On Death

This morning I was woken up by the sound of laughter. This occurrence is highly unusual, since for as long as I’ve been living here with my parents, I’ve had my weekdays fairly regimented with regards to mornings. 10am wake-up followed by a whole routine made up of stretching, coffee, eggs, television and showering. The fact of the matter is that lately I’d been waking up a few minutes ahead of the alarm, presumably my body’s way of telling me just how much it hates the sound of loud, static music. A partial possible contributing factor to my slightly early wake-ups is telemarketers, who seem to make a habit of calling immediately after 9am. To combat this, I decided a week ago to unplug the cable connected to the phone on the table right by the head of my bed.

All of the above has been a quick way to explain why the 4am phone call didn’t wake me, and why I was instead awoken by the laughter of my assembled family.

This morning at 4:25, my grandfather passed away. He was 87. We called him ‘Bop’.

It was quick, we were told. He was having trouble breathing for the first bed check at his nursing home, and then later on towards morning he stopped altogether. They attempted CPR, but the folks at the home were convinced that he was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.

My parents got the phone call as he was being put on the ambulance, and they beat Bop to the ER. I learned all of this after the fact after several minutes of  in-bed listening to the conversation taking place in the kitchen several walls over. After listening a bit more and fully waking up, I ventured out to find my mother and more or less the rest of the Omaha-area clan, sans children.

“Bop’s dead, isn’t he?” I asked my mom. I knew the answer already. She nodded.

Everyone had been together since much earlier in the morning, and everything had slowed to a crawl as we waited for my dad to return from a hospital appointment for which he had been fasting (getting blood tests done or something of the like).

Today has been my first experience with the business and impact of dying, and it’s been altogether morbidly fascinating, emotional, frenetic and sad. However, everything is imbued with a sort of palpable energy. From the moment I stepped into the kitchen I knew everyone had their game faces on. It seemed so clear to me then how everyone knows what their role is whenever there’s a big life event like a death. Everyone has a purpose about them, and everyone is aware of the goal. But it’s in moments like that very first one, waiting for my dad to come back so we could go on to breakfast, that really speak the most.

Despite all being cut from mostly the same cloth–what family doesn’t have its own unique DNA to it, after all?–in these sort of ‘hurry-up-and-wait’ moments, you could really see how different people take things in. Some compensate to the point of overcompensating with humour, some withdraw inside, and others become even more terse and full of business.

I’ve had moments today, some of which are too personal for me to publish so openly, and others where I’ve been moved by everyone else’s emotion. Within the first few minutes of the day I didn’t think I would be all that effected. The Bop we children knew was never terribly open, and especially in these last years–the years where I’ve been a grown man–he has been more or less a shell of who I’m told he once was. That said, I’ve been intensely struck by the finality of death in a way I haven’t been before–oddly not even when a very close friend passed away years ago.

There’s also a surreality to a day that takes you from Village Inn to a now empty nursing home room to a funeral home to a lawyer’s office and then to a box full of photos older than your parents. All of those photos and letters contain memories: memories of love, memories of loss, memories of old friends, memories of children. These were insights into a person I didn’t know, but more than that, they were insights into being a human. They really shook me in an odd, almost (pardon maybe going over the top with language) existential way.

When I woke up I didn’t quite know how I would feel. I think I know now, after today, and I think I’ll know even more leading up to the wake and funeral: I want to gather up everyone I love and stop them from ever leaving. What I was exposed to today was not only the reality of the death of a family member, but the reality that what I might be afraid of more than anything else is losing the people I love from my life for good. How do people face that? How are my dad and his sisters dealing with not having their parents alive? I want to round up everyone I love and just keep them safe and near forever.