All This Time

The morning bird song gives me no relief. As I lie dying, I study the composition of my face mirrored in the hospital glass. It is possible to recognise the strange monster looking back at me amidst wires and nasal tubes; my skin still holds the texture and tone of something human, although I begin to sense something more abstract, a withering, wimpering self portrait of a creature fading across time. The sun starts to set around my five o’clock shadow, bone frame. I close my eyes and go to my happy place—surfing the waves. Death is like this, you know; it’s waiting for that one nice entry in a race against time to catch that last curl of the day, because it’s getting dark and I can tell by the shadows growing in thickets that there’s only about twenty minutes of daylight left. I gave it a shot, this life. Rode the waves, kicked my way out of deep waters when things got tough, yet always managed somehow to paddle ashore to safety. Not this time. No, this time is different. Now the sky is closing in and it feels like something big is marching straight at me under ominous clouds and I am painfully aware that not only is time running out, but that only you, not me, will get out alive.

Then comes the big kahuna, and there’s no escaping it; soon I will be falling because, paddle as hard as I might, this big beast has my name on it and it’s coming to take me with it to the tenth dimension. How do I tell my mother, who labored all day long just to give me a life, will outlast me? How do I tell my father who worked the gold mines of South Africa just to put food on our plates that his child will soon be joining him in heavenly skies, waste away to nothing, eat no more? That I will meet his beloved ancestors? I stare down at the result, unable to meet my doctor’s gaze. I feel nothing and everything at the same time. The world is crashing down around me, walls crumbling, everything in ruins. Oh, once upon a time I thought I could be King Dennis for a day, a place where possibilities grew in pretty gardens and the sun shone endlessly in a bright white light. Now I look and there is nothing, even hope floats away like an evanescent gas turning to vapour in an arctic summer.

In a dream state I conjure Dali’s clock and wonder: is it melting, or am I? In the persistence of my memory my sculpture withers to a lithograph, becoming lines and outlines of something less full as the disintegration of the self takes hold. Time is running, running and running out. To where, I do not know. I am deep in the meditation of my own incumbent collapse, melting like that surrealist clock, melting like camembert in the sun. Does camembert too, contemplate its life as it melts? Or does it just melt into nothingness, cease to exist, to be wiped off plates and tongues, to be forgotten? Conscience seems to be our worst human affliction, the burden of that thing we carry on our backs like lead weights, unable to make any sense of.  

The door opens, and a nurse enters quietly with her charts, checking for vitals. I want to scream at her that she doesn’t have to tiptoe around me like that, I’m not dead yet! I don’t give a damn about vitals, the only thing going on here is my vital need to understand it all, make peace before I go. She nods politely, gives one of those sad, pathetic half smiles reserved for the elderly or half dead and departs to join the other white coats in the hall. They talk in hushed tones about me, occasionally regarding my nearly dead carcass through the glass. 

Whoever once complained there were never enough hours in a day never mentioned how many abundant hours there are when one is staring down into the abyss of death. Tick tock, tick tock, that’s how my heart beats now, and I silently mark each beat in the countdown to my death. I wonder if in my heart sits a secret pendulum swinging back and forth, growing weaker each time until it eventually loses power altogether before coming to a complete stop. That’s when the white coats will return, assemble around my bedside and discuss the hour and manner of my death, record it in very white books accurately depicting the concept of time.  

Time of vitals check:1.47pm. 

Time of last endutracheal intubation: 3.10pm

Time of respiratory failure: 7.07pm. 

Time of death: —-undetermined.

The persistence of memory, Salvidor Dali says—for without memory we would have no concept of yesterday as being different to today, no inkling of the concept of time, nor any occasion in our memory banks to mark it by. It seems strange to me now, but the truth is I have taken it all for granted, this life, this time. Everyone thinks we have all the time in the world until it is about to be taken away—then we start clutching at it, and all those times that I thought it didn’t matter and that I could just put it off til tomorrow, becomes a desperate grab for now—because the truth is that tomorrow might never come. And now it is all coming to an end. What is the point of it all? What really happened in that 60-odd gap in time between my birth and…? 

My entropy is playing itself backwards in time now like a puddle of water turning a cloud of smoke into unburnt wood, a video of my life, reels of memories playing backwards or forwards at the push of a button. Only I no longer hold the remote, and whoever is playing the movie is playing it privately, just for me. We sit quietly in an empty theatre, shoulder to shoulder saying nothing, because there is no need for words, no need for explanation. It is all there. School uniforms and grazed knees, six ring binders and girl crazy teens; Christmas presents under the tree, holidays and barbecues and Saturday morning cartoons and Mother’s home baked pies. Pummeled by a boy who spittles on my face. Young sex in cupboards, no grace. Here I am swimming with dolphins, then plunging into icy cold Hungarian baths and riding train lines in between European hotels; fast forward and my tired arms rock baby to sleep, eyelids so heavy and poopy diapers that breed and multiply into the poop infested swamp of fatherhood. Fast forward again and I’m shuffling child into school juggling backpack and cut lunch, briefcase full of documents while gulping down a Starbucks latte; a few more years on and I’m on my knees by my father’s bedside, weeping as he peacefully slips past kidney failure to someplace heavenly. Flipping through divorce papers and then my Dark Man mask falls and I’m again careening down an aisle with someone new; it’s a Roman drama to a honeymoon to wherever you fancy, honey—Paris is always lovely this time of year. Now I know for sure that I’ll never finish Ulysses and all those times I gazed out windows to pastoral views to contemplate The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying were wasted moments I should have saved up for this moment in time. You never know how much time you have until you start melting like the camembert clockface. Thats when you know it’s over. In the mother of all broken promises I wheeze my way out to the finish line. 

Remember that time when we were little and you ran through the garden sprinklers, tripped on the hose, your little floral sundress dancing in the breeze, the concern growing across my face that you had hurt yourself, grazed your knee—when all the while you were just angry that you were the clumsy younger sibling, and tripping over like that had made you feel dumber than me? So you took to my smirk like an angry beast, charged headfirst after me and pushed me flying off that swing— and there I lay, quiet as a mouse on my back, broken jaw and contemplating the stars on high as everything moved around me? Well here I am again, immovable in the macroscopic celestial, and there is nothing else for me to do but be contemplating particles of time as slowly we drift away from one another. And whether I drift left or right is of no consequence, it is that it is time irreversible and it is this irreversibility, which is what will be my last experience as I arrow towards death. Time reversal symmetry and options are no longer, and all my objections forthcoming become insignificant at a low level fundamental truth, as Loschmidt himself dances around lost in his own paradox, and my hurtling towards the grim reaper is not linear but a universal causation of molecular chaos beyond my control. Then the painful realisation hits: I was never in control. I was just moving through transient systems in time, just like you and the word fate was never anything more than just a pretty name we give to a bunch of flowers we do not know the name of. And your floral sundress keeps spinning in the breeze, and now I see the mix of jealousy and resentment plastered all over your face that I never slowed down or paused long enough to see before, and suddenly it all looks so different to me now. And that is why you turned away. That is why you disconnected the phone, lost my number, blocked my email, deleted me while I was still here. And that is why you kneel by my bedrail now, your tears soaking my hospital gown with regret for all the time lost, all the time we will never find again. Grief comes crossing our path in the shape of a white butterfly, and I am torn between wanting to stay and wanting to go— and I want to scream at you and yell and hug you and never let go of you the way you let go of me, my sibling.

In the spirit of uncertainty and how little I know of the world still, and even as an older man facing death, I am realising I know one thing in life, and that is that I know nothing. Sixty-six years on this damned mortal coil and I still cannot understand half the mistakes I’ve made or why I have ended up this lonely old sod of a man with no one by his bedside in my final days except for my wife and estranged sister now dishing up her own guilt offering, the one who never had any time for me.

As I lie dying, it is Faulkner, Addie Bundren and all my muses who come to life. These are my real friends. Dickinson whispers her secrets to help me understand that, “..because I could not stop for death, He kindly stop/s for me—the carriage holds but just ourselves and immortality,” and I feel the direct promise to be wild, the promise to be finally free. Death, I must say, feels exalting. I have not heard a fly buzz yet, nor seen the King in the room; but if I stay still for long enough I can make out the faint thrum of ancient drums calling me from a higher place. Wallace Stevens, dying on swallows wings, appears and promises me an imperishable bliss as I fly “downward to darkness on extended wings”; and in this moment I also realise I am the Pulitzer I never won, the poems I never finished, the cake I refused to eat, the man who couldn’t love, or at least love properly. 

And now I must be in the home stretch, because there is Plath pointing south, mouthing to me her reminder that dying is an art, and like everything else, I must do it exceptionally well. I rise out of the ashes to unpack all of my mistakes, to try this thing again. 

Resurgam! Resurgam! Fluctuat nec mergitor! I cannot call, I cannot even whisper. Oh, dying man in hospital gown, you do not fit, for I had imagined something far more dramatic in my final soliloquy, like Marie Antoinette’s oxygen stealing corset constricting me in my final hours, neatly juxtaposed against a lifeless body, headless corpse. Headroll.

What if I should fall asleep, slip under? I begin to play the bargaining game; I should have avoided the fast food, waited for the wedding feast, instead of consuming the junk—the all-consuming, time wasting fucking junk! God, please give me one more chance, I promise I’ll go back and make everything right and I won’t eat junk food and I won’t reject that homeless guy outside the pharmacy and I won’t be that selfish son-of-a-bitch hell bent on freewheeling nomad adventures neglecting my wife and child and all I hold dear. I’ll pray, go to church, do whatever You want me to do, and I won’t take time or money or people or my life for granted. I knock at the door. I’m begging. There is no answer.

I’m running out of time now, or it is running out of me. 

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; for now hath time made me his numbering clock, my thoughts are minutes and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes! The outward watch whereto my finger like a dial’s point is pointing still.” 

Oh Bard, you know me as well as Richard II! 

I greet her then; she comes to the door to meet me. Death is the mother of beauty mystical, and she wears no Louis Vuitton and has no need for jewels because she is the jewel. And to think: all this time I feared her, I feared death—and it kept me from being truly alive. My God, she is beautiful! And now here comes Grace, and her friend Gratitude, and I realise they too have been here all this time: in the morning song of birds, in the gentle breeze, the beauty of verdigris sculptures and cerulean seas, azure nights, delighting in the giggles of babies on verdant lawns under picnic sunsets, vermillion lips so kissable even Love makes room for me. Celadon and mustard is the colour of my skin now, intermingled with injectable violet markings, an intravenous invasion and last ditch attempt to save me via modern medicine. I look across to Grace and Gratitude, who sit to the right just over my wife’s shoulder. My wife is silent, she says nothing but holds my hand to accompany me as far as she can on my jouney. I whisper to Grace.

“Why weren’t you there?”

“Oh we were with you, Dennis—we have always been with you in this flavourful journey under the stars! Did you not hear us on your tastebuds as you drooled in gratitude for your wife’s exemplary cooking? Did you not see Grace arrive on the scene when you were fired from that job? You were all ready to yell at your boss that day, launch a dedicated attack on him—and in the very last minute you had a change of heart, thanked him for the wealth of experience. And Gratitude, well she was with you when you held your father’s hand in his moment of passing, because if you’d gone to Atlanta as you’d intended you would have missed out on goodbyes? Gratitude was there for the birth of your baby, and gratitude was there that time you lost your wallet and a kindly stranger gave you money for the bus home. Right?

I nod quietly to the walls. All this time, and I never knew. Now the time has come. The King, be witnessed, is in the room. I’ve had my free will, and it’s time to sign my will away, sign off what portion of me be assignable. I crumble into smaller and smaller parts and come to see what lies beneath the surface, and it is so breathtakingly beautiful. It is God’s original work. I sigh and heave, working to turn exhalations into inhalations and back again in shorter and shorter segments. The nobility of time comes to kneel by me, and integrity arrives with it. The lights dim, and as darkness comes under my skin I see Reluctance turn to Grace and Grace turn to Gratitude and we all sigh the kind of deep understanding sigh that surpasses any amount of knowledge attainable on Earth. Past the howling winds and sideways snow I finally have the courage to say, give me your killers and your floral moons and I will defeat them all in the face of death; it is where trumpets call to herald my arrival past that place of fear to the lake of tranquility in a season that never ends but holds an unestimated fortune beyond the casket of broken things to welcome me in my newfound wholeness. In this butterfly gin hour I must say that tonight’s vision is splendid; I take my seat next to divine love who has patiently waited for this love child to reappear in the lost child once buried under a mountain of life altering corrupted software. A warm feeling blankets my soul and I am a baby once more, back in my mother’s arms to be cradled and rocked to sleep. It is so heavenly that I hear the morning birdsong now, and their sound fills me up and carries me forth in love for all the yesterdays and tomorrows to come until the end of time.