Sometimes I think about dying and all that it implies. I don’t mean the final-breath-and-you’re-dead type of dying, but more like the six-months-left-to-live type of dying. The realization that one is about to be imminently dead is surely terrible, but the longer agony of living under a terminal medical diagnosis scares me more.
However, knowing that you’re dying months in advance gives you the ability to prepare for it: to spend time with family and friends, to make sure that children will be cared for, and to put all of your remaining affairs in order so as not to leave a burden on anyone who survives you. You get to be a sort of pyrotechnic engineer planning for the tidy demolishment of your own life. Find the beams that keep this place standing and set the charges. No one knows the structure of this place better than you, and when the powder goes off you want it to fall straight down in a pile and not leave debris scattered everywhere for others to clean up.
Attack of the imagery.
Anyway, there would be lots to do if I knew I were going to die shortly. One thing I’d be tempted to do is write letters to my children for when they’re adults. That would be my one chance to communicate with them as a peer, as one-sided as the communication may be. A young child certainly wouldn’t see dying dad as a complicated person in a tough situation. I’d want to leave something behind to let them know how much I loved them and to say that the hardest part of an early exit isn’t losing my life but losing the chance to be a part of theirs.
But as I think about it, I recall what Harriet Tubman reportedly told someone on the persuasion-end of her pistol, and instead of perceiving a threat I’m taking it as good advice: “Dead men tell no tales.”
Throughout human history it has been customary to die and then shut up. People don’t communicate after they’ve died: it’s creepy. Whatever I have to say about checking out early, it can’t be anything new to human experience. Just because I feel something deeply doesn’t mean it should be recorded or — worse, but just my style — crafted into a poem. The rhyming kind.
If my children are thoughtful, they’ll understand the broad strokes of how I felt for them — and how much I must have thought about them — by the time they’re adults. If they aren’t thoughtful, what’s the point anyway? I don’t know what makes me think I’m so special and my story so moving that I should clutter up my kid’s lives with the dying ramble of some wanna-be.
Or something like that. Trying some kind of Amazing Kreskin act by attempting to communicate to my kids 10 years after I’m dead could really backfire. It’s probably better to let others tell my tales for me. I’ll leave it to the uncles, aunts, and cousins. (Some of those stories will be more colorful than others.)
Can you tell? Six months gone by. Doctor’s appointment coming up.