The last six weeks of my life have been punctuated by awkward phone calls full of bad news, visits to one hospital after another, and sleepless nights on uncomfortable chairs in sterile rooms. Although my family has been historically pretty healthy, we’ve been dropping like flies lately. My current illness, a particularly persistent cold that’s been making me miserable for weeks, is the least of it.
There’s something very humbling about watching someone you love die. The last time I saw my uncle before I went to Maryland to help transfer him into hospice, he was competing in triathalons. Ten, maybe fifteen years later, he was under 100 lbs, in excruciating pain, and recognized me only every other time he was awake. It had been ages since we’d spoken, and it was more than a little surreal to be there at his bedside, talking him though panic attacks and helping him with everything to eating to changing the channel on the TV to urinating. The basic things of life become so important, and everything else is just parenthetical.
He’s been transferred back out of hospice into a long-term care facility now, and he has good days and bad days. He is dying, no doubt about that. And faster than you or I am, most likely. But when it will actually happen is completely up in the air. My guess is sooner rather than later, but what do I know — I didn’t think he would last this long.
I also didn’t think I’d be back in a hospital room again so soon. This time, I’m with my brother, who — thankfully — is not dying. He’s one of the lucky ones. Late last night he was in a car accident that left the driver and one passenger dead at the scene, and my brother and another passenger battered, bruised, but alive. If they hadn’t been wearing their seatbelts, A. and R. would have been thrown from the car and killed instantly like the other two.
Instead, A. and R. now will live their lives with the memory of last night, with the sounds of crunching metal and breaking glass etched into their memory in a cruel loop, the smell of scorched rubber burned into their nostrils, the sensation of rolling over and over with a narrow strip of webbing cutting into their chests as the only thing standing between them and oblivion impressed into their limbs. They will live with horror and fear and guilt and anger. They will live with sadness with a weight so great that it will be almost unbearable. But they will live.
A.’s sleep is punctuated by muscle jerks, caught breath, and frowning expressions that cross his swollen and stitched face. I can’t imagine what he is dreaming about right now, and I don’t want to. It would have been a blessing for him to have been knocked unconscious, but no — he remembers everything. I hope the pain medication is strong enough that he is sleeping dreamlessly, that I’m reading too much into the normal twitches and facial calisthenics that come with much-needed sleep. But I fear that he’s watching an encore of the accident over and over in his head.
How do you navigate your life after something like this happens? How do you manage it after it happens twice? Last month, less than 30 days ago, was the anniversary of our younger brother’s death. In the seven years after Jesse died, we all struggled. A. had finally found another brother, a family member of choice, to fill that role in his life, to be there for him, support him, have fun with him, all those things siblings do for one another. And now this brother is gone, too.
I don’t believe it is anyone’s “time” to die. We grieve because our hearts were made for eternity. Life is filled with abrupt endings, and knowing they’re coming doesn’t prepare us or lessen the blow. It’s not in our nature to know how to handle death. That’s why it’s so miserable.
There’s nothing natural about it. Only final.
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I will forever remember 27 as the year I finally grew up — and not just because it was the last year I could legitimately describe myself as being in my “mid-twenties.”