06.20.09
Passing
I’ve spent the weekend thinking of friend who lost his mother to cancer this week and who is sitting at the funeral right now next to his partner and the rest of the family. His partner lost his mother several years ago to cancer also. When I think back now, I now have a spate of six years, really since my own mother died, where a friend has lost a parent each year and while I initially thought “how strange” to myself, now that I’ve really looked at it, I guess maybe it isn’t so much strange as just part of our lives as we’re getting older.
I don’t know if there is a right or expected time to start losing our parents. I would have said in my early to mid thirties that I would have expected people to start losing their grandparents. I lost two and have my very last grandmother still around and kicking which I know I’ve been lucky to be able to say and appreciate each conversation and time I spend with her. But now that I’m on the countdown to 40, I know I have to be more expecting of eventual life events. I was even telling Jeff the other day that on my run I was thinking about the next ten years of our lives together and how, statistically speaking, this will be the decade when things start breaking and falling off of us. I could realistically expect one of us to have a heart scare if not an outright cath and stent for a blocked artery. I think we’re now in the window for certain kinds of leukemia and more uncommon organ-based cancers. On the plus side, I feel more and more confident that I’m finally out of the woods for testicular cancer which I was at a higher risk for and had been expecting anytime after I turned 25, since I’m a black cloud kinda guy.
As I’m big on clich´s, “I guess if it’s not one thing it’s another” suits me just as well as anything else. Pithy, for sure, but true, none the less.
And yet my thought still go back to Jay and the passing of his Mom. This one a steep and quick decline from pancreatic cancer that took her so quick I’m still not sure anyone can make sense of it. Jeff’s dad was that way too…three weeks from diagnosis of lung cancer to being gone. In some ways, I can’t even fathom what it takes for someone to gird themselves to that kind of decline because unlike a sudden accident, I think people probably tell themselves and hold out for improvement or at least more time. I thought it was amazing to watch Jeff with his dad the day after the diagnosis go in and settle up the account, making sure his Dad knew exactly where he stood in Jeff’s life. Jeff had a clear idea that there was no time to wait, even with a long-term diagnosis and that days are lived as days. I was luckier, some would say, I had six months with my Mom before she passed away and five and a half of them were really good months and so, in my typical fashion, I stammered and hemmed-n-hawed over the months, dribbling out the same truing of accounts with her, never denying we had limited time but in some kind of denial that there would always be a tomorrow to say and do more.
And so we’re here today. More sorrow and loss and now, rather than an aberration, it seems like maybe more of a right of passage for those of us getting a little bit older and moving from our young adult hood into whatever this next phase is (Early middle age? Certainly not!).
June 25, 2009 at 9:44 pm
It is not just an outgrowth of late youth or early middle age. Both you and Jeff have each lost a parent prematurely and the surprising thing is how much we continue to need them well into our old age. I still catch myself thinking, “I have to ask Dad about this or that.” It fades but never really disappears. That is the lifelong connection we have with those nearest and dearest to us.