When did you start thinking about death?
Me?
I’ve always been thinking about it.
When I was a kid, I loved to read novels and history books and watch movies about wars and combat. My interest probably came to me from my parents. They had both been slave laborers in Germany during World War II. My mom didn’t talk much about her experiences and the deaths she saw, but my dad did. During the 5 years he spent in Buchenwald concentration camp, he saw friends starved to death, beaten to death, worked to death, and frozen to death. He wasn’t shy about sharing these experiences. I remember listening to him tell me these stories when I was 6 years old.
But when I was a kid, these stories about death didn’t bother me. They were just like the deaths in the movies I loved. It was different for my dad. Telling me these stories, he’d often weep. But I didn’t. Death was just a story to me. I sat there listening to these stories and trying to picture them just like I watched war movies like All’s Quiet on the Western Front and John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima. These stories about death and dying were gripping and engaging, but they didn’t touch me emotionally the way my dad was touched by the stories he shared with me about the war.
And then it all changed. As I got older and older, death became more than a story someone told me. Death became something that pressed against me, something that knocked on my door, something that wanted to spend more and more time with me, and not in a good way. Death became death.
I’m really not sure, but I think I started to feel death more as something real when my dad, the person who first told me about death, died. He was diagnosed with Stage 4 liver cancer and died about two weeks after the diagnosis. His death was terrible. He had tremendous pain in his abdomen and his back, and the pain was so bad that it made him groan and try to crawl out of the bed and escape from the hospital. The doctors gave him morphine to relieve the pain, but it just brought back so many memories of the terrible things he experienced in the war. Holding his hand, weeping with him, trying to comfort him by singing the songs he loved to sing, I sat there sharing his misery for two weeks until he died.
Death had never before been real to me. It had always just been a story people told to warn you about where life will take you, but it was always just that, a story in a book that you could close whenever you wanted to and just walk away from it.
Now death started to be something much more than just a story. Every death I’ve seen since my dad died has brought death closer to me. I was with my mother when she was dying. I was with my wife’s Uncle Charlie when he was dying. I was with my wife’s mother Mabel when she was dying. And there have been deaths I didn’t see, the deaths of so many of my life-long friends.
All of those deaths have taught me one thing about death.
Death is not just a story about misery and grief and loss and suffering you can walk away from.
—
My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.
