Hello Granny! I see that I am on your blog roll, thank you!
Oh Lord. I hadn't meant to stop and read. Too busy. But I did. And here I go, welling up.
This is the one that haunts me - increasingly, now I've gone over fifty and I start to understand what age means.
Unless you're like my Dad, who was lucky enough to just keel over one evening, there must come a time for many many of us when we find ourselves lying in a bed somewhere, perhaps in pain, knowing that this is it; there's nothing left to look forward to; and you've come to a place where the past is all that remains.
I thought about it when the Pope died, and not long before when Arafat died. Both slow deaths, and they both must have had time to think - but what? Were they the same thoughts that went through my grandfather's mind after we left him in the home that evening, all of us knowing that this was going to be the last time and yet none of us admitting it? The same thoughts your father had?
When we come to it, will we feel relieved or angry? Or just plain tired and wanting to rest?
Right now I'm thinking 'never give up'. But there's a time for everyone when that's the only option.
Sorry. Too many questions for a comment. You touched a nerve, I'm afraid...
I have no answers to any of this. Dylan Thomas might have said 'don't go gentle into that good night' - in one sense he was right - we should 'rage rage against the dying of the light' - in another quite wrong. But then he wasn't talking about old age I think. And he wasn't ready to acknowledge that we all have to die in the end and we have to accept that. Gently. Just read 'Sunday night at the swimming pool in Kilgali' - terrifying story - was very struck by comment from Rwanda taxi-driver, with AIDS, but likely to be slaughtered by the Hutu before that got him - the very next day in fact - to the effect that westerners make a big fuss about death, you just know it'll get you sometime and so what? - or something like that. ( The book's back in London so I can't be more precise.) The problem is partly of course that our old people drag on so, and that medical science keeps them that way; cruelly, I think. The more so now because bloody LIFE rules - plug in the anti-biotic, don't up the morphine, they might get addicted to it- or it might kill them too soon. Yuk. I think that's what frightens me much more than death itself - especially after seeing my dad dragged back to life endlessly, uselessly from his bouts of pneumonia.
So what DO we think about while dying? - nothing wrong with the past - but it was good my dad at the same time loved the future, via his great-grandchildren. We can't ask them. Maybe he did see my long-dead Mum at the point of death if not after it as he hoped. I hope that for him at least. My sister was in a coma for a day, but I had strong feeling that more of her was there, conscious, aware of us, remembering, than we knew. Those are the only kind of clues we have to go on anyway.
No help, I guess Mark. More alongside you than in response. The mystery remains.
It would have to, wouldn't it? I rather like the idea of your dad embracing the future at the point of death. There is SO much we are never ever going to know. But we lay out under the stars here last night, drinking wine and watching airplanes fly by and I had briefly set aside my work and the world seemed a comforting place. Maybe the next one is comforting too...
Deathdays are as strange as birthdays, if not stranger. Ambivalence is often a major part of both. Your post expresses this beautifully. And I like the first person writing very much. Thank you.
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