Death is not an invitation it’s a demand!

Death and dying is the one thing that enters every home usually when least expected. Least expected because no one really wants to think about it, prepare for it, or deal with it. It’s probably one of the least talked about topics in 99% of households. That’s just a guess. The odd thing is when it comes to "birth", everyone wants to talk about it.

There are of course situations where people have severe health problems or someone dear to them has the problem, then they have to focus on the topic whether they want to or not.

We all respond in different ways. Some folks are religious and some spiritual; most of us are not ready. There’s a multitude of ways to prepare for our respective “end.” Many of them are traditional and more often than not, some are not so traditional. Sooner or later we must all face the facts, if we get that chance and don’t meet our ends in a sudden accident or something along that line. Then we may not have the opportunity to make decisions about our end.

Personally, I’ve never had to, “deal with death” per se. I’ve had friends and relatives die of course but my life has been so fractionalized that only a half dozen of those deaths touched me deeply. Some of us don’t get a lot of practice dealing with death, while others do. We all react differently.

Some folk’s weep and some appear to be stone faced. Those who weep think those that don’t are heartless, and those that are stone faced are waiting for time alone so they may grieve and say their good-byes privately.

We are strange creatures us human beings. Some people prepare large and garish funerals and others prefer to leave as quietly as possible. Our differences make us interesting. Those who have left me did so from a distance. By the time I knew of their passing someone else had things well in hand and I had no personal dealings with specifics until recently.

My partner Paul was in great spirits one Monday and full of life as he usually is, when I left for a couple of hours to check on my business, only six kilometers away from our home. The year previous he’d had three mini strokes and a bevy of other health problems. We’d more or less solved those throughout the year. Being a man who had no previous experience with health problems all of this activity came as quite a bewildering experience for him. But I was fortunate to be able to guide him through it.

This time I was pretty useless. I arrived home and found him unconscious, stiff, and barely breathing. I immediately called 911, our emergency services number and since they have an office about one km away the paramedic troops arrived pretty fast. When they took over, I went into shock but tried hard to keep my mind focused on what to do next that would be helpful. He’d been having several serious operations the past year but the man is wiry with Viking blood in his DNA. How can he be unconscious? Nothing made sense to me.

He’s completely unprepared. He has a basic will, we both do; but he’s made no plans for his demise. They took him to our village hospital, it’s really not much more than a very good clinic since no operations take place there but they do have well qualified staff and can make several tests. If someone is near death’s door, they can air lift to larger hospitals in metro; a two-hour drive even for an ambulance.

They checked him out and decided against moving him into metro for a variety of reasons. One was because CPR can be quite violent on elderly people. Many on-lookers don’t fully understand that on someone thirty or forty years of age it won’t seem as violent but on someone much older too many other things can go wrong. In any event, after two teams of medical staff checked him over, I was told he’d pass away overnight and that if there were people I wanted to call I should do it now. If I wasn’t fully in shock before, I was now.

His relatives are 6,000 miles away and mine are 2,000 miles away. Between us we might have a couple of dozen people we could call really good friends. But because of the seriousness of the situation, you wonder who to call? Your mind goes blank. You sit beside his bed holding his cold stiff hand while he continues to breath a shallow breath and wonder what you could have done better or differently.

You talk to him hoping he can hear you but you don’t know if he can or not. You think of all the things you’ve done together and the plans you made together yet to be accomplished. You weep quietly.

The nurses keep checking on his condition and record readings for the doctors. Everyone whispers even though your partner is unconscious and since you found him his condition is little changed. You sit there for hours wondering how to break this news to those who love him thousands of miles away. You want to be sure he’s not suffering of course and the medics all assure you that he isn’t. He appears to be merely asleep. Like he does every night. But they all say tonight he won’t wake up ever again and you try to make some sense of that in your mind and cannot.

Eventually you have a friend join you so you don’t feel so terribly alone. Luckily the friend has been through a similar situation so they know what to expect even if you don’t. By 2 am you’re falling asleep in your chair so you decide to go home because you don’t know if you locked up or not when you left home and someone else drove your car to the hospital for you.

Once home, sleep is the last thing you’re able to do. You need noise in the house so you do laundry that doesn’t need doing but it will make noise so that the house seems normal. You know you’ll need a sleeping pill to get to sleep and you don’t have any. You know you’ll have to make some calls to his relatives but you wait until morning because of the time differences. When you do make the calls you know you’re incoherent even while you’re trying to explain things. You hope he doesn’t die before you get back to the hospital but it could happen, and you wonder if you did right in leaving at all. So you make the calls and cry some more although all the crying won’t change a blessed thing

You should sleep before driving your car because people will be driving to work soon and you could be a menace on the road if you’re not sharp. You try, but sleep simply will not come to you. Your mind is working overtime. Did you call everyone? Did you give them the hospital’s number? Did you give them enough detail? You ask yourself several dozen questions that you don’t have any answers for. You sit on the couch and begin to weep but you’re not sure if you’re crying for him or for yourself.

You go back to the hospital because they may be able to give you something to help you sleep and take away all the emotional pain and that zombie feeling that has taken over your entire being. You check on him first. The nurses in trying to make him more comfortable are giving him a bed-bath and he’s responding although he doesn’t know where he is or why these people are trying to wash him. He has no idea who you are either. He only wants to sleep. You stand in the doorway as your whole person is astounded. How can any of this be?

You’re too tired to figure it out but you suddenly realize all those calls you made have to be made again and you simply want to collapse and sleep yourself. You wonder about your sanity and whether or not this is just some sort of nightmare and it’s not really happening, you just don’t know how to wake yourself.

The medical staff is just as amazed as you are at his reawakening and have no answers that make any sense to you. Your doctor is prescribing sleep for you because you’re not your usual self and you know you won’t function until you do sleep. You were mentally preparing your mind to deal with his loss when life took a U-turn and now you want to be sure it's true, that he really will be OK.

Once assured he’s fine, you head back home. You’re not sure what to do so you take the prescribed Melatonin and try to sleep. You get four hours and think you’re OK again. So you start making calls again. You get a lot of questions you cannot answer and you know you’re not as sharp minded as you thought you were, so you give them all the hospital’s number and let the hospital try to explain it. You don’t go back to the hospital that day because they’re sending him to metro for some tests and bringing him back, so you figure the best course of action is to get some food into you and sleep so you’ll be fresh the next day.


Maybe the nightmare will go away by then. You hope your partner won’t have a lot of permanent damage, but you never know because you’re not a medical professional. So you sleep and wait for the morning again.

The next day you go to hospital and he’s sitting up in bed asking if he’d scared you. He now knows where he is and who he is, and who you are. He’s not sure what all the fuss is about.

He points to himself and smiles when he says, “Made in England!”

You smile back. He looks wan and you can see that this medical trauma has taken its toll. But, you breathe a mega sigh of relief and play it by ear.

Eventually after a lot of tests and reports you find out, he had another stroke that buried the previous three mini strokes, and when he collapsed his body went into a seizure. He’s now under severe observation and appointments are being made with another bevy of specialists.

You’re still not sure how you feel. Sort of like you’ve won a dismal kind of lottery. You’re relieved of course; but you don’t trust life anymore. You watch for signs of damage. Luckily for him, it’s minimal and you know he’ll recover as much as anyone can after such an experience. He remembers nothing of the initial incident.

Your daughter flies in from away and stays with you for several days and you’re relieved and happy to have the close human support to help you get back to your own comfort levels. Oddly to you, it does take days. You begin to examine your own questionable ties to life itself. You plan to make sure everything that needs to be in place to make things easy for your family are in place. No one should be left to make some of those decisions alone at such an emotionally charged time.

You eventually know you’ll be ok and start making those plans. You also know that once he’s home again this experience has to be discussed so that you’ll know what his wishes are in regard to death and dying. He’ll know yours as well. It’s a necessary and while this could have been disastrous, you’ve got another chance. Best to think of it as a rehearsal of sorts. Maybe when the time does come it won’t be so gut wrenching and emotionally destructive to you and others. Maybe…