The Humour in Dying

Your parents are dying in front of your eyes.

Don’t ever forget that. You can live in denial most of your life but when the time comes, the truth will hit you like a sledgehammer to the back of the head.  The dreary corridors, the hospital gowns, and the smell of old age will bring you back to reality.

You expect old age to creep up on your parents in a romantic way where one day they’re working in the garden or cooking a meal then the next they decide it best to pare back a bit on housework.  You start to notice they're walking a little slower and starting to forget things.  (How silly of them! It’s a natural part of ageing, after all.) Then, perhaps, they could use help with cleaning.  No use risking a fall when you can pay someone to help with the trickier tasks.  Decades later, they quietly pass away in their sleep but not after attending one more family dinner the night before.

Sometimes it happens this way, but more often than not their decline takes them into palliative care faster than you can book a plane ticket.  The condition of their health can be plotted over time.  The curve of the graph isn’t linear but instead takes a negative nosedive towards the end.  The results show that once the death ball starts rolling, you can’t begin to keep up with how fast it’s moving down the hill.  One day your parents are offering you advice, the next they can’t keep their eyes open long enough to have a conversation.  They’re losing weight at breakneck speed.  They’re always stoned.  (Hallelujah for pain control.) They repeat every sentence to you.   They stop eating.  They starve themselves.  They still manage to crack a joke though in between apologizing for ruining Christmas.  Oy! The jokes. You have to admit, they're pretty good. You catch yourself laughing. You take solace in the fact they’re in a safe, clean place with good care. That colour jade they’re wearing in a hospital gown is one of your favourites.

Hope is a bastard.

There’s no moretime left, not for them and not for you. Not if you see time as a truth timebomb. Tick, tick, tick.  You had your youth and the world in front ofyou.  Your parents were there to act likea barometer for the possibility your life represented.  Now, your parents are dead or dying, but youshould have known that. 

My father is dying; he has been for a while, we simply didn’t see it. We didn’t know the speed at which he was nearing the end.  Looking back, there were signs. Hindsight is sneaky that way. It’ll tell you, "You should have known better."

We should have known better though because that’s how life moves.  You live and you live and then suddenly you roll quickly towards the end.  There will be no more holidays together.  You got your wish that you’ll never have to have an awkward, guilt-ridden phone conversation with them again about not calling enough.

 “If you can make a joke out of this, LittleSister, you can make a joke out of everything”, my brother said to me one day.

I can’t findthe humour in this one.  My father can,though.