Death on the Northeast Regional
On March 30, I boarded a train from Philadelphia to DC. My seatmate died 68 days later. He knew he was dying then. Something had come up while the doctors were planning to take out his gallbladder. It was stage four pancreatic cancer, he told me.
Having lived in New York City for a time, I greet any talkative stranger with a healthy dose of skepticism. I quickly decided that there was no way to know, and the man needed to talk about it, so I accepted his impending death calmly and started to ask questions. It’s the same cancer that Professor Randy Pausch had, it must be such a thing to have on your mind, I said, to not be able to do anything about it.
That’s how he manages it, he said, because he knew that there was nothing to do. His wife had died instantly of a cerebral hemorrhage. By comparison he had much more time, could resign from work, could travel a bit, though he had been forced to cancel a trip to Iceland.
The man had just been in New York for the Whitney Biennial. I referenced the Emmett Till controversy and we both avoided the politics. I’m not a religious person, so I couldn’t advise him about that.
Back in the day, the man had been involved in building parking lots. I had a group project designing a parking garage back during civil engineering class, so I asked a few questions, mostly about whether a computer calculated the right number of spaces, and so on. He let me in on some juicy parking drama, about a LaGuardia parking garage which caved in before it even opened, how they discovered the inspectors were all paid off by the Mob.
He had traveled to Egypt and Europe, so I encouraged him to talk about those places that I hadn’t been. It was a little uncomfortable to talk about places in Iceland, knowing he might be missing out on them forever.
I was reading a huge book about AIDS origin theories which I wasn’t really ready to talk about. He told me about a friend who had gotten HIV back in the 1990s, how he had taken disability and prepared for death, but survived long enough for better treatment. After discovering his cancer, they had a very frank conversation which only a select few living people can have. Recently his friend had gone off disability and returned to work. But my seatmate knew that he probably never could.
Yesterday I found his business card in my luggage while I was looking for one of my own. Tense, I typed his name into Google for the first time in months and saw the obituary, which surprisingly confirmed what I knew and added more:
He enjoyed travelling, golf, spending time with his family, and regaling his children with terrible/amazing jokes of his own creation.
When we went our separate ways on the train, there was a handshake, and he gave me his card. There was no parting pearl of wisdom about the meaning of life. Just two people waiting to get off the train.
I’ll remember his genuine friendliness and calm when faced the worst.
Have you sat next to a stranger who has accepted death? I walked off the train convinced that I had.
But later, telling the story, I remembered how he first opened up to me, asking to open his bag of potato chips because I have cancer. He needed to talk to a stranger that afternoon, with family hundreds of miles behind in New York City and knowing they would go to the next Biennial without him. So I’m not sure anymore, if any of us can be ready, can accept our common fate. I am glad though, that we shared a moment in life.
