Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sundays

A close friend’s father is dying.

Of course, we’re all technically dying from the moment that we’re born, but he is facing the true end of his life, the kind of dying where death is imminent and there is no time left to do things over, or make amends, or see new horizons. The kind of death you can see coming and are positively helpless to stop, not matter how much more time you may want or need. There is no rewriting of history here, no new chance to take risks, or make the kinds of mistakes that one can chalk up as learning experiences. All the mistakes, all the tiny moments of triumph and recognition and love and loss and discovery that make up a life are sealed. A lifetime unalterably complete. And here, now, the indignity of waiting and watching the sorrow of loved ones as they wait with you. It is, I imagine, a time of private reckoning and reflection and, finally, the simple acceptance of what and who you have been in the lifetime you have been granted.

I spoke to this friend on the phone last night. She and her family have been convened in a hospital in Boston, where her father was forced to make a decision about a potentially risky surgery that would prolong the inevitable—although only briefly. Without the surgery, he would have been gone within a day or two. She said they all wanted him to know that they would understand if he didn’t want to go through with the surgery; that he didn’t have to go through yet another procedure and the discomfort of recovery for their sakes. She said, “We wanted him to know that if he needed to go--if he was ready to go—he could go.” These words consumed me after we hung up, as I pondered the ultimate cruelty of mortality. Are any of us really ever ready to go?

I don't know to what degree those of us who are not immediately grappling with our own deaths can truly appreciate the profundity and finality of it all, but watching someone we know and love go through it certainly drives home the point on some level. I suppose all these circumstances can give us is the proverbial PAUSE and then we have no choice but to throw ourselves back into the manic journey toward our own ends, our own finite succession of Sundays.

Sundays are always sodden with melancholy for me and I have learned this summer--being out of work--that it's not just because they are followed by Mondays and a return to work or school. I believe Sundays have something in their chronological DNA that evokes those darkest questions about existence and ends and lives perhaps not lived as grandly as they should be.

My friend’s father decided to go through with the surgery and he emerged in good form—but minus half of one arm, which was amputated. He was not qutie ready, not yet. Fortunately, his remaing days will not be spent wrestling with regrets, or saying all the things he should have said. This man, has the supremely good luck--or maybe it's not really luck at all, but his own design--to have said all those things already, to have loved fully, to have lived a life he is proud of and to be surrounded by people who not only love him dearly, but KNOW him deeply. This, I suppose, is the best possible way to leave this world and embark on whatever it is, or is not, that lies in store for us in the hereafter.

For now, I have that PAUSE, which gives us briefly the ability to examine our lives with something like a bird's-eye clarity. I hope to hold onto it for a just a little bit longer and to turn some corner or tie up some loose end or make some kind of amends that will, someday, make my own passing a little more bearable.