My father died this week - on Monday, 2nd February, to be precise. He had been ill, with dementia, for many years. Yesterday, whilst looking for something on my computer, I came across a letter I'd sent him in October 2005 which, on reading back through it, reveals that the early signs of dementia were already beginning to make themselves felt.
For the past few years, he really hasn't been 'him' - there has been a sort of shambling shadow of the man I once knew, but none of the person; the personality; the humour; the wisdom - all stripped away by that dreadful disease (actually, I think it's worse for those 'left behind' than for the sufferer - he seemed blissfully unaware). In the end, he came down with bronchial pneumonia, and lasted about another 24 hours, sleeping away quite peacefully. It has, as you can probably imagine, caused a whole spectrum of emotions, and a lot of pondering and remembering.
The main emotion has actually been relief that the torture (torture for his family at least - watching him slowly 'leave us', and then trying to care for the 'empty shell') is finally over. I haven't actually felt particularly sad, other than just in odd moments. At one point I felt sad because I wasn't feeling sad (if that makes any sense at all!) - sad that I'd done almost all my mourning while he was still, at least nominally, alive.
Towards the latter part of the week, I'd mainly got on to remembering happy times - things we'd said and done together and as a family - and looking back, perhaps with a little wistfulness and a sense of dampness around the eyes, but mainly just enjoying the memories. But there was something else which, when I stared hard at it, I knew was really bothering me.
It was a bit like staring down the barrels of a loaded shotgun.
Scary.
And that is what I want to talk about.
My paternal grandmother also died of dementia. And my aunt, my dad's sister, seems to be heading the same way. It doesn't appear to be a problem which afflicts my mother's side of the family at all. So my thought was that, if I live that long, I've 'got two chances' as they say around here. And I was terribly afraid that I would go the way of my father's side of the family, and cause those I love the same pain and anguish in my final years, even if I myself, by that stage, was unaware of what I was, unwittingly, doing to them. I think that fear has been lurking, somewhere deep in my psyche, since Gran died, over thirty years ago.
And a sort of refrain had been playing around in my head in recent weeks and months: I hope I die before I get old.
Not nice.
Rather morbid.
I was reminded of a speech in one of the appendices to 'The Lord of the Rings', in which Aragorn, King of Gondor, is talking to his wife, the half-elf Arwen (who has 'opted' for mortality):
"Lady Undómiel," said Aragorn, "the hour is indeed hard, yet it was made even in that day when we met under the white birches in the garden of Elrond where none now walk. And on the hill of Cerin Amroth when we forsook both the Shadow and the Twilight this doom we accepted. Take counsel with yourself, beloved, and ask whether you would indeed have me wait until I wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless. Nay, lady, I am the last of the Númenoreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep."
Don't get me wrong - suicide was never an option, where I was concerned, but there was a part of me which was envious, in a way, of Aragorn, who had been given the choice of when to die. The 'unmanned and witless' bit is the bother.
This doesn't fit very well with the sort of triumphant thinking one associates with Christians facing death… The actual death bit, it has to be said, doesn't bother me that much - it's the start of another great adventure. What's been bothering me is how I get from here (hale and hearty, with most of my faculties pretty much intact) to there (dying and being raised to eternal life) without, along the way, messing up everyone else's lives.