The End Is Near(er)

   The call came at 11:30 at night...my wife's mother was heading to the emergency room at the hospital.  The news was not good, and despite a battery of both tests and treatments, her 88-year old body was suddenly like an old carburetor struggling to run properly.  Things were suddenly and unexpectedly going wrong, from balance to memory to frailness.  In just a matter of days, she was being faced with trying to piece together the very real possibility that her life might be nearing its end.  We cancelled everything, my wife sitting by her mum's side in the hospital, watching another nurse or technician give a test or draw more blood or slap a mask on her mum's face or tell her to move this way or that.  After the third day my wife had to ask, was this all really necessary?  And the end result of all that testing?  Her mum was sent home to face palliative care, a service designed to help reduce her anxiety or pain but not the unseen tornado of thoughts drifting over and over in her mind.  There was little that they could do and she was handed off from Medicare to hospice, an exceptional service of comfort but one that requires just one thing...you have been told by a doctor that you have six months or less to live.  The possibility of her life ending soon now had a clock counting down and you could hear it ticking.  My wife became a mirror of all that, returning in shock as the predicted outcome of her mother's remaining life shrunk from years to months.  How do you process that your mother will soon be gone, she asked me?  I had no answer, only saying that those of us still lucky enough to have a mother alive will each have to face that question in his or her own way.  My mother is 92 so realistically, how much longer before I too have that swirl of emotions as I'm told of an expected amount of time left for her life?  We called our pet sitter, called my brother, called a few friends; priorities had changed even if it seemed life had moved on without blinking...people went to work, children went to school, grocery stores were busy.  It was that quantum physics feeling of somehow being transported via a portal to a different universe; it was all becoming so unreal.  Always down the road, my wife would say; yes our parents are old and will get frail and pass away, but that would all happen somewhere down the road...not now.  Kick the can down the road, again and again.

   Fast forward a few more weeks and it's now my mother's turn.  A routine and scheduled visit to her doctor (following up on a foot infection that she had developed and had mostly overcome) finds her on her third day of not eating.  She's lucid, but not that interested in food anymore.   Her doctor matter-of-factly tells me that she "might just be tiring out," and says that he's going to put her on hospice.  And that, basically, is that.  Now she also has a timer and a countdown and the button has been pushed, both of us dreading that moment when the time is up and the alarm sounds.  Two moms, two timers ticking.

    We recognize that we are certainly not alone in this receiving of unwanted and unexpected news.  Entire industries are ready for "the end."  They're places that we drive by almost daily, the hospitals and the rest homes, the cemeteries and the mortuaries, the homes with closed curtains and tired caregivers inside.  One lecture series I've listened to on the subject said that if we were standing in line at club and someone yelled "we're all going to die," well, it would be true.  Maybe we wouldn't be dying right that instant but the truth is that from about age six, as humans we are able to comprehend that life for us is finite (some species such as microscopic worms, are found to face no such end and in theory, can live indefinitely).  Life and its accompanying finality circles around us constantly but there are only a few moments in our lives that we ever listen.  A near-accident or a deep sickness...or accepting that we are old.  For my wife's mum, the knock on the door had become louder and louder to the point that it now could not be ignored.  Eventually she would have to open it, as all of us will,  and face who or what is there and what (if anything) might be next; most of us (thankfully) can't see that door yet, or what's beyond it; but eventually that knock will come for all of us...not now, of course, but somewhere down the road.

   One has to wonder that given a certain time frame, what would enter one's head.  As my brother's friend pointed out, once that number is given by a doctor that seed becomes planted.  How long do I have?  One year, five years, five months?  Once there's a number there, the clock begins even if you defy the odds, at least in one's head.  One classic tale of Confucius is that when a disciple asked the master about death the reply was "how can you understand death when you know nothing about life?"  Confucius would be just one Chinese belief but his message was to experience life and to live it to its fullest, to die "empty" having used all that you have been given.  Sounds terrific, even if it is difficult to put into practice...there's work and children and financial obligations and all the other things that can serve to tie us down.  But in between all of those, one has to ask where one's life goes...to rest, to a trail, to a child's soccer game, to an area never visited?

   It's a changing world, and just as with material things, when that world gets personal --or as news people are so fond of saying, "up front and personal"-- so much else simply drops away.  Your mind is in a bit of an accelerated mode as you try to sort and compress everything from what else might possibly be done to how do you process those blunt words of finality.  Photographs and memories, as the songwriter Jim Croce wrote, "somehow it just can't be true it's all I've left of you."  The hospice nurse left me with 10-14 days to get it together...the hospice doctor said seven.  In all the silence, as that world dimmed away,  I could suddenly hear only that loud ticking.