Tag: Dealing With Death

Grief, pain and the whole damn thing

Ending It All

Old Age

I remember reading David Niven’s wonderful autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon, back when I were but a callow yoof, and being saddened by Niven’s story about the brilliant actor George Sanders.

Sanders declared that at age 70 he would commit suicide, because “my cock will have stopped working, my memory will be fading and all the joy will have gone from my life.”  And he was true to his word.

The above was sparked by reading this article:

The Kessler twins — a German entertainment duo who became famous both in the US and throughout Europe beginning in the 1950s — have died at 89 after choosing to end their lives together.

The singing and dancing sisters reportedly died together in their home in Grünwald, near Munich.

The Kessler twins once were known for making the rounds on American talk shows and performing with multi-hyphenate entertainment giants, including Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire and Sammy Davis Jr., among other stars.

Apparently, the sisters ‘no longer wanted to live’ and ‘had chosen to end their lives together.’ 

Here they are back then:

As I said, back in my youth I would not have understood that feeling, that life had passed and now needed to end.

Now, on my 71st birthday, I can understand that feeling a whole lot better.

Before anyone starts reading something else into that statement, let me assure you all that there’s no cause for alarm.  My health is excellent — not just for a septuagenarian, but for a man of any age, my doctor reassures me — and I still have some unfinished business on Ye Olde Bucquette Lystte (patience, Salma).  Please do not concern yourselves.

I truly understand how George Sanders and the Kessler sisters felt — but I don’t feel that way for myself.

We can revisit this topic, however, when I turn 90.

A Good Death

Grief & Loss, Old Age, Wildlife and Hunting

I was chatting to a close and dear friend, who told me of the death of one of her closest friends.

Apparently this guy had been a surgeon, who’d retired when he could no longer do it.  Since then, he’d devoted himself to doing what he loved:  fishing and hunting wild boar in Europe.

Seems as though he’d been doing the latter fun stuff in the Lower Pyrenees, an area renowned for its matchless rural scenery:  high cliffs, deep ravines, sparkling streams of ice-cold water, you get the picture.

Anyway, he’d just shot a huge boar and using his cell phone, called his friends over on the next ridge to tell them this, but added that he wasn’t feeling too well.  When his friends finally got there, they found him sprawled next to the boar, dead of a massive and unforeseen heart attack.  He was in his mid-seventies.

Of course, my friend was all torn up over this death of a good friend, but let’s just think about this for a moment.

After a long, successful life, a man dies amidst gorgeous scenery, doing something he loved,  something very manly withal — having just dispatched a massive, dangerous boar — and his own death was likewise quick and probably reasonably painless.

Is there anyone reading this who isn’t the teeniest bit envious of Our Aged, Intrepid Hunter?

Pete

Friends and Family

I first met Pete DiStaulo back in 1985, when I joined a small marketing company as director of their supermarket relations effort — I was, if you will, an in-house consultant to their clients who were all just starting loyalty programs.  About my age, Pete was the VP of IT, and we hit it off immediately, my no-bullshit management style being a perfect match for his Jersey-City no-bullshit technical expertise.  I don’t know what company management expected from our friendship, but to their consternation I was more often on his side rather than on their side, because while Pete knew next to nothing about marketing and Management knew absolutely nothing about IT systems, I knew a great deal about both, and I was able to temper their sky-high expectations of IT with the realities thereof.

Anyway, Pete and I became family friends, in that not only did he and Connie get along, but his wife Margie became part of our little IT circle.

Pete was a small, tubby man with a receding hairline, while Margie was a large, overpowering woman (a senior nursing sister in a local Jersey hospital) who terrified everyone she met — her husband not excepted, she insulted and verbally abused him constantly — but both Connie and I thought she was wonderful.  Connie’s genteel Beverly-Hills politeness contrasted so much with Margie’s Jersey-City brusqueness that one would have thought that they’d never get along;  but we and the DiStaulos got along famously, and had dinner together more times than I can remember, more often than not causing consternation among the restaurants’ customers with our peals of helpless laughter.  By the way, Margie wasn’t Italian, but Irish.  “And I had to learn how to cook his fuckin’ guinea food, because he hated anything that wasn’t pasta.  Jesus Christ, what a fuckin’ nightmare this marriage has been.”)

I left the marketing company after a while — hired away by one of their biggest clients to rebuild and relaunch their failing loyalty program — but Pete and I stayed close friends.  In fact, when I left the supermarket company three years later to start up my own consultancy, Pete left his company to become my partner.

Time passed, and sadly, there was just not enough IT business for Pete to stay on, but even though he left to head up a local bank’s IT department, there was no rancor — in fact, we became closer friends than ever, talking on the phone at least a couple times a month and still having dinners together as a family thing.

His son Pete Jr. (“Petey”, duh) finished his college degree at Tufts and was offered a couple of jobs:  one in downtown Manhattan and the other in Chicago.  Amazingly (he being a Joizee boy), Petey turned down the City job for Chicago, and his move to the Windy City happened only a month or so after Connie and I moved to the lakefront.

Of course, Pete and Margie had helped Petey with his move, and when they all arrived in Chicago, needless to say we had dinner at our apartment in Lakeview.  To our general astonishment, it turned out that Petey didn’t have a sofa for his new place, and we had discovered that our large sofa took up too much room in our apartment — so then and there we gave it to Petey, and he and his dad moved it over to the new apartment.

Incidentally, the Manhattan job that Petey DiStaulo had turned down?  It was with Cantor Fitzgerald, on the top floor of the World Trade Center, and his start date would have been September 1, 2001.  (Yeah, I got the shivers, too.)

Living across the country from each other only meant that the DiStaulos and Du Toits had fewer dinners together, but Connie was working for Ernst & Young in NJ, so every time she had to go there for a management meeting or the like, I’d go with her so we could get together with Pete and Margie, and our ongoing phone calls were frequent and needless to say, cordial.

Then Connie got ill, and Margie was distraught — as a nurse, she knew all about cancer, of course — and now she started calling Connie, often, for updates on her condition.

When Connie passed away in February 2017, of course I called Pete to tell him the tragic news, but I only got his voice mail so I just left him a message.

The next evening I got a call from his phone, but it was Margie on the line.

“Kim, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Pete passed away last November.”
“Damn Margie… why didn’t you call and tell us?”
“I couldn’t — I just couldn’t.  I didn’t know how Connie would take the news, and I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
I thought about that for about three seconds, and said, “Margie, I don’t think she could have handled it.  Pete going away might well have pushed her over the edge.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Margie, thank you for not calling us.  Please don’t feel badly about it, because as hard as it is to think about, you did the right thing, I promise you.”
“Good, because the kids have been giving me no end of shit for not calling youse.”
“Margie, what happened to Pete?”
A pause, then, “That fuckin’ asshole.”
Despite myself, I started laughing helplessly.  “What did he do?”
“You know he fell and busted his hip, right?”
“Yup.  But I thought he was doing okay.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kim, he wasn’t doing okay, the lying little shit.  He couldn’t get up the stairs, we had to convert his office (“awfiss”) to a bedroom, and he was basically bedridden for four months.”
“Ah man… so what happened?”
“Donald Trump killed him.”
“WHAT?”
“On Election Day, Pete absolutely insisted on getting out of bed, making me half-carry him to the fuckin’ car, and I had to drive him to the fuckin’ polling station so he could cast his fuckin’ vote for Donald fuckin’ Trump.”
I couldn’t say anything because I was incoherent with laughter.  Which then stopped.
“And then the next day my Pete just died.  The autopsy showed a pulmonary embolism that was probably caused by his being bedridden, and it was dislodged  by his activity of the day before, that going to vote for Trump.”

And there you have it.  Donald Trump killed my great friend Pete;  well, according to his widow, anyway.

Despite her offhandedness and abuse, Margie was absolutely devoted to Pete (“Kim, he took my fuckin’ virginity!“), and he to her.  Of course, it was easy to see why, because they were the most warm and wonderful people I have ever been privileged to meet.

Of course, no prizes for guessing what triggered this reminiscence from me.

I wonder if Margie voted for Trump, this time round… I’d give her a call, but a couple years after Connie died, my last attempt met a “no longer in operation” tone, and Margie too disappeared from my life.

I miss the DiStaulos, terribly.

Front Line Analogy

Old Age

I like to think of Life as a journey to the WWI frontline trenches, said trenches being old age, where death is almost certain if you stay there long enough.  (Feel free to spin this out in your imagination.)

I was drawn to the analogy when reading about Bruce Willis being given birthday best wishes by his ex-wife Demi Moore.  Willis is suffering from aphasia , and has just turned 69.

I’m 69.

And here’s why I’m thinking of old age as being like being in the trenches.

There are so many ways to die, at any age, but if one dies at a young age it’s more a result of either a random tragedy (brain cancer at 39, or a heart attack at 18, and so on) or else the equivalent of playing Russian roulette, say by smoking a pack of unfiltered Camels every day, riding a motorcycle without a helmet or living in the South Side projects of Chicago.  (The WWI equivalent would be dying in a car accident while driving to the station or losing your head by sticking it out of the moving train’s window, i.e. going before your time.)

But once you’re in the frontline trenches — that being old age — there are any number of ways that can snuff out Life’s Little Candle, because the Boche are throwing all sorts of shit at you:  shelling, poison gas and snipers being the equivalent of kidney disease, aortic aneurism, stroke, heart attack, diverticulitis and so on.  You get the picture.

I have been extraordinarily lucky so far, in that pretty much all my ailments have been recoverable either by my own body’s healing function or else by medication.  (That said medication becomes more necessary is borne out by the fact that pills once taken for a day or two are now a permanent fixture and the morning routine involves something like a saunter along the Rx shelves at CVS.)  And my physical condition has actually improved recently in that I’ve shed a lot of weight — granted, through said medication, but whatever — and I’m reasonably spry as a result.

But there’s no fucking cure for aphasia, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease or any of the brain ailments which end one’s life horribly.  And sure, you can get those at any time during your life — but once you reach the Golden Years, those illnesses become more and more likely, and the Golden Years become more like the Golden Shower Years, where Life pisses on you from all directions.  (And I’m not even talking about extraneous squirts of urine like the IRS or Bidenflation, don’t get me started.)

What the hell.  So far, so good.  I’m in decent health for my age, the doctor tells me, and would be in better shape if I just quit eating all that shit that’s bad for me but which gives me such pleasure that I refuse to quit.

Screw that.  If there’s some Boche sniper out there loading up a bullet with my name on it, I might as well eat that piece of lovely, fatty boerewors, right?

And now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my Breakfast Gin.  Cheers.

Hammer Down

Bad News, Grief & Loss

Oh, bugger it all:

Fox News star Charles Krauthammer reveals he has weeks to live

It’s cancer, that vile illness.

And on a personal note:  I just learned this very morning that my closest childhood friend Mark Pennels is also in the final stages of cancer, with maybe a week or two left.  I spoke to him in December when I was in South Africa, and he was cancer-free then, so this latest episode has been a total bastard.

And you all know about Connie, taken from me just last year by the same ailment.

I think I’ll just go to my room and pull the covers up over my head for the rest of the day…

365 Days

Grief & Loss

One year ago last night, my wife Connie died of ovarian cancer.

In many cultures, there’s almost a mandatory mourning period of a full year after the death of a loved one, and I now know why. It has to do with anniversaries: “Oh, last year this time we were celebrating something together. This year… I’m doing it alone.” Those add up, and they take a toll on you as that horrible year drags on. But with the merciful passage of time — and it’s true: time does heal the worst of wounds — those little aches, those pangs of shared memories, fade and lose their sting. This year, I’ll remember an occasion from last year and this time, it will involve just me. Not as painful.

I have spoken many times about how my friends all over the world rallied around me and helped me get away from this most personal tragedy, so I’m not going to repeat any of it other than to say that they collectively gave me a reason to carry on living: not that I was going to do something foolish like cap myself, of course, but they got me to do things that helped dull the pain of memory, kept me busy, and above all made me realize that I still have so many things to live for. The alternative was for me to sit in a one-room garret and stare at the walls — which my friends, as they told me in no uncertain terms, were not going to allow me to do. Instead, once I’d taken care of the soul-destroying minutiae of death, I sold the house, traveled, and did the sorts of things which reminded me of the things I hadn’t been able to do before, but could now do. I did those things, and I will do again.

It’s called living. Life goes on after death and now, one year after that most profound tragedy from which I thought I’d never recover, I’ve come out from my period of mourning with renewed purpose, renewed hope for the future, and a renewed determination to live my life to its absolute fullest. That feeling, that intention, is not something that happened suddenly, or just this morning; it’s been a gradual process which began at some point (I have no idea when) and grew stronger and stronger as the year went on.

Now it’s been three hundred and sixty-five days since Connie died, and if you’d told me then that I’d be feeling the way I do today, I’d not have believed you.

Now, at last, I think I’m healed (although of course there may well be the occasional twinge of pain — I’ve felt a few just writing this post). All I needed was to get through the horrible anniversary to put the seal on it, and thanks to the boundless support from my friends, my family and my Readers, I made it.

Now it’s time for adventure, time to live again.

And if you’ll all indulge me, I’m going to continue to chronicle some of those adventures on these very pages. That is the real reason why I started blogging again — there’s no point in having an adventure when you can’t share it with anyone — and it’s only when I wrote this post that I realized it. (And by the way: a huge round of applause for Tech Support BobbyK, without whom I’d be snarled in incomprehensible Gordian techno-knot,  and you wouldn’t be reading any of this.)

So stick around: I’m going to drink deeply of Life in the years to come, and you’re going to share it with me. Enjoy the journey, because I most certainly plan to.

In Memoriam:

Constance Mary (Carlton) du Toit
14 May 1958 – 3 February 2017