think we need to become more proactive and observe with happiness, and contentment, possibly even enjoyment. We may not be able to control getting old and dying, but we can control how we react to it.

We can choose how what emotions we allow into our lives as our bodies start to do what is natural after so many years of life. I hope for myself at least I can find enjoyment in the way my body shuts itself down. I can not do anything about it, and I enjoyed my body at its best, so the least I can do is enjoy the idea, it is doing what it thinks is best for me.

In essence, I can enjoy and appreciate that my body is doing the best it can with the every day more limited resources it has to work with. This seems more natural to me, and much better than being bitter and resentful that my body which served me so well, is now shutting itself down because it has no more to give.

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Introspection in a cold breeze

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The gates of introspection were thrown open late the other night. It was a mistake, I was not thinking, but they opened all the same. The only public item that washed up was the death of my Mother. She died a few years ago, three days before Christmas.

I took off a month of work, left my family alone, travelled across country, and stayed at her home with her in October/November. I was there twenty four hours a day seven days a week. Or most of it any way. She had told me back in July, that as the time got closer, and it looked like she did not know what she was doing, she did know what she was doing, and it was okay.

Okay, I could understand that. My father in the weeks before he went, did everything he could (or so it seemed) to help me hate him. So my Mother saying this was not something that shocked me. When I was with my Mom, after about a week, I needed a few hours to myself, time away from reality. I asked my Mom if she was okay with me leaving the house for an evening, and she said yes, she would be okay.

It was close to freezing when I left. Less than two hours later I received a phone call from a neighbor that my Mom was outside laying on the ground. They called the ambulance, I raced to the hospital. About ten days later, there was a repeat, this time she was in the back yard, the weather was still freezing. Repeat the story, a few days in the hospital, and home she came. Some days I thought she was really there, and other days I was not sure who was home, if anybody.

One afternoon she wanted to go for a ride. I helped her in the car, started driving, and she started singing. Not a song from her childhood, or a song from the romantic days of her life, but another song. This song had one line, and the same rhythm. For over two hours I drove my Mom around listening to her one line song. I want to mention first that I rarely heard my Mom use any off color language in her life. On this day for over two hours, I listened to her sing, “Thanks for being a prick.” Over and over again. The fact that she was constantly grabbing at the steering wheel trying to turn the car into the ditch was minor compared to the song. She didn’t want to go home, fwiw, so we rode around the countryside, her singing her song, and grabbing at the steering wheel now and again.

A few days later she seemed to want to talk about her life. I asked her something about my Dad. “I don’t know why I married that son-of-a-bitch”, was the only thing she had to say about him. She told me some things about a Great Aunt I never knew I had. She talked a little bit about her Dad, Sisters, and Brothers, and that was about it. End of the end of my life conversation.

Because of all the problems with her body dying, it was impossible for her to come and live with me. I live at altitude, she could not survive without oxygen, and she kept pulling it off. Want to or not, it was time for me to pack up, and go back home. Over the next few weeks, there were some phone conversations, but they were not good, they were pretty ugly actually. She called me on the fifteenth to wish me a Merry Christmas. A week went by, and the phone call came. The hospital made the call as easy as they could, and I appreciated their effort.

It was a day of introspection for me, as I went over that month in my mind. Fortunately for most of us, each day is not our last, and there is time to fix the something we did, or at least acknowledge our faults. I can not guess if that month was really a month with my Mom, or with a shell. A month where things were said, and I never knew if they were true, or even thought about.

Of course it was an hours walk today with a cold stiff breeze, thinking about those last days with my Mom to realize it does not matter. She’s gone, and I am left to walk, and wonder.

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