Winter: The Season of Cancer, Death & Diesel Trucks

Last May I was able to meet an old woman who'd just got out of chemotherapy, who was tired of the radiation and was just growing back her dark hair. She was a kind woman, my fiancé's grandmother, in point of fact. While old, she still walked, talked kindly and was always happy to talk about her life, her children and grandchildren. She still worked in her garden, did chores, the laundry and dishes, and even looked after a guy who, to me, seemed a little more than of under average intelligence, who couldn't hold down a job or even take care of himself, a guy with one glass eye and told rather silly, childish jokes that maybe only kids would find funny.

Anyway, this story isn't about him. It is about this old woman, who my fiancé loved, and who wasn't around too much longer for me to really get to know her. She worked hard and was dying of cancer—it was eating away at her as I looked upon her, as my fiancé visited with her. There wasn't anything anybody could do about it and I think it made their family feel sort of useless when it came to her health. The woman wasn't supposed to smoke, but somehow she got them anyway. If she would have quit, she would have still died. Maybe it'd take longer, but, eventually, it would have taken her.

Not too long ago, last week in fact, she was smoking a cigarette while on oxygen. Of course, you're not supposed to smoke around those machines and there's a good reason for it. My fiancé's grandmother became an example of it: she burnt her face and inhaled some of the fire when the tank exploded. We received a call only a few hours after it happened and when we were able, we went to the hospital in Yankton, South Dakota. By this time she was taken to her own room, and was conscious. We saw the burns and the inflammations, the tubes and machines connected to her, and we visited. My fiancé, understandably, was upset. Her grandmother was medicated and she wasn't finishing complete thoughts, or inquired about things that wouldn't make sense to anyone. She even asked her great-granddaughter why she didn't have her own cup of coffee.

But while she was out of it, there's something vital in her. For some reason there was a part of me that thought she still had many years in her left. This, of course, was a false assumption. You had to see behind the life that was still there to see the cancer, and, frankly, there was a part of me that didn't want to, didn't want to even acknowledge it being there at all.

Eventually, she made it home, bed-ridden. I never saw her on her feet again. Family members were considering hospices. Family some distance away started showing up to see her. Jennifer and I visited her on the last night she'd be alive. They'd rolled a bed out for her, a breathing machine was there, its tubes in her nose and her head was fallen back on the pillow as she gasped deep breaths of air. My fiancé, as strong of a woman that I've ever seen, takes a look, but finds herself unable to really look for long at what state her grandmother was currently in. I found it difficult myself, but I have to force myself away from it. There's an odd otherness I feel in such macabre moments, something that fascinates me and perplexes me. I don't want to look away because I guess there's a part of me that needs to see what happens when someone is dying. I think it's the same reason why I didn't want to see the cancer in her, the withering death eating her vitality away.

We talk for awhile. We leave. The next morning, we wake and there's already people calling us. My fiancé's grandmother passed away during the middle of the night. And I have to confront the fact that I was wrong, that she was dying, and it had happened. I wasn't surprised, really; I just had a reckoning with myself on the subject of life vs. death (is it really “life VS. death,” or “life IS death?”). I have to realize that yes, I lied to myself, knowing how fragile the vital is in all of us, how easy it is to go from animate to never-ending inanimation.

Her funeral was yesterday. There was a big blizzard, a complete white out and we traveled home. We got stuck for a couple hours behind a car accident. A diesel truck has smashed into a pick up. I'm not sure if anyone is hurt. After a couple of hours of not moving, kids complaining, calling people on my cell phone to pass time, we finally get moving again. Everyone is moving just under ten miles an hour. Another diesel truck comes crashing through the white out, going way too fast.

It makes you wonder. How much control do we have over our living and dying? How much control do we grant those around us?