By The Campfire

August 8, 2008

No one wants to talk about this one. It creeps them out. I have an undertaker friend. He can tell you, people are leery of shaking your hands when you just put a suit on a corpse. If you are squeamish about death, stop reading now. If not, have a seat.

I hate it when other people die, but the thought of dying myself doesn’t bother me too much. Maybe that sounds strange, but that’s just the truth. If death shows up at my house, I’m volunteering first.

It’s watching others die that is the worst part about death. Facing it yourself is easier than watching those you love face it. I will give you that. But let’s cut to the deadly chase.

The toughest part about dying is you can’t write about it, especially if you’re the one doing the dying. The truth of that sentence hit me recently. You know the gig. Now and then we all have to go to the doctor to make sure we are not dying. Things happen and you get to go see the doctor. Everyone gets to make these trips sooner or later. When you are asked to “step into the doctor’s office, he/she wants to speak with you privately,” you know what follows is not going to be good news.

There have books written about dying. Some are about conversations in heaven. Some try to describe what happens when you die. Fiction.

I hate to be the one to tell you, but no one knows what happens. We have theories. We have religious beliefs and scientific hypothesis and medical descriptions of the physical act of dying. But no one who has ever done it has ever come back to write a story about it. And that is the biggest problem with dying. We have some idea of what to expect with just about every other big thing that happens to us in life – births, graduations, weddings, whatever. Dying is a blank page upon which no author has scribbled.

I’ve sat in the chair talking to the doctor. I never ask enough questions and tell too many jokes. But I know the antsy feeling, not because I fear dying. I figure it’s just another part of the story we all leave here. But it’s the part that never gets written by us.

Think about it, every biography of any great person from the past ends with the same story: Death. After that, they have no more story. The ones remaining alive mourn and are left to postulate and epilogue and postscript sentences about the departed. The person who died isn’t talking. No more stories from them.

I think about this ‘end of the story’ situation and I remember a guy who died a while back. I read about this in the New York Times. He found a way to talk to his friends after he died. It was a deviously morbid but simple plan.

Once he knew he was dying, he wrote letters to all of his friends and addressed each envelope in his own hand, put postage on the mailings and gave them to another friend to mail at his death. About a week after his funeral, all of his old friends got those letters from him as if he was writing them from the great beyond. Some people, of course, were shocked. The ones who knew him best were not.

I smile when I think about that. We so deeply fear the Grim Reaper. We fear the permanence he brings. We dread his punctuation on that last, lonely sentence: Period, end of story. We make him look horrible and scary. But none of us know what death looks like. Even people with ‘near death experiences’ – which are just that, near death, not death – don’t really know what is next. Seems like there is a pretty big difference between near and done. One, you get a second chance. One, you don’t. Big difference.

As I type this story, I have no idea what will happen to me in the next few hours. I may die in a car accident or during a routine procedure (or at a very un-routine procedure). I may also live to be one hundred and four. Who knows? It rains on us all when it rains. The rain doesn’t care. Bring a coat.

One thing is beyond question, however: In the end, I will die. So will you. That’s how the story always ends.

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