The Way It Was Then - Part #15

July 15, 1983

Easing Death’s Sting

Dying is a lonely business. Someone famous said that once, I don’t recall exactly who it was.

But, unlike any other great event in the life cycle, death is the one that is carried out strictly by the doer … no one can really help, or go along for comfort.

I’m on this topic this week because of my uncle in northwestern Pennsylvania.

He’s really my great-uncle, I guess, since he’s my late grandfather’s brother. There were six of them … my grandfather Louis, his brothers Bill, Millie, Charles, Henry and Frank. Not necessarily in that order. I don’t remember how they ranked in age, because they always seemed very old to me. I think, though, that Charlie was the youngest.

My grandfather was 89 when he died in the early 1970s. The genes are strong on that side of the family too, I suppose. My father and his brothers are all in the upper quarter of the century in age and going strong, so I have some serious longevity on both sides to hope to emulate.

Uncle Charlie is 81. He is very ill and under treatment for a slow-advancing type of cancer that will eventually take his life. Maybe.

It’s the same thing my grandfather had, but he recently died of other types of functional failures before the cancer got to him.

A few months ago, I had a long talk on the phone with my cousin, Charlie’s daughter. She’s also an only child and she’s really into the discovery of how heavy the burden of a parent’s death … the last parent’s death … can be. Her mother’s passing was tough, but she had her dad and together they handled the grieving.

This time, she’s alone.

But this time, it’s a lot different than it was the first time around in another way. My cousin and her father are totally honest with each other about what the future holds.

They have faced the seriousness of his illness; they have cried with each other; they have talked and talked and planned and planned. They know their chances of beating Mr. Death are nonexistent, but they’re willing to try to hold him at bay as long as comfortably possible. They aren’t kidding themselves or each other. And there’s a lot to be said for that.

Years ago, before the marvelous work of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and other researchers into the psychology of dying, many of us played a kind of macabre game with our terminally-ill relatives. It was like a big “Let’s Pretend,” filled with “when you’re better, we’ll...” and “the doctor’s going to give you this terrific drug and you’ll be right as rain in no time.” Heaven knows who we thought we were fooling, least of all the patient, but we skirted around the dreaded subject of death and acted as though it would never really happen to us.

How unfortunate.

Bu playing this “horrible game” as my cousin termed it, we really cheated ourselves and our dying relative out of the last chance to be real people.

 We blew our chances to say the things that never got put into words because “there’ll always be tomorrow.” We had one last tomorrow and we didn’t use it honestly.

What a waste!

I probably am in good company when I say how much I’d give to be able to roll back the clock and spend my mother’s last days reliving old good times and telling her about how great it had been having her as a mother.

Instead, like so many others in that situation, I lied and lied and lied about how much better she’d feel after one more chemotherapy treatment .. on more injection … one more new pill.

Those days she spent in such pain and fear could have been spent in any kind of tranquility she chose preparing for her death. She would probably have wanted that, but she didn’t know she could insist on it.

And none of us was honest enough to offer it to her.

Things are changing some now. There are doctors, like my uncle Charlie’s, who won’t be dishonest with their patients, nor will they allow members of the family to play no-death games.

There are people who firmly insist on the right of choice … on being able to say how much heroic effort they will allow to spare their lives for another day, week or month of suffering.

There are children and loved ones who have the courage to be open and frank about their feelings and their fears.

So we are perhaps coming closer and closer to the time when, although only the dying person can slip away from this world, he or she has had plenty of company on the journey and can leave in peace, knowing that those left behind were prepared and shared in the last days … honestly.