Kirk

My friend Tom died a few days ago. He’d gone into palliative care, and then after a day started to check himself out again. I think he was afraid of the finality of the situation. I tried to call him, but he was either blocking everything, or more likely, simply physically unable to answer his phone. Fortunately, he realized that he was physically unable to leave the palliative unit, and he more or less slept the final 48 hours.

The last time I saw him, we discussed the finality of death at some length. I don’t think he was really prepared for it, as I suppose that I won’t be when my time comes.

Tom is the first of my close friends to die. I have lost parents and siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Tom’s death is different. We were young together, we tackled weighty philosophical questions together. We talked of girls and life and money, music and drugs and history – you know, all the important stuff. We didn’t always agree, and there were times when we didn’t speak for a day or two, but we understood each other.

I don’t have too many regrets other than the one large one, that I allowed my ex-wife to separate us, and that I didn’t rectify that until last year. I offer this advice: if you have a relationship with someone such that you would regret their death, and you have let your contact with them lapse, give them a call.

I received notice today that my friend T has entered palliative care at a private nursing facility. On the one hand, that’s not a good thing. It means that, as I feared, things have progressed rapidly. On the other hand, I am deeply grateful that there is a facility like this, and that they had room for him. This isn’t always the case.

As I said to the person who notified me: Knew it was coming. Not really ready for it.

I drove up to visit my dying friend T a couple of weekends ago. It was a measured risk: balanced against the risks of Covid was the fact that he is dying and doesn’t have much time left. They stopped chemotherapy as ineffective some months ago, which moved him into palliative care. At this point he is still in his home; I don’t know how long he can continue.

He has always had mental health issues. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, for example. Looking back, it should have been obvious when we were teenagers, although forty five years ago nobody had ever heard the term bipolar, and depression was another word for weak. You just needed to get over it, you know? T was always like that – up and down all the time. He was, and is, bright and creative. He’s an artist and musician, and has a degree in creative writing. But he struggles. He really struggles. And that’s quite outside of the diagnosis of terminal cancer.

We had planned to go up, my wife and I. T likes my wife – when we see him, he brightens and talks at great length. Like many people with his mental challenges, he is a poor housekeeper, and so he is ashamed to have people in to his apartment. For this reason, we always met him at a pub, where we would sit for three or four or five hours, talking.

My wife had a small crisis with her elderly mother and thus at the last moment she couldn’t go. I had a hotel reservation, so I drove in to the interior, away from the coast, up through foothills and then mountains, past crystal glacier-fed rivers edged with robes of golden fall leaves. The sun was out – a break in the rain – and the air was warm with the soft melancholy of autumn.

When I got to the town where T now lives, I phoned him. He couldn’t come, he said. He was in too much pain. I couldn’t come over to see him, he hadn’t had a chance to clean up. It’s just me, I said. Not the Pope, or the President. But as always, he couldn’t be persuaded. So I went to the hotel, checked in, got out my laptop and wrote some.

Sure enough, a couple of hours later he phoned from the parking lot. He owns a 1994 Ford van – it still runs, and I think he paid $400 for it. But he shouldn’t drive. He’s on enough opiate to kill a normal person, and he sometimes gets sudden pain that causes him to double over. But again, as always, you can’t tell him anything.

We went for dinner to an Indian place. T isn’t able to eat much these days – the cancer has destroyed his pancreas and he has to take enzymes. Even then, anything with processed carbohydrates gives him a lot of trouble. But he can eat vegetable curries, and the spices cut through the fog of probably 12 or 14 medications.

After dinner we bought some beer. Not much, a half-dozen local brews. T can’t drink much any more, either. We went back to the hotel, and T said he wanted to stay there that night. There were two queen beds, so I said sure.

We laid in bed and drank beer and talked. We talked of life and death. We talked of regrets. We talked of all the heavy, difficult things that men who have known each other since childhood might speak of when one of them is dying.

And it was like we had not had a separation of 40 years. For a time, I half felt that those 40 years might have been a dream, that somehow I had fallen asleep and dreamed the years, two marriages and children and multiple jobs, houses bought and sold, tragedies and triumphs weathered, and that in reality I had been here the whole time, talking to my childhood best friend T.

He fell asleep for a while. I looked at him. He was more skeleton than man, and yet the face of that boy was still here: the snub nose, the wide face, the angled eyes. Yorkshire blood, he was once nearly as wide as he was tall.

I do not know how much longer he will live. Not long, I don’t think. But I am grateful to whoever, whatever, that lined up the stars to allow us to reach one another again. I don’t know if I will see him again before he dies. Now, though, I approach that thought with a degree of peace. It is a blessing to reach the point of resignation.

I spoke with my friend T last night. I had booked a hotel room in the little town he lives in. I told him that we would come see him this weekend. I said that we would be in town, and if he could see us, that would be nice, and if not, that was fine too. I want to see him, but at this point I realize that I want to see him for me, not for him.

In addition to other things, T has suffered from some mental health issues over the years. Looking back now, those were evident when he was a teenager, too. His mood fluctuated up and down. He has, since, been diagnosed as bipolar. When I called him last night, he started off by saying that he had been intending to send me an email asking me not to come.

He was having some breakthrough pain. He is dying of pancreatic cancer, and breakthrough pain, particularly pain that is hard to control with strong narcotics, is really not a good sign. But T is also someone who gets into his own head too much. He is quite capable of talking himself out of things. He has ample reason to be depressed – he’s in the final months of his life. I say ‘months’ – I’m not doctor, but the rule I remember is that if you’re seeing changes over months, you have months. Over weeks, you have weeks. Over days…

It seems to me that he’s in the weeks stage, but we’re getting close to the stage of days, of final days. He’s still over a hundred pounds, but not by much. Or at least he was last week – this may have changed by now.

This has all disrupted my writing schedule and my flow. I had thought to have my second novel finished by November 1st, but that is not going to happen. As it is, I am at 80,000 of a projected 90,000 words. Close enough to touch, to feel. I spent my allotted writing time this morning in my journal, and I realized that as a result of T’s illness, I am confronting issues of illness, of aging, and of death. I wish it didn’t impact my ability to write fiction, but it does.

And maybe it should.

I hadn’t seen T in a very long time. More than twenty years. I heard that he had cancer, and more than that, that it was pancreatic cancer. One of the bad ones. So I reached out to him, and my wife and I met him at a watering hole that had once been a firehall in the town we’d grown up in and gone to high school together.

It took a moment to recognize him when he came in. He was thin, much thinner than the last time I’d seen him twenty years ago. He was thinner than he’d been in high school, when he’d been a pretty fit, strong teenager. His hair, which was always unruly, as the cliche goes, was short. I believe primarily because much of it had fallen out.

He’d been on chemotherapy for some months at that point.

We talked idly and ate, and the awkwardness began to disappear. We returned to high school patterns, he the talkative animated one, me the taciturn one who responds occasionally to keep the words flowing.

T was (and at the time of this writing, still is) living in reduced circumstance. He’d never found a vocation, a calling, but had worked at whatever was convenient at the time. The closest he’d come was a lengthy stint at a retail chain, but when the relationship with a woman ended, so had the job. He attended a coastal university, studying creative writing, but as far as I know has not published anything that earned him any money. He was on chemotherapy, and landscaping, which as most of us know is a euphemism for mowing lawns, for a living.

He was (and is) living in a facility for people in reduced circumstances – assisted housing, they sometimes call it. An old folks home for poor people, if you want to call it what it really is. But on that day he was house-sitting in his older sister’s house, and after the pub, we all went back there where we had more beer and conversation, and then ordered dinner. We sat on the deck in the shade and it was almost like old times.

I saw T again several times in the intervening year. The last time before the most recent visit, we stopped in for an afternoon at the end of July on our way back from delivering one of our daughters to university. He was starting to run out of options, then – several courses of chemo had seemingly slowed the advance, but had stopped working, and he was down to older, more debilitating medications. We had beer at the pub I had tried (with occasional success) to get in to when I was a teenager. One of his ex-girlfriends joined us, and we all went for Indian before my wife and I departed for a late drive back to our place, four hours away.

Since then, he has gone off the last of the chemo. His days are now numbered, though nobody knows quite yet what that number will be. It will be a low number, though.

I went to see him last Friday. My wife was working, so I left around eight and got to the pub near his house about noon. He was late, which was unsurprising. He’s always been late for everything. When he walked in I knew, for certain, that the final days were near. The skin around his mouth had dropped, and his temples were sunken hollows. We had some beers, me only one, and then went back to his place for a little while. I left around four.

We’re going back again this weekend, my wife and I. We’ll get a room in town and stay the night. Hopefully he won’t be too tired.

My times. Not the times.

When you reach A Certain Age, things don’t work as well as they used to. Wear and tear and the slow creep of time work their way into your joints, your eyes, your ears, your muscles…

I have reached A Certain Age. I have been proactive about dealing with things, mostly. Unlike many members of my sex, I don’t shy away from doctors should the need be evident. Being in my seventh decade on the planet, I am on blood pressure medication. I take something to reduce my cholesterol. I have lost twenty-five lbs from my peak, which was a too-high 255. I can stand to lose a bit more, particularly at my age. One of the things that the Ravages of Time does to men is reduce the amount of muscle you carry. You can stave that off, to some degree, with weights and exercise, but it is only to some degree, and like everything else, that degree decreases as you get older.

In order to get the weight down, I first cut out the apples I used to eat. I love apples, and I’d have one first thing in the morning with my coffee (black). Then I’d have one on the drive in to work. I’d have one mid-morning. Often, I’d eat one on the drive home from work, mostly as a kindness to the people sharing my living quarters, as I can be a bit of a bear between about four-thirty and dinner time. Oh, apples are healthy, you say. But three or four apples a day are at least 500 additional calories.

So I stopped the apples. Then I started 8/16, which is a modified form of intermittent fasting. Essentially, I stopped eating breakfast. I found the first week tough – by about 11 I was ravenous and shaky. But it smoothed out the following week, and now I mostly don’t eat before noon. These measures got me down from 255 to about 235, and they reduced my insulin response. So now I am much more even-keeled when my blood sugar drops.

This is not a diet. This is a lifestyle change. I am of the opinion that if you try to control your weight with dieting, you are setting yourself up for failure. When you go on a diet, you think of it as a temporary measure, as something that has an end. You drop twenty or forty pounds, and then you can resume the life that led you to becoming heavy in the first place. A lifestyle change, on the other hand, is something permanent. Going forward in my life, I will generally only eat between noon and eight pm.

There are exceptions to that, of course. I eat breakfast before skiing, for example, when I need the food energy to stay warm. I sometimes eat breakfast on a weekend when my wife and children are about as an exercise in companionship. But most days, nothing from 8 PM to noon the next day. I have found that to work well for me, and with moderate exercise, it controls my weight at a point that is a little too high, not a lot too high. My blood pressure, with medication, is 110-120/70, and my cholesterol profile, according to my doctor, is ‘excellent’. Once my legs are conditioned, I can ski an entire day without fatigue being an issue until late in the day, and I can ski every day for a week finishing the Friday as strong as the Monday.

For my seventh decade, I’ll take that.

When I was 13 years old, I made a friend. I am not someone who does so easily, or with great frequency. I don’t remember now how we drifted together, he and I, but we were both outsiders attempting to navigate the deep and dangerous waters of high school. We shared interests in military themed board games and heavy metal music.

He went on to join a band when he was 18. My second girlfriend hated him (and, actually, everybody – it took me some years to see that) and isolated me from him when we were in our twenties. I did not see him for many years, then once at a mutual friend’s wedding, where we were as awkward and strained with one another as we had been when we were thirteen. I heard through the grapevine that he left the band and went to work in a wine store. He was living with a woman who seemed to have got him straightened around.

I left my second girlfriend – who had in the meantime become my first wife – some time after that, but I did not reach out to him. Nor, to be fair, did he to me. But we are all responsible for our own actions in this life. I heard through the grapevine that he had left the girlfriend and was now living in some degree of diminished circumstance in a town near the small one we had grown up in.

Last summer news reached me that he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My wife and I stopped in to visit him on our way through the town where he lives, some two hundred miles from us. He was thin, but cheerful. He had hopes – the doctors had said that it was possible, if the treatment worked, to live with this for some years. We parted as friends again. Not as we had been, but friends nonetheless.

My wife and I visited again earlier this year just as ski season was about to be ended by a pandemic. We spent a gentle afternoon in a pub, drinking sour microbrews and talking. He was on a little break from chemo – they were trying a new one, as the previous ones hadn’t worked well.

I talked with him again recently, and he is, as they say, out of options. I’ve been meaning to go up to see him, but there is always so much to do. Things to maintain, people to talk to, waste to be gotten rid of, things to be improved. There’s writing to do if I am ever to get this hopefully final career off the ground. Writing and editing and planning…

His palliative care nurses have been saying that he may not make it to Christmas. So tomorrow I will put aside all of the other things I have to do and drive two hundred miles to have lunch with him. I will do this as often as I possibly can, given that storms may close the mountain passes and fuel for the truck is pretty steep.

I will do this because the end really is near. Because this, finally, is the reality of being the age that I am: if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it at all.