No Weddings and a Funeral

an essay

I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. Losing a parent will do this. Losing anyone close will do this, and over a week ago from my writing this, my father died. Though expected, given his condition, the suddenness of it was still somewhat jarring. Surprising. Abrupt. Death, even when we can see it standing there, the hooded specter floating beside us, it somehow continues to surprise us when it visits.

To be clear, my father passed away recently, and I have now returned to the trappings of normal life after traveling back to Philadelphia to see the rest of my family and attend the funeral.

Diagnosed with MS back in the early 1990’s, I watched the steady decline of my father’s health over the decades. He went from capable soldier in the Army to a man who struggled to stand hunched over. Add to it being a chronic smoker, the mental health issues that come with significant disease, and the two attempts at his own life (one he shot part of his face off), it was a substantial miracle he lived to see his 70’s. Even so, as expected as it might be as to his passing, it took me by surprise.

A normal Tuesday turned into the slow countdown of hours to his passing.

I didn’t get to see him or speak to him before so, except in January when I last visited. At least I had that. It was a good visit, a change from the fighting him and I had been engaged in for nearly the last two years.

Some never get reconciliation.

Most wish they had more time.

Would we have spent it wisely, though, if we had? Would we know what to do with that time?

I knew my father was on borrowed time, especially in the last few years. If I hadn’t figured it out on the two attempts on his own life before. How long before he tried again? Would he try again? How long would his health hold up in spite of the attempts? Questions swirled around those facts alone. Yet, even knowing this, nothing in my life changed. I didn’t talk to him more, after all, he and I were fighting.

In other words, knowing didn’t change my habits. How many of us would act the same as I did?

Life goes on, even as death sits there, waiting. Waiting for us to take notice. Unfortunately, it seems we never do, even when it is too late. For some, though, it becomes an obsession. Or a hobby, something to tinker with in the time between other more important things, like laundry, work, the dishes, paying the bills. We forget family. Friends. People. Taking the moments to enjoy the very fact we live — how we persist with death.

Death is not the opposite of life, it is a part of life, for it cannot exist without life. We continually die as time moves forward, with pieces of us sloughing off in favor of growth. I think life isn’t lived in fear of death, but rather walking along with death in a somewhat gracious acceptance.

But this is hard. Even while writing this, my hands reach for dopamine, for distractions, things to disappear into and ignore the world around me. Yes, some of it is necessary, a kind of letting off steam. In large measure, and most often, it is avoidance.

We constantly put off things to later, because there will always be later, right? Until we are confronted truly with our own mortality, it is so very hard to think on it, to know how I might not be here tomorrow to do anything. Life walks with death. Entangled with it. Time is limited even as it feels so damned slow and belaboring.

A week ago I watched my father’s body pushed into the mausoleum where it will rest for however long civilization stands until the building crumbles and becomes part of the rest of the earth. I still don’t know how I feel about that moment, about his passing. All I know is for some reason, I can see death nearby. It was always there. I wonder if I can actually learn from this and start living. Unafraid.

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Jeremy C Kester