Life And Death and Life

You will have noticed that I have not written much in the blog for most of this calendar year.

From a couple of recent posts, you may be able to glean why.

My father-in-law passed away this past Monday after a hell of a battle with cancer. I will draw a curtain of privacy around the details. Suffice it to say I have now seen two kinds of death, the sudden and the prolonged, and I hope I'm given a choice, because I know which one I'd choose. I can take pain, I can take suffering: when the only prospect after pain and suffering is death--no thank you.

That said--sudden death remains a vivid nightmare for me. Not so much mine. I'm not afraid of death at all. It seems silly to be afraid of something everyone must do at some point--it'd be like having a morbid terror of eating, or defecating. But the thought that someone I love can die at any time! sends a chill across my heart. It's a selfish chill: I see that now. If a death is owed, and nothing else in life is as sure--then that death is better paid in one lump sum than in instalments. Yes, I see that now.

The battle affected me deeply. For one thing, nothing else really seemed worth writing about as it raged. The rest of the world pales into utter insignificance when you're dealing with life and imminent death. All else is trivia. This may sound silly -- hell, I have no doubt my father-in-law would have no use for this line of reasoning at all -- but it is, nonetheless, true. I couldn't find it in me to care about much of anything beyond my wife and her family. I still feel that way, truth be told. It's hard to pick up the threads of your own life after you watch someone else's get cruelly snipped.

Grief has a way of toying with your mind. When my Uncle Ted died, I confess I didn't feel much of anything for weeks. I felt nothing, that is, except steadily mounting guilt at feeling nothing. When an uncle dies, especially one as loved, you're supposed to grieve, right? It was as if I didn't know how.

(And then one day it occurred to me in the context of nothing at all that I would never see my Uncle Ted again...and a dam I didn't even know was there suddenly burst and left me floundering in a flood of tears.)

I've cried for my father-in-law, a little almost every day over the past six months. Again, he'd as like have no use for that. And he'd have a point, because even knowing the outcome of this pitched battle in advance didn't really do a damned thing to lessen the wave of grief I felt when it was over. What use tears, if they don't even lessen the sadness? Especially when you know the person you're grieving for would want -- expect -- you to minimize his death, and, if anything, celebrate his life instead?


My own father laughs in the face of death. Then again, in his career as a police officer, he saw vastly more than his share of it and he has the policeman's way of dealing with stress down to a fine art: he turns it into a joke. He's told me at various times that his funeral will involve (a) Whooppee cushions under everyone's seats; (b) a remote-control laughing box; (c) a tape-recording of his voice saying that yes, as he expected, he's been sent to Hell...but luckily, he remembered to bring the Fire Department's hose with him and now it's one big party down here. The only tears he'd welcome are tears of laughter.

And yet...

There are two funeral homes in Parry Sound, his childhood home and the closest town of any size to his home today. The practice at one of them, for as long as I can remember, has been to announce deaths on a bistro-like easel outside on the sidewalk. My father unfailingly refers to this easel card as "the menu", as in "who's on the menu today". Yes, he actually says this out loud. Often.

(Imagine my mingled horror and hilarity when, in researching this blog, I checked the website for this funeral home and found...right on its home page...a menu. Done up in restaurant-like script.

He checks "the menu" quite often and always has. The biggest reason for this, I think, is that at any given time he knows somebody on it, or at least knows of him or her. Police officer, remember? It seemed to my childhood self that Dad knew everybody in that town of six thousand, not to mention the outlying areas. It still seems that way today.

But I catch myself wondering sometimes, as my father's age steadily accrues, if today he's reached that stage of life where he's checking "the menu" not so much to see who has died, but to see who he has outlived. The elderly--a word I flat-out refuse to associate with my father, just as I couldn't associate it with my wife's dad--often check the obituaries in a spirit of mad competitiveness. Something about that I find disquieting. I hope that's not top, or even bottom, of mind to my dad as he checks his "menu". Because when you start outliving people, it's only a matter of time until you're outlived yourself.

No, death doesn't scare me. Dying, on the other hand...

My dad's day will come. My mom's day, my wife's day--I don't give a fart in a glove about my day, but I look at all those other days as monsters hidden in the bushes and I want to take them out somehow, if only I could see them. And then there are the warning shots--my father's heart attack last year, more recent heart attacks in two colleagues and a friend, all three of them of an age that's awfully similar to mine and therefore my wife's.

Get it out of your mind, Ken.

I try, I try, but nothing else has really been in my mind for half a year, now. I won't get all melodramatic and say I've forgotten how to think. No, it's more like I've forgotten what else there is to think about. And so--

Life must go on. My father-in-law would be the first to say it, and he'd say it with conviction. As with anything else that happens for good or ill, it's up to us to determine what to do next, and how to do it. I can think of no better tribute to my wife's dad than to live life as he lived it, and that's what I intend to do as soon as this novocaine wears off. The alternative is to sit in a dumb haze waiting for the next loved one to be picked off...and the next...and the next...

No. Fresh bread will arrive in this Breadbin with more regularity, henceforth. Life must go on.