For Whom the Bell Tolls

By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I have been thinking too much about death lately.  Fun stuff, I know.

No, I don’t have a death anxiety. I am not in constant fear of my own death. I don’t really even think about my own death that much. No more than anyone else.

But a childhood friend of mine died the other day. He wasn’t a close friend, but someone I was on a couple of all-star baseball teams with when we were kids. But he was my age.

And I’m not that old.

Maybe when I was 50 years old I thought 60 was old. I know when I was 30 I thought 40 was old, and when I was 45 I knew 55 was old.  I guess 10 years older than what you are is as good a definition of ‘old’ as any. Although I recently learned a new one.

Due to my wife Terry’s extremely short attention span these days, we watch a lot of funny videos. No plot to remember, just slapstick comedy. From watching these videos, I have learned a new definition of old.

If you fall down and everyone laughs, you are not old. If you fall down and people cringe, gasp and start dialing 9-1-1, you are old.

I am afraid that, even if I am not old, I am now at the age where not only are most of the parents of my childhood friends passing away, but even some of my friends themselves are. Or at least people my age are.  They are beginning to fall to the wayside at a rate all too often.

I was looking at some old photos recently and I saw a team picture of a championship squad I played on in the early 1980s. Three people in the pix of about 20 are already dead.

And it is sad.

A long time ago when Terry first started really studying the Bible she used to tell me that when we are done with this world there will be a new system and that we will then live in a perfect world.

Several years later when she was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, she told me that, because of her faith, her beliefs, she was not afraid.

Well, I sure as hell was, and still am. Very afraid.

Back in the early 1980s I traveled to Oklahoma for a basketball game and we faced a player named Wayman Tisdale. He went on to the pros (second player picked in the NBA draft after hall of famer Patrick Ewing) and later became a successful jazz guitarist. He had a Magic Johnson type of personality on the court and on the stage, always happy and smiling.

As a musician, Tisdale became friends with country singer Toby Keith. When Tisdale passed away at the age of 44 after losing a leg to cancer, Keith wrote a song, a tribute to his friend, called Cryin’ for Me. In the song he says that “I’m not cryin’ cause I feel so sorry for you. I’m cryin’ for me.”

That’s how I feel. When people I know or relatives of people I know pass away, I don’t feel sad for the people who die. I feel sad for the people who are left behind. They are the ones who are now hurting.

And I don’t want to be that person who is left behind, that person hurting. Alzheimer’s.org, however, along with the statistics and the doctors, say that I am going to be that person.

I always kid Terry that the song by The Band Perry, Better Dig Two, is about us. That when one of us goes the other one is going too.   She can’t live without my help in everything she does, and I can’t imagine living without her.

They say you can’t take it with you. Well, we plan on taking each other with us. But then again, you know how plans go.

You read about that happening all of the time. Someone dies and a day or two later their spouse of 50 years also dies. It happened in February to a couple who I grew up down the street from. People actually can die of a broken heart. Back in December Debbie Reynolds died just a day or two after her daughter Carrie Fisher died.

And for those who do survive their partner’s death, often their quality of life is never the same.

That is what scares me about death.

In high school, they made us read. The bastards! I mean, in high school they made us read. Thank God! But at least they let us pick our poison.  I mean they let us pick our favorite authors. Two of the authors on the list were Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens.

Hemingway seemed interesting, but he blew his own head off with a shot gun. I chose Dickens because I thought he had a really cool beard (yes, I was very mature for my age in high school), plus he was English and at that time I was still a victim of the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, pre-disco BeeGees).

In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens wrote “Death doesn’t change us more than life.”  I am not sure if I agree with that statement, but I do share some of his thoughts.

Lately when people ask me how my “retirement” is going, I feel like saying “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.”

It is the best of times because I get to spend all day hanging out with Terry. It is the worst of times because of the circumstances. Because of why I am hanging out with my wife all day.

We haven’t exactly been lighting up the social calendar with excursions like many young retired couples do. Many days Terry doesn’t even want to leave the house, but I am sure that will change now that the weather is warming up. But sometimes I feel like I am wasting this opportunity.  Sometimes I feel useless, not being able to work or do things.

But Dickens also wrote that “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

That’s my job now. To lighten Terry’s burden. Help her function day-in and day-out. Help her laugh every day.

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor,” Dickens wrote.

Good humor. Now I am no longer thinking about death. Now I’m craving ice cream.

Until next time, enjoy the next 10 years before you too are old.

Bud

budfocht@gmail.com