Tag: death

Glimpse of Mortality

I’ve been close to death before, but it was quick. A move of desperation, grim faced and full of rage, daring the Reaper to take me. Then I rushed to my senses and swerved to safety.

But this past winter, I was made to stare into my own mortality and really contemplate the end. I was made to live with the knowledge that each labored breath could be my last, that if things went sideways or southwards, I’d be headed for my end.

I was one of millions who contacted the Covid-19 virus and it sent me to the hospital. I had survived a year of mask wearing and lockdowns and restrictions, but at the turn of the calendar, I got sick. One dark night, I tried to go to sleep. I have sleep apnea, and wear a cpap mask to keep my airways open. But even with that, I couldn’t fall asleep. Even with that positive air pressure being forced into my lungs, I couldn’t grab a breath. Into the night, sitting up in a recliner, I labored to breathe.

Eventually I texted my wife, unable to get enough breath to shout up to the bedroom on the second floor. Eventually I woke her up, and told her I needed to go to the Emergency Room. All the way to the hospital, I felt fear take hold. Unlike my previous suicide attempts, when I desperately wanted to die, this time I desperately wanted to live.

All year, I had seen the death toll rise world wide. I had read and heard stories of healthy people succumbing to this virus that sometimes seemed innocuous, and sometimes seemed vicious. I began to be terrified that I would never leave the hospital alive.

We arrived, and I sat alone in the waiting room, struggling to breathe. My wife wasn’t allowed to sit with me, to reduce the risk of infection to those healthy of the virus. Fear settled in to stay. Eventually I was taken back for a few questions and tests. I was given oxygen and a wheel chair. I could breathe easier, but inside I was still gasping, grasping for a hold on the moment.

After forever, I was taken to a room on the ER floor. An oxygen feed kept me breathing. After a bad night during which I didn’t sleep a wink and was reduced to deep indignity (no nurse was available to unhook my IV and in desperate need of relief, I shit my pants and pissed all over the room floor and still waited 15 minutes for help and a janitor to clean up my mess). But that was nothing: I was being admitted with a severe case of covid.

What followed was a week in which I was sequestered by myself in a hospital room on the fifth floor. A friend visited, but we talked on the phone and saw each other from 30 feet away through a window in the wall. He wasn’t allowed closer, being a nurse himself caring for covid patients. I couldn’t see my wife, and could only call her. I still can’t imagine what that week was like for her, alone and herself afflicted with a milder case of the virus.

I spent my long hours staring out of the window, watching the weather and thinking. For the first time in my life, I really contemplated the fact that I could die. The doctors, not seeing improvement, started me on steroids and a powerful drug (I don’t remember what it was called) to try to fight the infection. I was so scared, though I put on a brave voice for my family when they called. I kept thinking that healthier people than me had lost their battles with covid.

Eventually, after a few days, I did start to get better. In the end, I spent a full week in the hospital. I was discharged on oxygen and with a bucketful of meds, healthy enough to finish my recovery at home. I was finally reunited with my wife. It felt so good, though I was weak and still finding it hard to breathe.

It has taken me much longer to recover psychologically. Thanks to my doctors and the medication, my body got stronger and I could surrender the oxygen and I could walk up the stairs without getting winded. But the fear has only recently loosed its grip on my heart and mind. With my covid vaccine, I now am starting to feel that I might live a while yet.

No longer will I take life for granted. Never again will I tempt the Reaper. I know now that my life is precious. It could flee from me at any moment, after all, I could get into a car accident tomorrow, or something else could happen. The permanence of life remains an illusion.

But I deeply appreciate my life now in a way I didn’t before. I am gentler with myself, more accepting of my flaws and foibles. They aren’t as important or devastating anymore. I have been given a perspective I lacked before. I was flat where now I feel dimension. And all it took was a real look into the specter of nothingness. I wouldn’t wish covid on anyone. I wish I never had that experience, but I cannot deny the change it made to my life. It has taken me months to publicly talk about it in this way. But I find it important to acknowledge what happened.

I feel my life has begun in a new way since January. I feel I am living a renewed existence. And it feels good. Life still hurts and is confusing and messy and frustrating, but at least for now, I am breathing. And that’s not nothing.

One of those days when I was just lying in my hospital bed, I wrote a little poem. It isn’t anything profound, but I find it beautiful, and it is these little moments of beauty that I live for now. Life isn’t guaranteed, never was really, so I am about catching the little moments of beauty while they last.

The city,
wreathed in steam,
dominates only a small portion
of my windowed horizon.
An industrial plateau stretches ‘round.
What I took for a flock of birds,
frozen in the sky:
dirt on the windowpane.
Low winter clouds buttress the sky above,
grey and bleak and lit from far away.

- view from A5110

The Final Rest

Recently, my grandmother died and with her I lost the final of my closest grandparents.

When my grandparents came to visit, usually around Christmas time, my family and I would enjoy the time with them and wish it would last forever. But, as always happened, the time came to an end. They would pull their car out of the driveway, and head down the street. My brother Nate and I had this tradition: we would run on the sidewalk alongside the car as fast and as long as we could until we could no longer stay abreast. Then we would stop and pant and have a rest and wave goodbye.

Some of my grandmother’s last words were “maybe I just need to rest”.

I doubt she knew she was destined to die just hours later. But she longed for rest.

I cannot stand here and tell you with surety what happens after death, but I can tell you for certain what my grandmother believed. She believed in a swift flight to a celestial city and a reuniting with her Savior, Jesus, and the love of her life, my grandfather.

I am no theologian nor scientist; I don’t know what happens when breathing ceases. But I can tell you about a life. My grandmother’s life was a long journey full of happiness and joy. But the thing about long journeys is they often tire the soul and come with setbacks and sorrow. And you long for rest at the end.

My grandmother lived surrounded by many friends, family, and loved ones. She enjoyed nothing more than serving others and loving many. Many can attest to my grandmother’s caring way. But it wasn’t always easy, especially of late as injury and illness started to steal her vitality. And more and more the loneliness of lost love weighed on her heart. And she longed for rest.

I’d like to think that somewhere, my grandparents are reunited, once again young lovers full of life.

But I simply don’t know. What I do believe, what I hope, is that after death came a rest. A rest from this world, perhaps in another.

Did heaven await my grandmother in the form of God’s arms and grandpa’s embrace?

I only know this: my grandmother is finally at rest, from all sorrow and weariness and pain. And that is a comfort to me.

On Friday last week, we laid my grandmother to rest in the Ohio ground. I wrote the following to memorialize that rest.

 

Into the ground, into dust.
We weep the sorrow of failed fires
and ashes to ashes.

Like the old prayer rhyme
Now I lay her down
To sleep the forever sleep

I pray what lord on high
Her soul to snatch
And in bulwarks keep

Here on earth her shell
Is buried, betwixt her beloveds
‘Neath earth’n deep

Into the ground, into dust.
We weep the sorrow of failed fires
and ashes to ashes.

I will miss my grandparents, now that they no longer walk this earth, but at least they are both together now and are at rest.

Celebrating Life

On April 3rd, The Fast and the Furious 7 will hit theaters, and with it the sharp reminder of franchise star Paul Walker’s death last year. He died doing what he loved: driving.

Today, March 12th, is my birthday.

There was a time when I wasn’t sure I was going to see Furious 7. I wasn’t even sure that I was going to see today. That time was not that long ago, and I haven’t told anyone what I am about to say now, except for my therapist who helped me live through it.

Several months ago now, but still recent enough to haunt me, I was sure I was going to die, and not in any macabre way, I was sure I was going to kill myself.  I literally saw no future beyond January 1st. My depression had started to overwhelm me, and I was drowning in it. Days were literally as well as figuratively dark and cold. I looked up and saw no sky; I looked out and saw no horizon. I was alone and I was suffocating on nothing.

I had one thing before me: my sister’s wedding. I had nothing after that. I was determined that I was going to attend the wedding and have one last good time and then end it all. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” as the saying goes. I knew I was going to see my immediate family at the wedding, and so I could say one last goodbye and be done with life on this terrestrial sphere.

The wedding was as wonderful as could be. It was warm, sunny, and the happiest of occasions, but a darkness and a chill had settled in my core. I knew my days were shorter rather than longer. Once the wedding week was done so was I. I used up any positive energy I had left smiling for pictures and keeping it together so as to not ruin my sister’s big moments.

I returned from the wedding and stared down a calendar of days until the 1st of January. I manage to stave off hospitalization because I told my therapist I wouldn’t do anything to myself until at least then, but I knew that day was coming.

I welcomed it. I cherished the thought of the final release. When one has nothing to live for, one tends to think of the end as blissful nothingness. I hoped, and still do, that there is no afterlife. One life is enough pain and struggle and weariness without another life to endure. When I do die, I want that to be it, for it all to be over. I don’t want to live again, or to  live eternally. As the philosopher Yoda said on his death bed, “Forever sleep: earned it, I have.” I want to earn my forever sleep.

More than anything, that dark December of last year, I wanted my forever sleep. My weariness screamed for it.

And then, just when it was almost over, just when I had the bottle of pills in my hand, when I grew tired of setting it back down, unopened, just then I found a glimmer of something else.

Hope.

Hope for a future, for a better tomorrow shone through my deepest depression. I decided to make a radical decision for life instead of against it. I decided that January 1st was not going to be my last day on earth. I can’t tell you exactly where that minuscule drop of hope came from, or why I decided to delay death, but I did. In my mind, I simply decided to see exactly how long I could stretch life. At the time, I didn’t know how long that would be. At least another day. At most, a week. Here I am, three and a bit months later, still going.

Along the way, I decided to move to Texas, to physically grasp a brighter, warmer, sunnier future. I decided to leave all I could behind me, and strike out for something new. I am making my run for the border, eating and drinking and being merry for tomorrow I live.

In just a few weeks, I will sit down in a theater and watch the Fast and the Furious 7, and silently, simultaneously, mourn Paul Walker’s death and honor his life, and I will do what I have been doing since January 1st: I will live fast and furiously, one quarter mile at a time, until I have earned a natural end and a forever sleep.

No more do I contemplate my own death, at my hand or by Nature’s. It will come when it comes. For now, there is living to do. And never more have I been aware of that than today, on my birthday, as I turn 28 and start a brand new year. I honestly did not think I would see today, but here the sun sets and this day is almost over. Another one is coming.