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Reflections of a Young Man Who Witnessed the Slow Deaths of His Loved Ones
The illuminating act of death and what it’s taught me about living.
There I sit, in the chair across from the hospital bed, on the night of my senior high-school homecoming dance. Never would have I thought I’d be in this position. Yet…here I am. Barely able to wrap my adolescent head around what was going on.
The next thing I know, my dad starts convulsing, keels over and vomits about a pint of dark blood into a bucket. This was happening all night…
This is what dying looks like. A man, the strongest I knew, had his hardened shell reduced to that of a living carcass — hoping for death. An escape from the constant pain and suffering cancer had brought him. Unable to talk. Unable to taste. Unable to extract any pleasure from life.
This wasn’t his last night. That would come about a week later, plummeting my mom into a deep depression that eventually declined her health to a point that she too got cancer a year later.
She recovered, but that is merely a shallow view of my traumas to come. In a mere 5 year period after my Dad’s death, my beloved uncle unexpectedly passed away from a medical overdose in a chair at his home — laying their cooking in the summer heat for days…
