Here We Go

I felt I had learned not to take time for granted, and yet apparently the lesson hadn't stuck with me.

I was going to write a completely different piece, and then death happened.

A family friend died, after being ill with cancer for several years. It wasn’t a surprise; he had been palliative for some time. And yet, despite all of this knowledge of his condition, I was still taken aback by the news. I felt I had learned from previous deaths in my life to not take time for granted and yet apparently the lesson had not stuck with me. People die, and sometimes people who are very sick die slowly and then quickly.

I had thought a lot about this person the week before their death, about how kind he was and what a gentle, knowledgeable slightly mischievous presence he had been even though we were not overly close. I had wanted to send him something to let him know I was thinking of him. But I wrestled with what to send and whether it was even appropriate to send something, and then my week got busy and I put it off. I’ll do it next week. And then next week he was dead. I was transported back to being a child in sixth grade when a past teacher I had loved was terminally ill. My mum suggested I write her a letter telling her how I had appreciated her teaching, I didn’t, and then she died. I hadn’t thought of that incident in a long time and now it feels very fresh. You process loss—especially loss that is only tangentially connected to you—differently as a child but as an adult I feel it as knocking anew an old bruise.

This recently deceased family friend, didn’t need me to send flowers or a plant. He had his loved ones and dear friends around him, and a calm space to let go of life. He will leave a hole in his community and I have been left with a sense of sadness and loss and a reminder that time is fleeting. These moments that conjure up mortality, always seem to jolt me into volleying between a treadmill-like need to do everything all at once and a paralysis—I have so much that is calling out that I freeze unable to start.

I am coming out of that frenetic seizing up now. Enabled, admittedly, by numbing the part of me that feels the need to alertly monitor for death and decline in the daily lives of those I love. Grieving in advance doesn’t lessen the loss. You may think you are mentally prepared to lose someone, but you never grasp the experience until you are looking it in the eye. In Joan Didion’s acerbic ode to grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, she writes: “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” 

When my mother was dying, this recently passed family friend spent hours trying to repair her 1970s VW convertible so we could go for one last ride. The car's floor was rusted and threatened to collapse with a heavy foot on the brake. Something was wrong with the motor. He never did get it running. But all that futile labour meant a great deal.

MDL