Living before dying

The first thing that hit me was the smell. Not unpleasant exactly but I wouldn’t want to spend all day with it. Not like they had to. It was mix of cleaning product and that medical staleness that, somehow, is nothing to with hygiene. A smell of the living, or the smell of the dying?

The men that lay either side of me as I walked through the ward had genes that hailed from across the globe. But their differences emphasised their similarity. Wherever they, or their ancestors, hailed from, they now were arrayed in tidy rows. Maybe in their own lives they were snappy or slovenly dressers in their own lives. Now they were anonymised by their hospital gowns. Hair frosted with age and thinning. Many dozed, the wrinkles of age softened, mouths open, breath rasping.

Whatever these men were, or had been, didn’t matter. Here they were a series of checks of blood pressure, consumers or pills, recipients of injections. People to be talked about, not talked to.

At intervals some of the men were tethered to monitors or drips. The pressures on the cheerful, efficient staff so high that they could not be certain that they would know that someone was dying without an alarm sounding.

Awakening

He had been given a bed by the window and was asleep as I approached. I looked out onto the car park. It was a beautiful midsummer day. A few wisps of clouds meandered through the blue sky. I watched them drift while words pregnant yet devoid of meaning drifted in turn through my head: Tumour, sepsis, crash team, dying.

“Hello?”

I turned. He looked up at me through watery eyes. For the first time I could remember he wasn’t wearing glasses. It made him look younger.

I sat in the plastic and metal chair by the bed.

“How are you Dad?”

“Oh, first class. I just want to go home now.”

“You know that you fainted earlier?”

“Yes, yes, but that’s nothing. I’ll be fine in a day or two. Anyway, how are the kids.”

The conversation continued. As time passed my interventions became less needed. He wanted to talk not converse. The longer it went on the longer his speeches. Nurses coming to prod and poke him barely stopped the flow.

Talking

I had never heard him like this. He started on his childhood and his youth. The words not rushed but flowing steadily and determinedly. A monologue of a life lived.

Much of this story I knew as part of family mythology. Tales burnished by the retelling until the truth was been forgotten. In their place the half-facts, half-lies we remembered. But some of it was new, more petulant, more regretful. Slights remembered. Not forgotten and not forgiven. Doubters proved wrong. The anguishing over choosing paths less trodden.

The half light of the long summer dusk arrived. Still he talked. Visiting hours were coming to an end and I was the only visitor that remained. Dinner had come and gone yet the monologue continued. Words upon words as those around us started to drift from dozing to sleep.

Eventually he paused. We had reached the present day. The future was yet to be written. Then he spoke again.

“I won’t mind dying you know. I’ve achieved everything I wanted and more. If I go my only regret would be that didn’t see my grandchildren go to university.”

What do you say to that? I said nothing. I had said nothing for the last hour.

“It’s late. You should go.”

I looked at my watch he was right.

“Alright Dad. I’ll see you soon.” My voice sounded strange to my own ears.

He nodded and rolled up in his crisp sheets.

Returning

As I sat on the underground train I didn’t understand my own thoughts and emotions. What I did know is that I was tired. Bone weary.

I knew that my dad was old. Up until now I realised that I had only intellectually understood that, now I emotionally believed it as well.

No. I was still lying to myself. I had realised more than that. Today I realised that my dad was going to die. He may have got through this crisis, but there would be another one, and then another, and then, one day, there would be the last one.

Turning inwards

I’ve been writing an occasional series looking at the regrets of the dying. That has been theoretical and self-obsessed for the most part. What do I want to make sure that I don’t have regrets when my time comes? What will I do with my days after I achieve Financial Independence to ensure that I look back on a life well lived.

The last weeks have moved that thinking from hypothetical to reality. I am at that point in life where death is not a stranger. I have had friends my age who have died, I have older relatives who have passed on, some of the most painful deaths have been of those friends who have had problems during pregnancies. All of those have touched me in different ways but the thing they have had in common for me is to make me appreciate what I have and to live more in the present.

This time has felt different. Maybe it’s because it’s because it’s my immediate family. It’s not possible for there to be any distance between me and the events. Maybe it’s because I’m in the middle of it. Death is not here but I can hear his faint footsteps echoing louder. Maybe it’s because I’m having to make some of the decisions now. Living out the cliché of squeezed generation looking after both parents and children while feeling like I’m letting down both.

I don’t know. It’s could be due to all of those things and none of them. What I do know is this. The path I’m pursuing is the right one. Whether you have a faith or not we can all agree that our time on this planet is fleeting. What matters is how we spend that time.

Live before dying

All of have choices with what we do with our hours and our days and our years.  Nowhere is it written that we must spend the best years of our lives doing what other people tell us to do. To be clear I don’t just mean our employers. I mean the expectations of our family and friends and peers. Even more I mean living out the expectations we put on ourselves about how we think we should live our lives. The expectations about milestones that we should have reached and the successes that we should have achieved.

Should? There is no ‘Should’

You don’t need to live your life to deliver against some spurious measure of success. Life is short. Take time to work out what you REALLY want from life. Then, once you know, work out how you’re going to get there. For me life is about wanting family and self-development and serving a community that I am part of. That’s why I want to achieve financial independence.  I want to do those things without the pressures and stresses of worrying about money.

What you want will be different. Whatever you want, don’t wait too long. The past weeks have reminded me is that life is fragile and finite.

When you are in that hospital bed it may be too late.