By Victor Greto
The idea of death is terribly proud.
It refuses to sneak up on you.
Instead, at frantic intervals, it grabs you by the throat until you become almost feverish with self-pity.
And unlike aging, which slinks like a creeping vine in and around your joints, muscles and the lines of your face until it strangles you, we cannot talk about death.
Because we’re as proud and as lonely as it is.
Watching make-believe death on TV isn’t the same thing, of course; there, it acts as part of a plot, serving the needs of a story.
Seeing or reading about death in the news or in a book seems just as unreal; it’s still part of another narrative.
Even when a loved one dies, we don’t confront the idea of death. Instead, we are exceedingly polite to it.
During those times, many of us lie nearly immobile within loss and pain, murmur religious or fatalistic courtesies, our faces pinched in a common language of grief.
Because of the amounts of pride involved, we believe that truly thinking about death is not about serving the story; it’s about ending it – ending your story – forever.
But it’s not that way.
Death grabbed me by the throat the other morning, while I sat outside reading the paper.
It was for a silly reason. I got a call from a salesperson trying to sell me cemetery plots.
After I politely told her I wasn’t interested, I could no longer hold the paper in front of me.
I couldn’t help but see a lonely plot of ground, and then nothing.
But I started to relax as my mind reflexively darted toward the most important death in my life.
It’s been nearly two years since I stood by the doorjamb of a hospital room in Philadelphia and watched my father gasp his last breath.
For hours before he stopped moving, I had watched his mouth gulp air like a tired swimmer, his cheeks sunken, his skin pale with sweat.
Toward the end, he would stop breathing for several seconds at a time. I hung on his every breath, waiting patiently for the refrain of his breathing. When it returned, I’d push my forehead against the jamb feeling the cold control I had over my own breathing, slow, steady and quiet.
When he finally stopped, suspended, in the middle of taking another breath, it absurdly seemed as though he had been on the verge of saying something. The whole time he was dying I had thought about the story of his life, my very small role in it, and how unfair that it ended at 68.
My dad had been mentally ill most of his life. Every couple of years or so, we had to have him institutionalized; the rest of the time, he was on medication, looking or feeling sometimes “normal,” sometimes lethargic, sometimes buzzing, always unpredictable.
All that medication he had taken over the years had taken its toll on his body, which basically put up its hands in surrender.
As I rested my head on the jamb, I thought about the course of his life, how I had run away from it after I graduated high school, and saw him only intermittently during the last 20 years of his life.
I thought about how little I knew him, how I had feared his illness when I was a kid, how I dreaded caring for him when he was sick, how my teenage years filled with a desire to escape from him.
The sorrow I felt for him centered upon the broken promise of his life. He had been recruited for the major leagues, but his illness cut into his future.
And the pity I felt for myself centered on how, really, I knew nothing about him, and how, if he had never gotten sick, I may have never been born.
Death, the proud brother, the great leveler, had taken from me everything but that.