Every so often, you go through
spells of pondering mortality, a little more than you should, and it is then
attached to insomnia, which doesn’t need any help.
And regularly, everybody needs a reminder of other people’s
mortality. The human body, I’ve been saying for years, will do what it wants,
which is often not what doctors say, predict, or expect. We all know of medical
miracles still bouncing around, and poster children for proper health gone in a
second.
The body operates on its own terms.
That’s what my brother’s body went
and did. A few years ago, he had a stroke, and was living in an assisted-care
facility back home in Pa. As per usual, he went forward and backward. Couldn’t
really speak, but still could express himself. Things were where they were.
Then my sister called a couple
weeks. Uh oh. A form of cancer had emerged on his bladder, I think. No, he wasn’t
in perfect shape when he had the stroke, but he wasn’t a big drinker by any
stretch, and had gone back and forth as a smoker. There was chemo, and
something else, and initially, it looked like the plan was to go with ‘something
else,’ but all that would do was give him about six months or so.
As it turns out, he had decided against
that. He was still normal, despite the inevitability. My sister said to plan a
Christmas trip, because it looked like he’d still be pretty good and have a few
months left. When the phone rang this afternoon …
Just like that. He had weakened in the past few weeks, but was still fairly normal. Moved into a hospice, was given some medication, and things went drastically downhill, from months to days. My sister left him today – a nurse guessed that it was a matter of days - and got the call not long after she got home.
There are three of us, and he was in
the middle.
The reality – a few acknowledge
reality most of the time, since Hallmark doesn’t make a reality card/meme - is
we weren’t all that close, for a variety of reasons. One was, well, we had
nothing in common, personalities were mostly opposite. Just very different. He
wasn’t about careers or stability and consistency and taking
care of things, or often addressing things. And, again, the reality was that all of
our differences - with me, and whomever in the family - weren’t necessarily hidden. It never got bad or anything, but it kept things from getting better.
Life is different for everybody,
what you do and what happens to you. There was aggravation that he was never
able to sort of figure things out, find some consistency, realize that there
was more he could get out of life, that maybe he deserved more out of life, and deserved better than what life - and a share of people - gave him.
But the one inarguable thing – and few
things along the way were inarguable – was his huge, huge heart. Dogs, then
people. Well, most people. One reason he was found early after the stroke was because he was
supposed to dogsit for a friend. When he didn’t show, they worried, because he
wasn’t going to be late to hang with a hound for a few hours and help out some friends.
He was there for most everybody else, when you kinda wanted him to be
there for himself a little bit. Then again, I’m pretty sure he had much fewer regrets than
one might think, and had settled into the life that was his life, and the
accumulation of so many friends and so much goodwill.
That said, the last time we were
together, I left after a hug and an ‘I love you.’ He got one from my sister
today before she left, and is no doubt getting a lot of that from plenty of
other folks. And thankfully, I'm pretty sure he had an idea of how so many felt about him before his time came, a comfort all the way around.
No comments:
Post a Comment