Death.JPG
With rules against small group gatherings becoming a little more lenient I had the privilege of sitting down with my family to celebrate my grandparent’s 67th anniversary. Weird off-beat sexist jokes aside, the night was genuinely fun, it’s always nice to see my grandparents, especially since I haven’t had the chance as of March 13th. Despite their age my grandparents are active, healthy (relatively), and engaged, their minds haven’t started to slip, they still play golf once a week, and curl in the winter. My grandpa fixes cars in his garage, harkening back to his days as one of the best auto mechanics in Edmonton, and my grandma tends to her garden. My grandpa is 90 years old and my grandma is 86.
I’ve thought about death a lot. What I would do if someone around me dies, how much I myself want to die, these theoretical questions haunt me behind my eyes most hours of the day. That being said they have always been just that, theoretical. There’s never been a real sense of weight to those ponderings (aside from considering my own death but I’ve already made a post about that) and they were easy to push from my mind when distractions presented themselves. From my experience yesterday with my grandparents, I realized I’m not the only one who thinks about their own death.
My grandpa brought up the idea he’s not going to live through the year 6 times that night. Each time he brought it up my mom and dad tried to laugh and brush it off but it’s obvious they weren’t sure how to respond. My grandpa knows about his body better than anyone else, and I think he knows things are trending down. He’s going to die soon, and above his faltering heart and myriad of health issues, it’s probably going to happen because he’s ready to die. He’s clearly thinking about it a lot more, he doesn’t think he has a lot of time left, and if he believes with conviction he’s going to die before his next anniversary I think he’ll just start to fade away. I might be wrong about this, and I hope I am, but I truly believe one of the only reasons he’s lived this long is because of how stubborn he is, and how irrefutably vital he is. He wants things, he seeks out opportunities and pursues life with stalwart dogmatism. If he’d given up years ago and just let the world pass him by I think he’d be long dead at this point, probably back somewhere in the early 2000’s when his health issues really started.
I don’t want to always make things about me but this is my blog and I can do whatever I want so fuck off me, but I don’t quite know how this is will affect me. I’m troubled by the idea of a family member dying, I’d have to be a sociopath to be completely unaffected, but I genuinely don’t know if I’m going to be crushed emotionally or if my habitual detachment from people out of fear of getting hurt is going to pay off the years of anguish I’ve suffered. It’s sad that it’s taking this for me to realize I’ve been so disconnected from my family and friends, that in the past 5 years I only saw my grandparents a handful of times and potentially by the end of 2021 I won’t be able to see them ever again. I hold myself at arm’s length from people because I thought I was going to be the one who died, and I didn’t want people to suffer because of that, but that meant that for potentially the last half-decade of my grandpa’s life I was almost completely absent from it. I took away all sorts of memories he could have had with me, and I gave up on the chance to know him and learn from him and love him. In the end, that’s a terribly sad existence, I am fighting to get through this and I hope I can live long decades after this, but those decades of my life are going to be spent with nothing but a ghost of a memory of my own grandfather, who I lived in the same city as for my entire life, who I shared a house with for a month, who would always listen and offer any misguided generational advice.
I gave up the chance to know my family because I was afraid of hurting them and of being hurt by them, and I’m finally realizing that living my life afraid of pain only serves in the long run to limit my own life and prevents me from forging the tight bonds that survive long swaths of time. This is my realization, and I need to take steps to associate with people, and connect with people, and to invest in what’s happening around me.
Because like it or not, I’m going to be outliving people, and I need to make sure when their time comes, I was there for them and can hold their hand through their final moments. I love you grandpa and thanks. I’m going to miss you.