Because I Had To Stop For Death

     I always wondered about the oft quoted poem by Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop For Death.  It seemed to me that we didn't have much choice about it.  Death made us stop and take notice.  We waited on him, for him, not the other way around.  I was born old and possessed early on a rather stoic view of death and ends.  But I grew in midlife more hopeful, more sure, thinking ends might come when I was ready as opposed to when they must.  I thought all you needed was love, that it solved all things.  I think it was the combination of heart and hip and heart, that schooled me on the unpredictability of life, the inexorability of change, which gave life a preciousness made more so by our all too transitory natures.

     While we are all born to die, some deaths are unexpected -- a child's passing, a sudden end out of the blue, a man or woman in his or prime.  When cancer is diagnosed, especially inoperable colon cancer, death seems inevitable, sooner as opposed to the hoped and planned for later.  My dad wasn't young.  He was 76 and had already lived longer than any male in his family.  When they found the polyp during a colonoscopy, it had penetrated the muscle wall but not beyond.  The surgeon took it but best practices demanded he take most of my dad's colon, all of his rectum, leaving him with a colostomy bag for the rest of his days, something my dad just couldn't stomach.  The thing was, he had congestive heart failure and wouldn't, couldn't survive the operation.  So they chose radiation and chemo, promising my dad seven to ten more years when it was done.  "You'll more than likely die of something else," his surgeon assured him, laughing.  Not sure I see the humor in this but that could be the grief talking.

     Two weeks before the end of his treatment, the side effects began to negatively affect my dad.  He was still eating but food wasn't tasting good.  He had started to wear diapers because the radiation had so impacted his rectum that he could not control his bowels.  They assured him it was normal, expected.  About a week before the scheduled end of the treatments, the nausea increased to a point that my dad stopped eating and drinking.  My dad could be a stubborn man.  It makes no sense to refuse food and drink, and he knew it, and yet he did.  The doctors chided him, told him it was expected.  They never once considered ending the chemo until he stabilized.  The day he died, they wheeled him into radiation, unconscious.  I wonder if they even considered that he was failing or if they were too blinded by protocol to do anything but what was planned.

     It's not my intention to try to second guess what should or shouldn't have been done.  There's no changing things; dead is dead.  Whether my father's death was expected or unexpected, doesn't really matter.  I've started crying, at last, necessary for healing but I wonder every now and again, why.  I loved  my dad but we were not as close as we once had been when I was young, as we could have been if each of us had not been so stubbornly sure of ourselves and our rightness.  With a diagnosis of congestive heart failure and inoperable colon cancer, it was pretty clear that his end was going to be sooner as opposed to later, and he had outlived his parents and his siblings.  My dad's end was expected and I had been given time to prepare (as if there could ever be time enough) and yet I wasn't prepared, not at all.

     Grief is a funny thing.  Crying uncontrollably one day, I couldn't stop my tears, nor could I tell you the why of them, who was crying.  Was it the little girl in me who was the source of those tears, the one who watched her father leave 40+ years ago distraught, watching him leave yet again, this time with no visitations, no every-other weekend, this time gone and gone for good?  If so, then cry little girl, cry your eyes out, cry over that broken heart, cry as your mother never let you, grieve at last, as much as you need to for a father gone, never to return.  Was it the woman who always felt orphaned, no orphaned for real, at last, and realizing no one wants to be orphaned?  The order of life dictates we lose our parents, we become orphans, but nothing prepares us really for the day when we become the parents and are, ourselves, no longer parented.  That might be worth hours of tears, rebirthing ourselves from children to parents.  Was it the child/woman who has lost her loves, her first and this one, her true first, the man upon which all others are measured for good or ill?  I'm not sure it matters which part of me is the source of all these tears.  I suspect all of those parts of me will have their turn at weeping, as will the ones I haven't met yet.  And so it goes, has gone, will go, from the dawn of man to his sunset.

     Grief is a funny thing, with its own rhyme and reason, its own time and modes of expression, its particular season.  I suppose in a half-empty/half-full kind of way, Death stops for us.  Mostly though, we stop for Death, stop because there is no choice to do otherwise.  And maybe we find our place to equanimity, as Emily did.  Perhaps that's why we suffer so many deaths and ends and losses, so that when the time comes we will join Death in the carriage with civility riding toward eternity.  I don't know and so I go on because as much as that seems a betrayal in a way, it is what we do, hurt after hurt, go on.