Monday January 24, 2005 – Confronting Mortality

Monday January 24, 2005 – Confronting Mortality

On the news Sunday evening was the story that Johnny Carson had died and both my wife “I” and I were shocked—how could Johnny be dead?—and saddened. When we were first married, watching The Tonight Show was our late night entertainment. Johnny was born in 1925 about four years after my dad and I got to thinking about my father’s advancing age. Dad was born in 1921. I gave him a call Sunday evening around 7:30PM Pacific Time. Mom answered and she asked after her great grandchildren. “All doing well Mom, the youngest ‘T’ started crawling on Friday, instinctively moving knees and hands in the correct manner to propel himself quickly toward some bread his older sister ‘A’ left unattended on a paper towel near him on the carpet.” It was music to my mother’s ears to hear her great grandson loved to eat. “Here’s Daddy,” my mom said and resumed her progress to bed that the phone’s ringing had interrupted.

“How’s Mom doing,” I asked my dad and he said she was doing quite well especially since the two of them had started seeing a chiropractor every week. The regular adjustments seemed to help her balance and she seemed to be moving about much easier. It seemed to be doing my father’s troublesome knee—healing from knee replacement surgery just over a year ago—some good as well. My father’s mind is still remarkably sharp but first, a hip replacement over two years ago and a knee replacement a year later have conspired to slow his activity and it has led to constant frustration at not being able to perform the handyman tasks on the house and car that he had been doing up to then. He now finds himself hiring others to prepare the evaporative air conditioner sitting atop his two-story house for winter, for example, or to cut back the fruitless mulberry tree in front of the house. All these tasks were second nature to him before. Now, they require more from his recuperating leg than was possible for it to deliver.

What I wanted to hear in that voice of his was assurance that he was still up for the battle that confronts us all every day. And I heard what I needed in his recounting of all the trials that continued to confront him daily. He is still overseeing the construction of his large metal building on his property in northeast El Paso. The building will house all the accumulated belongings of his life-long friend Charles Upton as well as a good amount of his accumulated belongings including his five 1950s and 1960s car now parked on the lot. He has had a large door installed on the building—this is the one he’ll drive the cars through, but he’s waiting the installation of the smaller door. Once that’s complete, he’ll begin the process of moving the belongings into their new home.

He tells me of his problem getting rid of an old Lincoln still on the lot that has been scavenged for parts. He gave the pink slip to a neighbor who died. His family moved to Colorado after the old man passed away and my father needs to get in touch with the oldest daughter to see if he can get the pink slip back so he can have the car towed to a junk yard. I tell my dad the odds are not good that the daughter still has the document and if she did have it she probably wouldn’t be willing to rummage through accumulated papers attempting to find it. He concedes I’m probably right. He then says he’ll have some of the scrap metal collectors from Juarez come by and cut the car up with an acetylene torch and sell the individual pieces as scrap metal, something he had done in the past with other cars.

After he’s brought me up to date on the progress with the building, he begins to describe another crises he’s facing. One involves a dear family friend, one that I knew quite well when I was growing up. Now in her late 80s, she is a widow living with a grand daughter that has a penchant for spending money on parties and drugs. The grand daughter has been a constant source of trouble for the elderly widow who within the last year has survived a heart attack that everyone believe should have killed her, yet she made a full recovery as if by shear force of will she had decided not to die; she still had unfinished business on this earth. Dad has come to the widow's rescue on a number of occasion, paying bills to prevent the shut off of utilities to the widow’s house, helping the widow with home repairs, and when she was still driving, he kept her car running. He is now faced with trying to talk some sense into the widow’s grand daughter to prevent further uncontrolled spending that could throw them all into greater financial trouble.

We end the conversation with a discussion of his will. He tells me that he has gotten one drawn up and had distributed all of his earthly possessions to my sisters and me. Such talk would once unsettle me. Now it no longer has this affect. It now makes clear how well ordered my father’s life has become. And it makes me realize how poorly ordered my own life is. I suspect I’ve neglected this sort of planning precisely because I did not want to acknowledge that I had reached a stage in my life that I needed to bother with such detail. If my genes are as good as my parents, I can expect another twenty to twenty-five years. I’ll start thinking about the inevitable and I will begin to make plans accordingly, but for now I’d like to continue worrying over my parents’ health and marveling at their will and ability to endure and prosper.