Posts Tagged → death and dying

They always had chicken tenders and they weren’t great but they were hot and ready when a lot of other things weren’t

When someone you love is slowly dying, one thing no one really tells you about is just how much goddamned sitting around you have to do. Something like 75% of the whole shebang is time spent just sitting in a chair in a little room with the people you care about waiting for something bad to happen.

The other 25% of it is, based on my experience, forgetting to eat and then running down to the hostpital cafeteria before it closes to see if there are any chicken tenders left.

Anywho, there were a bunch of times in that room when I’d look up as if suddenly coming awake and see that, of the six or seven people squeezed in to be at Dad’s bedside, all of us were looking at our phones. Everyone except Dad, of course, who was busy with other matters.

It was surreal and … kind of horrifying. A definite, “My God, what have we become?” sort of moment.

I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or blaming anybody or any of that jazz. It’s just that I’m a teacher and I spend a lot of my day fighting to keep people off their phones so they can get some work done. These days, I have a sort-of conditioned response to seeing a room full of lowered heads and a bunch of tiny, glowing rectangles. I see how f*ing insidious our cellular masters are. I get angry about it.

In that room with Dad, I’d purposefully put my phone away and just sit. Not the whole time, but every now and again, when the urge hit me. It wasn’t meditation, but something akin to it, when I’d pick a sound or something and try to focus on it and just … exist in that room. Sometimes I counted seconds, sometimes I counted breaths, sometimes I counted the number of times the IV Dad was hooked up to made its little pumping noise. (It had to pump 4,000 times to go through one bag of IV fluid.)

Was it worth doing? Trying to “be in the moment” rather than scrolling? F*ck, I don’t know. It was hard not to be nihilistic or fatalistic when Dad was dying right there, to say to myself, “What is the point of anything?” and then mindlessly swipe through TikTok or Reddit. Take comfort where you can find it, right?

There have definitely been times when I’ve thought that the sort of distractions phones can give was a comfort. A blessing, even.

But we all know better.

The thing to remember is that all you can really do is anything at all

I’ve had these moments for the past several days where my body will suddenly stop whatever it’s doing, as if put on pause, and an incredible and inescapable sense of ennui will wash over me like a layer of quick-dry cement. I’ll be just walking down the hallway with a cup of tea on my way to 2nd block when, WHAM, it hits. In this moment of intense hopelessness, my thoughts will turn incredibly dark and I’ll feel this sense of, “What’s the use of any of this? Why am I — why are WE doing any of this nonsense?”

It lasts for a fraction of a second; anybody watching would probably think I’d just had to do a sneaky, stutter-step fart or something, and then I’m back to normal, just walking along like everything is fine.

I don’t know why, but I feel a little guilty about it. Is that dumb? I think it is. It’s a stupid thing to feel guilty about and I’m aware of that, but I imagine what Dad is going through and can’t help but think he’s the one who is in the thick of it. I should focus on how to be helpful rather than dwelling on how bad I feel.

I talked to my brother about it quite a bit yesterday and I said something to the effect of, “I’m really starting to think that the only thing I can do — the only thing any of us can do — is to find happiness in little moments. Stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future, take a cue from all of those eastern philosophers and just live in the now.”

Trite? Maybe. Cliche? One-hundred percent. But it’s one way that I’m able to find some sort of comfort. Plus, in a new-agey, hippy sort of way, I really do think that Taoism has the right idea with entering a “flow state.” Spending too much time dwelling on the future is missing the point entirely.

Anywho, I was telling my brother this in the context of sharing this perhaps-too-on-the-nose clip from the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood:

(The part I’m talking about is at the end. “..to die is to be human, and anything human is mentionable. Anything mentionable is manageable. Anything mentionable is manageable.”)

I’ve also (surprise!) been thinking a lot about how uncomfortable most of us feel talking about death. I’ve been able to talk frankly about it with a few people in my life — Sarah, my brothers, a few friends — and it really does seem helpful.

Just keep moving, keep busy, keep talking. One foot in front of the other.