#25 What We Think About When We Think About Death

I’m not dead yet so I have the luxurious curse of thinking about it way more than I’d like to. Fantasizing things I can and cannot do. Everyday upon arising the thought of still being alive is present, then at 6am my iPhone alarm sounds; crickets chirping and the words You Lucky Bastardo remind me that I most certainly am one lucky bastardo. And no matter how physically or spiritually painful things get this day I am still here. I vowed a while back that I would accept what is as it comes, and that eventually it would subside, and if it didn’t I would find a way to continue on as bravely as possible. My vow is mine alone, but I do have a deep understanding, and compassion for those who decide not to whether the storm because life has become something else that they cannot call living. A time like that may come for me but it is not yet here. I think about what I’ll do, if able.

This past week, one evening much like many before, my wife and I were getting ready to watch a DVD. I went to the TV, bent over to pick up the movie, and Mickey Mantle hit me right in the liver with a spiked baseball bat—it might have been Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire for all I know about baseball. I said “OHHH SHIT” and lifted up my shirt and put my hand over the area and looked at my wife. The both of us silent. We don’t need words anymore when these times come. I went to the cabinet and did three milliliters of jungle juice. Usually the taste of that vile swill is the first thing to move my mind from the pain. Not this time. I had to hold it under my tongue and swirl it around my mouth like some masochistic sommelier, and every thirty or so seconds let a bit trickle down my throat.  Sublingual activation.  I sat on the couch and held my wife because I thought my tumor or liver had ruptured and I would internally bleed out.  After a half an hour the pain had gone down to an eight, so another three mils would do the trick.  Adding to that a half a Xanax to stop my head and in about an hour the pain was a manageable four.

I’ve had something like this happen before only not quite this sudden so I had the chance to preemptively medicate and it never got this painful.  None of my oncologists, doctors, etc...knew exactly what it was, although one of them did mention a rupture in the tumor.  If I was bleeding internally, last time, or this time, I would know it.  My stools would be black but the color is still normal.  At Kaiser (that place will be the death of me yet) they misdiagnosed it as gall stones and were set to do some sort of invasive surgery when I checked out “against doctors orders,” signed their forms, and went home.  One usually tries to reason things like this out which is a total waste of time, suffice it to say it happened because I have cancer and fucked up shit happens...En Fin.

So yeah, the death thing.  It sucks because for the last twenty or so years the number eighty-three has always been in my head for the age I was gonna die; but I don’t know, nobody does, that still might happen.  I’ve always looked forward to getting older.  Even from a very young age, like at seven I couldn’t wait to be a teenager, when I got there I wanted to be twenty-one.  Then it subsided for a while and I was having too much fun...but now, well shit there ain’t nothing I want more.

Even if we both live until we’re eighty-three I’ll never have enough time with my wife.  If she were not in my life I’d have a much easier time with all this.  But I just have to picture her in my mind’s eye, or glance at her while I’m driving her to work and I could sob tears big enough to drown in.  And if I do die sooner rather than later I can’t bare the fact of her being alone, but I won’t have to (probably) because I’ll be the dead one, and she’ll have that internal sadness and that is the most saddest thing I can let in my head.

For myself, I’m curious about the afterlife if for no other reason than to find out if this is it or is there more.  I guess everyone wants to believe in some sort of afterplace-reward, and it’s the same ones who want there to be the afterplace-punishment.  I’m sure that if there is a hell that the ones who will be going there don’t believe in it.  I think if people find comfort or enlightenment in things of that nature then it is good. I never have.  I’m fairly certain, like most things that go on in my head, when I’m thinking about situational outcomes that it always turns out differently than I thought it would.  It doesn’t make sense that heaven and hell would be as complex as life, if so then where did RIP come from?

I have to stop now.

Thanks to Raymond Carver for the ideal title.  If you haven’t read “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” you should, it’s a magnificent collection of short stories you won’t soon forget.  In fact I think I’ll read it again, if I have time...