Children have no concept of time. Try telling a child to wait for an hour, a week, a month... they'll still ask you constantly if it's time yet. When we're young, the concept of death is also foreign. Maybe, if we're lucky, we only have to brave a few funerals, get kissed on the cheek by a few aunts and uncles and move on, eventually forgetting about the person who just passed (likely someone we didn't know very well or see very often) and the concept of death entirely. We live our life with glory and gusto, the way only children can.
When we get older, we realize just how omnipresent the specter of death really is. The reality of dying hits us... we really could go out to get the mail and get hit by a car. It's a statistically possibility. Some of us are better at hiding this fact that others. We go on about our days as though they aren't numbered, that there's not an invisible number over our heads. Others live with the threat every day, somewhere in the back of our heads. I live somewhere in the middle... the idea of death, of its absolutely finality, terrifies me but I'm usually able to look past it enough to function.
Today, I learned my childhood babysitter is dying. She's 96 years old and the majority of my formative years were spent with her... her handmade Christmas ornaments, her cards, her tiny TV that only showed PBS when I was over. She has been in the nursing home for a number of years and, over time, my visits have become few and far between due to growing up and falling even more completely out of the nest of youth. Tomorrow, I will go see her for what will probably be the last time. Honestly, I'm filled with dread and panic about it. My stomach is in knots. I've shed tears.
There is a difference between death being an invisible threat and watching it play out. Conversing with someone I love, both of us knowing that she is near death and that it will likely be the last time, makes me physically ill. How does one do that? What do you say? How do you encompass a lifetime of love into a single, last conversation? I'm not sure I know that answer.
What I do know is that today, my mortality is a solid figure. It's no longer a ghost or a shadow, a step behind.
