Today, The Missus is out attending a funeral. Her 18-year-old cousin died of a brain aneurysm a month or so ago and so the family are united in grief. While she wasn’t close to that side of her family, because of the age and circumstances of the death, the least she could do was attend. Very sad, but it reminds you that we all walk a very narrow tightrope between here and the great hereafter.
I remember being aware of my own mortality at a very early age. I couldn’t have been any older than 7 or 8 years old. We were on holiday as a family, my father still on the scene, and while in bed, struggling to get off to sleep, that thought struck me that one day I might not be here. For me, it is a real fight or flight reaction and the thought of death is a blind panic. This is one of the reasons I have trouble sleeping. There are few nights that go by that I don’t think of my own demise and that I don’t castigate myself for not being productive enough during the day. The fear makes me feel sick and I just want to wake The Missus for some reassurance, but she is always in a fitful sleep. The fear is primordial. It is bright flash of light, a sudden rush of adrenalin, heart beating in my mouth and the urge to run. However, you can never run away.
Bereavements are tough, funerals are for the living and not the dead. My grandparents died within two years of each other and they were like my mother and father to me. Their deaths were quick, all fluster and dialling of ambulances and then racing to the hospital to see the face of the nurse adopting that “it was inevitable and there was nothing we can do”. When my grandmother died, we never had a phone in the house, so I had to sprint around to the local phone box to dial for help. This leaves you questioning yourself: if you had run faster, would the ambulance arrived quicker and the situation changed? With my grandfather, he was taken ill in bed. He was feverish and very sick. We called the doctor who came out, recommended bed rest and went away again. All the while, my grandfather was slowly bleeding to death through a ruptured artery. He could have been saved. When the doctor re-visited later, I had to be physically restrained. His laid-back, “there was nothing we can do” attitude made me want to tear him to shreds. Luckily, I’ve had nothing to do with doctors ever since. Because he died at home, the police had to come out and the police officer had to make notes. I had the job of identifying the body for the paperwork. My grandfather looked as if he was asleep, but his face bore a grimace, a slight evidence of his dying pain.
Life and death are all part of the same process. You can’t have one without the other. Luckily, my bereavements have been quick. No lingering pain, no visits to the hospital with Lucozade and fruit to watch that person turn into a shadow and slip away. My other grandfather (on my father’s side) went like that – I visited him once and it was awful. He was on ward C5 – the terminal ward. You can imagine my horror when a few years later I was moved onto the same ward myself while being treated for pneumonia at 13 years old. I thought my time was up.
Death should be quick and blissful. If and when I get diagnosed with something untreatable, I am taking my credit card, flying to somewhere warm and sunny and just drinking myself into oblivion waiting for the tide to wash me out to sea. In a way, we should be more humane, like the way we treat our pets, and able to have a little dignity. However, quick deaths don’t give you the option to say goodbye, tell them all those things you wanted them to know, go out on an even keel.
I miss my grandparents an awful lot…
And while we are on the topic, yesterday I noticed that we have a shoal of baby mollies in the fish tank. Never had any baby fry before, so it is quite exciting. Yes, I know it is a complete change of tone, but life and death are all part of the same handshake. I’d take some pictures, but they are camera-shy and they only seem to come out to eat. They are hiding from the bigger fishes.
