Memento mori

Remember last friday night, I raided the neighbourhood library and brought back a book which much later on, I felt I must have been confused to have wanted to borrow it? A book about a man and his dying wife?

Well. I ended up reading it today.

A sad sad book.

how much of us there was by Michael Kimball

the book was about a man who's wife has a seizure in the middle of the night, after which, she slowly deteriorates and dies. But even though the story line seemed cliche and predictable, the matter-of-fact delivery, the honesty behind the words struck a chord in me.

Seizure in the middle of the night, and wife going into a coma

"I parked our car next to the emergency room entrance and left the engine on. I thought that that might somehow help to keep my wife alive. The ambulance that had had my wife inside it was parked there too, but there weren't any people inside it anymore. But the hood of the ambulance was still warm and i t made me think that my wife was still alive"

"Her eyes were closed and another part of her face was covered up with an oxygen marks. She didn't look like my wife like that, but I had never seen my wife dying before that night and I didn't know what it was going to look like."

"The machines and wires made her look so tired. I was tired too. I wanted to get into the hospital bed with my wife and go back to sleep with her. I wanted to sleep her sleep with her."

Bringing her home after she got better...

"I started the engine of our car up, but I was afraid to drive us away from the hospital. I was afraid that she might stop breathing again and that we would need other people to help us to keep her alive again. But I was afraid to turn the engine off too. Our car had kept her alive before"

"I would have carried her inside if I could have lifeted her up. But I was too old too , and too tired, and we just wanted to go back to bed and back to sleep together so that we could wake up again and it would be morning at home again. But neither of us could sleep much. We were both too afaid that one of us might not wake up.

"But we also knew that she was going to die sometime..."

"we knew that it didn't matter what or how much we ate. We knew that we couldn't be alive and together for very much longer"

"We wanted it to be daytime all of the time. We didn't need much sleep anymore anyway. I wanted to be awake for tht rest of the time that she was going to be alive.... We cooked and ate and sat and talked and waited and moved and walked and we did it all slowed down. There wasn't anything else that we wanted to do but be awake and alive with each other."

When she started deteriorating

"So we began to practice for how and when she might finish living and dying."

"We considered slitting her wrists, but we thought that that would have hurt her too much. We tried suffocation with a pillow, but I couldn't hold the pillow down."

"So we also practiced for her death with sleep. She would keep her eyes closed and change her breathing and push that hard last breath of air out of her lungs and her nose and her mouth."

"We both took sleeping pills so that we both could sleep. We were doing everything together that we could then."

"I swallowed mine so that I could sleep that sleep with her and not wake up either. We both held onto each other and looked at each other before we closed our eyes and let go of her."

When she dies

"But she was gone too and I hadn't taken enough of her sleeping pills with me or I wasn't close enought to dying to go with her yet."

"The rest of her body heat seemed to be leaving her body too, but I tried to keep her warm. I covered her back up with the blankets and I wrapped myself around her on the couch and held onto her too. She seemed to feel a little warmer again, but that was probably just the body heat from me warming her skin back up. But then she started to feel colder again and heavy in my arms and it made me feel cold too."

How his wife lay in the casket

"We had practiced for all of this in those last days too. We had used the couch for how she wante do be laid out inside her casket... She picked out that red dress that she wanted to wear and I thought of the sweater that she had always liked to wear at home and that she could wear over the dress and that might help to keep her warm."

"They asked me if there were anything that I wanted to put inside the casket with her, but I couldn't think of anything that I wantedher to take with her but me... and the casket wasn't big enough for both of us inside it."

"I laid down in the cemetry grass next to my wife's grave and thought of us lying next to each other in our bed again. I rolled over onto my side and laid my arms out over the dirt and tried to hold onto my wife again."

"I folded her clothes up to my face and smelled them and that made me afraid to wash the smell of her off of them. I folded her clothes up and stacked them up into a pile. I got a plastic bag out and set that little pile of her clothes down inside it. I tied the ties up on the plastic bag tight. I wanted to keep as much of the smell of my wife on those clothes and with me for as long as I could."




Dying is scary... to be old, ill and helpless is scary...

to love someone and lived with someone for so many years and have them die on you first is scary... I try to put myself in the shoes of such a person and it makes me shudder. I think I would want to just lie down and die with my loved one as well...

and I don't think I can overcome a major illness because i lack the tenacity to fight for my life. As it is, I'm only 26 but have begun to find life tiring.

Life seems to be a constant struggle to live up to the expectations of others. Worse if these expectations are work-related. That's why I try so hard to not let work affect me in anyway.

Most people never pause to consider that they have only a finite amount of time to live. They think it frivolous to fritter away economic value producing time mulling over death, dying and the like but to me, turning a blind eye to the fact that each passing second brings us closer to death seems almost naive.