Dying Inside

Death. It’s as unavoidable as taxes.

 

It's also something nobody likes to talk about. I mean, dead is dead; what's the fun in that?  No way around it, though, I will be at death’s door… someday. (Although the longer I'm around, the nearer someday seems). As for now, I’d rather not think about being invited in.

 

But in the bottomless hours of a restless night, death often comes-a -calling anyway. Not to claim me, but to keep me honest; offering a friendly reminder in the middle of a nocturnal convulsion of lively brain waves, that sooner or later it’ll be back for keeps. However, though I’m keenly aware of my pending earthly expiration, I'm not all that fearful of dying. I know my eternal destiny and Hell has no foothold there. I think it's the process of dying that scares me.

 

I don't want to suffer or be in a hospital, sequestered away in a strange place and being looked after by strangers. I want to go quick and peaceful, too, like in my sleep, and in the familiar surroundings of home; maybe after a really, really good day. Or how ‘bout a nice quick one-car accident heading home on rain-slicked I-80 some night? No fuss, no muss, no taking out anyone else. Just my truck and me; off to eternity. As an exit, yeah, I could live with that.

I've decided I don't want to go in the spring or summer either. I don't want to die when the world is coming alive and active. I want to go when everything else is cold and dying, too, like in the dead of winter. And while it'd be nice to hang around as long as I can, I sure as heck don't want to outlive my welcome or everyone I know. I want someone around to remember I was here. I don’t want to live so long past my prime that the general consensus becomes- “Gee, I thought he already was dead.”

Naturally, though, none of this is my call. I'm pretty sure God's got the final say. But I think the doom and gloom of "the end' comes to me so often on sleepless nights because it's been hanging around close enough to notice since I was 3 years old.  My brother died that year. Then after Larry, a Grandma passed when I was 10, an uncle at 12. Then both Grandpa's croaked within four months of each other when I was 16. That was the year my friend Jim Hinton died, too, and not to diminish any of the others that one seemed to hit a lot closer to home. I couldn’t seem to shake it off; instead I allowed it to shake me to the core. Jim’s death haunted me for a long time.   

 

The fall semester of my junior year in high school was winding down and Christmas vacation was in sight and Jim was planning a day of duck hunting over the break. He and I weren't super close, but we sat together in the back corner of English class with three other dudes, plus Jim ran track and I played soccer. So in addition to being classmates, as "jocks" too, we crossed paths often. And on the last day of class before the holidays, Jim asked me and the other guys from our English clique if we wanted to join him to shoot ducks. I'd never been hunting before and had never fired a gun. But it sounded like a good time of male bonding- with firearms, no less. Shoot, if everybody else was going, I wanted to go, too.

Jim’s preferred hunting spot was a marshy spot out in the Antelope area behind, and not too far from the Roseville Rail Yard. In those days, Antelope wasn’t nearly as built over as it is today. In fact, Antelope Road was just a two-lane country road with almost nothing on it. Once past a 7-11, it emptied into a bland rural landscape of empty fields dotted with live oaks. But there was also a murky unnamed pond (probably also paved over now) that, in the wintertime, migrating ducks often used as a pit stop. It’s all concrete and houses now, but back then you could fire a shotgun out there without attracting too much attention.

The hunting excursion was planned for Thursday December 23. Even before then, though, it became pretty obvious the outing wasn't going to happen. At least it wasn’t going to happen for me because I’d come down with a cold. Of course I’d have gone regardless, but Mom—who’d never been keen on me having fun even when I was healthy- stopped me in my tracks. “There is no way”, she fumed, ”that you’re going to ruin the family’s plans for Christmas” (We had to go to LA on Christmas Day) “So you’re not going anywhere until then.”

 

Apparently there would be no furlough granted to shoot ducks with my friends. She thought that was barbaric and pretty much put me under house arrest. My orders were to get well. Or else. I heard later I wasn’t the only one who had to back out; just the one with the pansiest excuse. Jim, though, apparently had no trouble finding other takers besides me and the crew from English to accompany him, because he went on his merry way without us.

 

On the day of the duck hunt, the weather was pretty crappy; cold and clammy and so foggy, you couldn't see across the street. But the conditions were ideal for duck hunting- or so I’d been told and would’ve liked to experience for myself. However, I was still stuck at home and hacking up hair balls. At five minutes after six a.m., as Jim and his two fill-in hunting companions made their way to their destination, still dark as night with the ground shrouded in a thick tulle fog, and only a few miles from the pond, Jim chose to try and beat a freight train crossing the tracks.

 

And didn’t make it.

 

I didn’t hear about it, though, till the next day, when I read the front page headline in the afternoon paper, 3 Local Teens Die in Traffic Mishap. Underneath the caption were pictures of the three boys as they'd been in life.  I didn't recognize the other two names. One was only in eighth grade; the other from a different high school. Those two died at the scene. Jim lingered till a few minutes after midnight, which was Christmas Eve. I was surprised he made it that long, looking at the picture at the pulverized car. But the shock sucked the air out of me. I’d just seen him in English class less than a week earlier, and spoken to him just two days ago. How could he be dead? At 16?

Yet as a brooding teenager, though the accident had nothing to do with me, I managed to quickly shift gears from grief to guilt, and make it so. I talked myself into believing that if I'd been well enough to talk Mom into going with Jim and the boys, I'd have been in that car, too, and should've been just as dead as my classmate and his passengers. So why wasn't I?  I was asked to go and wanted to go, but circumstances intervened and kept me home. Nevertheless they were dead and I was not.

 

Was it simply their time? No, I rejected that as being too easy, too empty and too lame to explain why Jim and the other two were no longer with us. Maybe things just happen and there are no answers. Still, I wondered had I not been sick that morning, and Jim had come to our house and picked me up, if that extra time might have been enough to keep him from getting to the crossing at the same time as the train? Who knows? 

 

In this life, I suppose I'll never know. But it took a good chunk of time, mind games and second guessing to finally let it go. I didn’t discuss how I felt or about the accident with either Mom or Dad, except only in passing; that I knew one of the boys in the accident. They said that was too bad, especially with it being so close to Christmas. But there was a plane to catch and the holidays to celebrate. So off we went. Besides, boys don’t cry, boys don’t show emotion, boys don’t talk about stuff. Boys suck it up and move on, or we're supposed to.

 

Christmas in LA was a blur. I did the hanging out thing with the cousins, made small talk with the aunts and uncles; pretended all was good. Unfortunately, we were in LA long enough that I missed Jim’s funeral. I would’ve liked to have gone. Back then funerals didn't freak me out as much as they do now. In fact, I’d already been to two that same year alone for my two grandfathers. But until that December, I always thought a memorial service was for old people like them. Not for a kid in my English class.

It was a lot to take in. I felt on overload, but a quiet, desperate overload. It seemed impossible that somebody my age, who I’d eaten with, discussed the importance of nouns and pronouns with, laughed with when he farted in class and shot baskets with at lunch, was gone. Just like that. It simply couldn’t be. Missing the memorial sucked, too. It would’ve been nice to have a chance to say good-bye.

 

Whenever a young person dies unexpectedly today, grief counselors seem to come crawling out of the woodwork. The kids left behind get cocooned and gently shepherded through the grieving process. Often, at the school or roadside where they died, make-shift memorials spring up in their honor, practically overnight. And I think those are good things, but none of that happened when Jim Hinton and the other two kids died. We went back to school on that first Monday in January and it was like Jim had never been there. Like nothing had changed. There were no announcements or acknowledgments that the accident even happened. I guess since it took place over the holidays and the funerals had already occurred, the school probably felt it didn’t need to deal with it anymore. That it was better to make everything seem normal, so life could get back to normal. But life wasn’t normal.

 

Miss Stewart, our teacher, was the only one who used that first day English hour to talk about it. But it was so surreal to be in that room, in our corner of the classroom and see that empty desk; the desk Jim had been sitting at less than 3 weeks before. And now he was in the ground. And but for the miracle of a messy cold, I might have been there too. But none of the other teachers in any of the other classes that day, or in future days, made any reference to Jim's passing. It happened; it was over. Move on. It was like they were trying to pretend it didn’t happen.

But it did happen. And it didn’t stop. After Jim there were four others.  First there was Kirt Huber who, along with Gary McKenzie, had been a constant childhood chums during our days at Kingswood Elementary. He perished in a violent two-car drunk driving crash. Next was Barbara Diffin, a girl I knew from church. She was taken on her way to a Tuesday morning Bible study, her car t-boned in half by a trucker who ran a red light. Stan Ford, who I’d known since kindergarten, I heard he o.d’s. Finally Donny Smith, a buddy from the freshman baseball team, died instantly when he hit a tree head on late at night, going way too fast and missing a curve. 

 

So counting the carnage, between the years I was 16 and 18, seven people I knew or were close to had all gone out into eternity.  But like having an IV drip of Novocain going directly into my soul, each successive tragedy just seemed to increase the dosage. I grew numb to more bad news.  Wow that’s awful but, God, who’s next?  People in my own peer group were dropping like flies. Though each loss was an unforgettable lesson on the fragility of life and a healthy reminder that young people are no more immune from a quick end than anybody else, I was really tired of people dying; especially people my own age.

 

But the ‘lessons’ validated the suspicions I’d had since early childhood, that death seemed to be stocking me. Seemingly always nearby, I couldn’t get away from it. And I began looking over my shoulder, wondering if it was getting close enough to take me, too. I mean, I’d lived a long time- by 1973 practically 18 years. Maybe that was enough. Like some of my friends, maybe that was all I was going to get. And if so, I guess I was at peace with it. But I was also afraid. Afraid death would always be on my tail and would always be chasing me. And since I'd only be able to out-run it for so long, I thought I better live while I could.

 

Yet I couldn’t even do that right. As it turned out, mostly I just made a mess.

 

Thankfully, God's cleaning it all up now, though I'm still a bundle of contradictions and disarray.  At least death doesn't scare me anymore. In fact, I’ve looked it in the eye- often- and when it finally does come, I think I'll be ready.  In the meantime, I really think I’ve got the dying part down pretty good now.  It's just the living part that, so often, still confounds me.