Near Death
She had been gone about five months. After a two year battle with cancer and an ugly death that had traumatized the three of us my wife of 36 years was gone. Our two grown children and myself were all shuffling forward; functioning, dazed, quiet, and damaged. We lived apart from each other, any comfort that could be garnered by physical proximity was not available.
A routine developed; I didn’t do it, it just happened. Work in the morning, go home around noon, lay on the couch and weep for a bit, and then on to the next thing. I was overwhelmed with the details and minutia of running a small business, legal matters, employees, personal grief, and the prospect of having to live out my own earthly stay alone. I was slowly being buried, sinking into the gooey, cold, dark mud of loss and depression. I could see no end for me other than as an old man alone, living out my days in isolation in this lonely desert canyon. What might be the chances of one day meeting a suitable companion? Of an attractive, intelligent woman driving down that dirt road and finding me? About the same as being hit by a meteor, I decided.
One day while making the short 3 minute drive from the business to my house a random thought occurred to me. Just a little muse in my brain, nothing to take too seriously. It said, “ I wonder how bad it would hurt to put a gun in your mouth and pull the trigger? ” Just wondering. Hell, I had been an athlete in high school and college, and had endured the pain of those practices hours a day for years, voluntarily. My life of physical work on this farm had dropped a normal number of accidents and mishaps in my lap, and some of them had been quite painful. I could do the pain, if there was any.
It could only last for an instant, right? What would it be like? A moment of extraordinary pain? A jolting electrical pulse? A flash of blinding light? Hmmm. I remembered what I knew about the construction of the brain. A lot of the instantaneous, lights - out mechanisms were located at the top of the brain stem, I recalled. One would have to consider the angle of the barrel to be sure to include those. What would it be like? No one knows, and those who do aren’t talking. And then a brief consideration of the mess it would leave behind, on all levels. I pulled into the garage and it went away, pushed aside by the more immediate consideration of what to do for lunch.
A few minutes later as I made a sandwich in the absolute silence of my new existence, A big clanging alarm went off in my head. It said , WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?? I stopped with the sandwich and stood there. What had that been? Was I really thinking about THAT? No, I didn’t think so. It had just been a sort of… curiosity. Just wondering. Maybe just feeling too sorry for myself. Just an indulgent, random moment of pity and drama. However to best describe it, it had the feel of an incomplete visit.
You are in trouble boy, I realized. You need to do something, or you need to get some help. But you need to do something, or that unasked for little curiosity might come back to pursue that idea further. As I stood there with a knife in one hand and a half sliced tomato in the other, I considered all of this. I was not suicidal, I knew that. But I wasn’t ok either, and I now realized that with a new clarity.
In the remote location where I have spent all of my married life it is difficult to get things done. If you need oil changed, or junk hauled away, or a tree cut down, you have to figure it out and do it yourself. There simply aren’t any other options out here. As an old miner once told me, you just have to put your head down and your ass up and go to work. Maybe this was going to be like that. Maybe I would have to figure it out for myself.
And I did; after mulling it over I concluded that the problem was simple. I don’t do well alone. Ok, how do we solve this problem? A solution isn’t going to come to me, so I am going to have to go out and find one. Maybe some college courses, or join a monthly club or group of some kind. In the mean time, keep moving, one step at a time, one day at a time. Do the dishes, the laundry, vacuum occasionally, tend the yard, breathe in, breathe out, repeat as necessary.
A few months later I made a decision to seek companionship, which led a to a single, brief and somewhat comical adventure in Internet dating. Note; do not let a bunch of liquored up high school buddies make up your dating profile. They lie. Eventually a chance encounter with a woman we had been vaguely acquainted with would lead to a friendship, and then a relationship, and a way forward. At some it became clear that I had come through the storm. I was changed, altered, but then that is what the storm is about.
That little, niggling curiosity never reappeared. Had I been near to Death? Probably not mine, but I had still been too near to hers. I had put my face up to the window of a very dark room, a room no one should ever enter. My life long habit of momentum instead of inertia had served me well. The interplay of our physical lives and our emotional state had shoved me forward enough to never reconsider a second look into that window. That room is gone now.
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