CHAPTER ONE
JIM'S DEATH.
I had fallen asleep in the chair I had placed in front of his bed. I don't think it had been more than twenty minutes since I last looked at the clock. But after a week of no sleep and crushing stress, my own body and mind was fighting back against my need and desire to remain alert, and try though I did, my eyes betrayed me and shut fast asleep. It was not a peaceful or deep rest. As soon as I dosed off, my legs began cramping and I moaned from an entire body in being in pain.
There is nothing like hurting so badly that your body moans, without any conscious effort. And in those few worn out moments that my eyes were shut, the demons and the horrors of the past week filled my dreams.
But then I woke up as if a blast had gone off under me. I jumped to my feet without first knowing where I was. I looked about my brother's small bedroom for answers, and saw only a tired old man, whose body was half out of the hospital bed I had secured for him just four days previously.
Before I could really orientate myself back to consciousness and my surroundings, I instinctively knew the frail old man in front of me was dead. Forcing myself to be present, the slow realization that I was back in Denver, in my seventy three year old brother's apartment, came over me like a cold shower in winter.
And there in front of me was my dead brother. I cursed myself out loud for not being awake and present when he died. I looked at the clock, and it was only a few minutes. I swear it was only a few minutes. But I fucked up and fell asleep. I fell asleep right when he died, and maybe he needed me, maybe he woke up from his morphine induced sleep and wanted to say goodbye to me, or tell me the secrets to the universe. And I fucked up and fell asleep at the most critical moment of his life.
I slowly approached the head of his bed, and checked his breathing. There was none. I checked his radial and carotid arteries, again there was no pulse. I placed my ear to his chest and there was no heart sounds or respiration. Unbelieving that the inevitable and expected end of his life from cancer, had happened. I don't know how long I stood there, looking down at his lifeless body before I went to the other side and lifted his right arm and leg back onto the bed.
I covered his body with his bed sheet, and then placed a kiss on his head. I mustered all my mental resources, and though knowing his was not religious, I said a prayer for him, and thanked the Gods that he was finally out of pain from the cancer that ate at his insides. I was glad that he was out of pain from the hardships of his long and bitter life. After calling the hospice nurse, I sat beside his bed and held his limp right hand. It was muscular, filled with calluses, cuts and scars. His finger nails were short, broken and stained yellow from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.
He was not the first dead person I'd touched in my life. Matter of fact, since I was a child I have dealt with death up close and personal countless times. Death has been as much a part of my life, as living has been.
And yet, this death, his death was somehow different. Not because of my relationship to the deceased. But because after a lifetime of holding the hands and heads of the dead, I came to finally understand that death is not the same as life. It is clearly not part of life. In those hours waiting for the morticians to remove Jim's body, I came to fully appreciate that death is not the opposite side of the coin of life. But something entirely different.
That death and life are not related.
CHAPTER TWO
THE PAST
Children are exposed to death at a very early age. This use to happen daily, back in the old times when most families still lived on farms and grew their own food. Up until sixty years ago, the world's population was mostly agrarian and the cycle of life, and the necessity of killing one's food happened every day, in sight of children. Chicken's, rabbits, squirrels, fish, goats, sheep, pigs, dear, fowl, and cows have supported human families for thousands of years. Are unending hunger has driven human society to travel the world in search of our next meal, and then again the next one.
The first animal I remember seeing killed was a large black pig in the back of my cousin's pickup truck. One moment the animal was shuffling back and forth between it's legs, then after the loud crack of a pistol, the portly animal fell unceremoniously onto the flatbed and gave out a defeated grunt. In a single heartbeat, it went from an alive pig, to our family's dinner.
After the pig's death, I watched, and participated in the killing of chickens, deer, ducks, geese, and rainbow trout. And being too young to understand life, these animal's death meant nothing to me. It was not until I reached the age of six, that I saw my first dead human.
My aunt Francis was a beautiful, dark haired woman who treated me better than my own mother did. Her death by cancer also meant nothing to me since I had no reference point for what a human's death was, or what a death by cancer was all about.
But on that Saturday morning long ago, lay my dear aunt Francis in a brown box. Not moving, her body's graceful frame, frozen in time, and her once strong hands forced into holding a rosary for her final voyage to the dirt behind the church where the family then sat.
Unable to grasp what death was, or her death by cancer meant to her husband Clark. I cried simply because all of the adults around me were also crying.
I learned that Death was sad event on that overcast Saturday. Death ended relationships and made people's hearts hurt. Death was bad, and must be avoided at all cost.
CHAPTER THREE
THE EPIPHANY
It's only been eight weeks since Jim died. And yet I can't remember what his hospice nurse looked like. She was in his apartment for nearly two hours, and sat directly in front of me in the front room after speaking to him. But I have no memory of her face, or the color of her hair. And yet, out of the crush of burden that overwhelmed me, her brief words have altered my life, and helped to change how I view the world.
Modern medicine failed Jim. For all it's expensive machinery, the sanitized hallways and bleached white lab coats, he died from oversight and neglect. He died because at the one precise moment he needed the full weight of the medical establishment, his independence and naturally caustic nature pushed doctors away from caring about this one little old man. He had been sick and losing weight for nearly five years, yet each time he went into a medical clinic to be checked out, doctors viewed his complaints about his stomach and indigestion as nothing more than an annoyance. So for five years, while the cancer in his gut grew, his complaints about them were dismissed and marginalized by the new Obama Care medical system.
And by the time some young pup intern had the sense to scan him for cancer, it was too far advanced, and too late to try fixing five years of medical complacency. Even after the diagnosis in the Denver General's Emergency Room, doctors were telling him he could live another three to six months. He died eight days after the diagnosis.
Three days before he died, the hospice nurse came in to see him. After speaking with him for some time. She came out of his small poorly lit bedroom, and sat down across from me. Like most nurses in her situation, she was polite but did not mince any words. “Your brother is actively dying” she said simply. His body was shutting down. It had no more need of food, nor water, nor to urinate, or defecate. He simply needed to be kept out of pain from the advancing cancer, and to wind down after a lifetime of challenges and disappointments. His body needed to rest before giving up the spirit that had propelled it for the last seventy three years.
Three days later, I found myself sitting beside the lifeless body of my brother, holding his hand while I waited for the funeral home to remove him. It was the longest four hours of my life.
But there was those words, “Actively dying” They rang like a bell over and over in my mind. And in those quiet moments I held his hand, I could finally make more sense of the many lessons I had learned over the previous seven decades of my own life.
Until that moment, I always thought of life and death as two sides of the same coin. But it became clear to me that life and death or not part of the same thing. That life and being alive is utterly and completely different from what we call death.
Life is creation.
Life is progress.
Life is growth.
Life is movement.
Life is motion.
Life is dynamic.
Life is action.
And what humans have termed “DEATH” has no relationship to LIFE.
I have never been more certain of anything.
As I held Jim's hand, his cold dead hand, I was aware of a gap between us that was so wide, so expansive, that it could never be bridged. What was once Jim was now so foreign to life that it could never again return to the state of being alive.
Now I am not a neophyte to being around the dead. Since I was in my twenties I have been witness to, and an actively participant in many other human's death. Either as my time as a nurse, or while a police officer. Then there was the AIDS epidemic where I held the hands of dozens of my gay male friends who lay dying from that disease. Sadly, I am no stranger to death.
But until Jim's death, I was completely ignorant of what it was. Because of the terminal fear I had developed as a result of my Aunt's funeral, I grew up thinking that death was behind all living things.
But it isn't. There is only life. Life is the only reality. And the moment our bodies stop breathing. There is nothing else. Death means nothing. Life means everything.
CHAPTER FOUR
ACTIVELY DYING
When Jim's nurse used the phrase “Actively dying” I immediately knew that people have to be actively living at all times in their life. That our lives, by their very nature, must be actively lived. Not passively lived, not walked through, or sauntered about in. But life must be lived ACTIVELY. Because if we just sit in front of the TV and watch the flashing lights in front of us, we are ACTIVELY DYING. If we are not actively producing something, we are ACTIVELY DYING. If we do not have forward motion in our lives, if we are not living dynamically in our lives, then we have crossed that great divide that leads to death. If we are online day and night, pontificating, talking about our pronouns and gender, we are actively dying.
Life is motion.
And just like Jim three days before his body finally gave out from the cancer. Many people are in a phase of ACTIVELY DYING.
I know now, that just as soon as any person stops, stands passively, and or allows life to move beyond them, that death is certain and happens in an instant. Life must be lived, and every person must get out into theirs and live it fully. Move it, progress in it. Without that self driven desire to move, and be in motion that life, the marvelous and magical aspect of life will quietly slip away from you.
After the nurse left Jim's apartment. I stood in the doorway of his room and watched as he lay uncomfortably in his bed. The morphine drops the hospice had prescribed were just starting to ease the horrific pain he was in, and after three days of his screaming day and night, he lay in bed quiet. His breathing labored but steady.
Too seldom do we look at our friends or loved ones and seriously think they are actively in a state of living or dying. Perhaps if we did this more often, then we would be in a better position to deal with the reality of our personal and intimate relationships. As I stood there, and putting my brother's status in my life in the state of dying, I began to better appreciate where he fit into my own life.
We never had a good relationship. He was six years older than I, and was already in puberty by the time I reached ten. His friends were never my friends. Nor his experience being on the cusp of adulthood had any relationship to mine on the very early edge of puberty. Our father was a drunk, cheat, and con man that had given up his own dreams of having a normal family when he married our schizophrenic mother. Eventually he walked out on his wife and three children, leaving us destitute in a cheap hotel in Montrose, Colorado. The Mexican woman he left us for, had two teenage daughters, both of whom he eventually had sexual relationships with. Given this background, both Jim and I, grew up with no guide or stewardship as how to be the best people we could be. Circumstance dictated that we both ran head first into our wants, desires, fears and follies and damn the consequence. Jim was always much tougher person than I. Or so I thought.
But as I stood looking at this frail old man, his body destroyed by a hard life and years of unchecked cancer. I could not imagine the man in front of me was the hard drinking, hard living, brutal man I had once known my brother to be. Life changes us, living changes us. Disease, hunger, stress and the brutality of poor decisions wear even the hardest of stone down to nothingness.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIFE FOR THE SAKE OF IT.
For the last two months since his death, I have repeatedly asked myself if the simple act of just getting up and going about one's business is actively living. I worked on Wall Street for many years and know the wear and tear upon a person that daily routine of going to work for eight hours has upon a person. By Thursday afternoon, the average person is mostly spent. Beaten down by the half mile walk to the train. The one hundred and sixty steps down to the platform, and then the 35 minute ride while standing in a cramped, stinking PATH train. This then followed by another two hundred steps up to thirty fourth Avenue and another six block walk in 90 degree weather to an office. And if you had any reserve left by the time you reached your desk, you must manage to force yourself through the rigors of five hours of meetings, and eating an over priced, under nourished lunch in under fifteen minutes. Repeat, and then try going to sleep without having a dozen work conversations running over and over in your mind.
Is this active enough, I ask? And after Jim's death. After spending the last seven days of his life with him, I have to conclude that “No it is not”
Activity alone is not a parameter for being involved with living. Because even in the most demanding job and life, filled with meetings, interactions and involvement, people, myself included in this... Become numb to life. The daily grind of living has the effect of people putting up their emotional guard and simply walking through the events and interactions with people, and we become blind and senseless to our own feelings, other people and life in general.
To be actively living, you must be present in your own life. Jim in the last days of his life, was actively dying and was not present in his life, nor in the process of dying. He was no longer involved in his own life, partially due to the drugs, and partially due to advanced stage of cancer. But much of it was he had checked out of his own life the moment doctors told him he was going to die shortly. I can only assume, but after a lifetime of disappointments and dozens of failed businesses and love affairs, that once he was told he would die, he had no more interest in fighting another day, or another moment to survive. He left whatever issues and struggles there were that week, for me to contend with.
To be actively living, I believe a person must be involved in the planning of life, involved in the process of achieving, and present journey with all that life means. I have stated this many different ways in several of my other books. When I made the decision to stop doing drugs on May 14th, 1990, I did so with the understanding that being stoned on drugs and drink numbed me to the experience of being alive. Being a crack head like I was, kept me from being present to life. And on that day, it was made perfectly clear to me that life was way too short to be oblivious to even one second of it.
And here I am, finally figuring out the rest of that puzzle. That YES, you have to be sober and alert in life. But more so, you have to be involved in every possible moment.
It's as if we are all master chefs who are making a complicated dish for the Queen. We have to keep checking, tasting and measuring the flavor and texture as the meal cooks and the fluids evaporate and the meal and individual flavors began coming to the surface and metamorphoses into something magical. We can not be negligent for one moment in this process, in fear of burning or destroying the
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