or (Christmas, part three)
To say that it was difficult to see my grandfather old, toothless, and frail there on a hospital bed would be inaccurate. At some level, I realize that life is temporary, fleeting, ephemeral. Difficult implies an inability to accept, or that this turn of events was somehow unexpected, which it wasn’t.
Instead, looking at him that was like looking at myself in sixty years. It was coming face-to-face with the reality that human bodies do not last forever. They break and slow down and get wrinkly and fragile and saggy and brittle.
Grandpa peered at me as we entered the room. “Hi there, Jacob.” he rasped.
My name isn’t Jacob. Jacob is my cousin.
Dad corrected him, in that slightly slow, loud voice that people use when addressing the elderly. We sat and talked with him for a while. A little bit of his old sense of humor shone through. He teased me and verbally sparred with the nurses that came to give him a drink of water. He told us a story about something funny that happened when he used to drive a school bus. He didn’t move much. His hands trembled, and his hair was whiter than it was last time I saw him.
As we left the nursing home that day, we passed through a common area where patients mingled. Two elderly people were reclining in a couple of seats in a corner. They stared at the ceiling with vacant expressions, slack mouths hanging open as intravenous fluids were pumping into their arms. It was disturbing. People say all the time “If I ever get that old, just pull the plug.” I’ve heard it over and over. In fact, my mother voiced this sentiment in a hushed voice after we passed those people. I can’t say I disagree. But I wonder how many people really mean this.
When I worked at the hospital, the orthopedic floors were constantly filled with old people, many of whom were not ambulatory. They simply sat in bed all day and rarely moved. There were plenty of people in the nursing home where Grandpa was. Many of them in wheelchairs, unable to get themselves from place to place. Some were in bed. It seems that the vast majority of people want to postpone death as long as they can. Maybe they don’t realize that they’ve grown old. Maybe family pressure to keep pushing off death one more day keeps them going. I don’t know.
I do know, however, that I’m not joking when I say I don’t want to end up like that. I want to go down fighting for something I believe in, like James in the story, or Boromir fighting to defend Merry and Pipin. Or if that’s not an option, I at least want to go out spectacularly.
Think “Area man dies in spectacular meteor incident”. That’d be an awesome headline with which to mark my demise.
I don’t want my body to grow old. I think it would okay to be old, to have gray hair and all sorts of cool stories. But to to be ravaged by forces that no amount of pharmaceutical or technological wizardry can overcome…to exist in a state of living death, technically alive but no longer living, I could do without. My grandfather represents for me a state of physical degradation that I never want to get to – not quite that bad, but inching that way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil. But I want to go before I can no longer move, or at least do so with a bang.
So, how do you want to die?
Exit, stage left.
Sparks