[Pardon the sight the following words might invoke in you, especially if you’re young – I’m writing this with a transparent soft plastic nose & mouth mask hooked up by tubes to a nebulizer, a compressor device that aerates liquid medication into a mist that I inhale via mouth to my lungs.] I have had to confront the issue of mortality in a more corporeal way in the last two weeks when I was struck by a tornado, a figure of speech that resembles the feeling I had when trying to pedal my bike up a very slight incline. I ran out of breath fast, my quads lost all power to pedal, and I had to stop the normal course of my life. I have sought explanation for the sudden fatigue syndrome and gotten answers that I’m living with. The answers are tolerable and have been accepted by me. My lungs need help recuperating from 84 years of urban living, 25 years of smoking (25 yrs ago) and 50 years of marijuana addiction (halted temporarily six weeks ago). I have also sought some kind of relief from trying to accept the certainty of death during the last five years when joining a Unitarian Universalist church. I haven’t learned much so far except that perhaps serving others, and serving the just moral arc of the universe, might help someone feel better about themselves by improving the lives of others. That’s not working too well for me so far. But this meeting with what I feared was the grim reaper who ultimately controls my destiny has brought me into another swampy area that holds some nebulous promise of solace. While reckoning at the periphery of my life’s fate, I decided to reorganize my dvd collections of ten years of recordings off television broadcasting – films, interviews, politics, health news, documentaries, performances etc. I didn’t count them but I estimate I have 500 discs with 4 hours of many recordings on each. I sorted through them year by year, using my halfway detailed written notations on each recording made contemporaneously with the recording on ten Staples pads of ruled paper. I think I stored in boxes marked by the year of recording 350 discs and saved 150 for memorable complete films and significant interviews (especially Obama moments of which there were many during my ten years of recording, thank you Barack & Michelle for being the best America can produce, essential in these times when we experience the worst of America). I came across one film that has been my favorite for a decade or more, my fearful favorite because it deals, among other human events, with the death of one man, not dissimilar to myself, who is mercy-killed during the course of the film. The film is called Les Invasions Barbares or The Barbarian Invasions from 2003. It won the best Foreign Film Academy Award that year. It’s French Canadian written ’n directed by Denys Arcand. Thank you. The central male character is a professor of history in his 70s and the organ he has abused in the arc of his life is his liver. I think there’s only one of those. He has abused it beyond repair and he’s dying in the one month course of the film. His son lives and works in London in high-flying investment banking, his Bohemian daughter is on a sailboat in the Pacific Ocean, and his estranged wife is living apart in this Montreal story. The wife affectionately orchestrates his admission to hospital, summoning their children and attends to him with a resigned love throughout this final month of his life. The successful son flies home right away and gets into the usual son-father confrontations, but the wife/mother makes the son know how attentive the father had been in the son’s youth, and the son resolves to do all he can to help his father through his final ordeal. One of the man’s mistresses’s daughter is heroine-addicted and she is enlisted to treat the man with heroin through the stresses of tests and hospital life. This educated attractive woman, during this month, ends years of addiction and goes on the methadone treatment; and she will also administer the morphine injections that will end his life. One of the fine transformations of several. The other is the reconciliation between father and son which has me crying right now making it difficult for me to write. The major final transformative event takes place in a two day weekend at a Canadian wilderness lake vacation house – the man, covered in blankets, lies on a chaise-lounge through the night out-of-doors with water forest and mountains around him. Each of his friends, several mistresses, wife, son, son’s fiancée and the methadone woman come to him on this makeshift funeral pyre to say their farewells and declare their love for him. They go inside. The woman comes with the tray of syringes. The son embraces his father and holds his hand. The man nods. The syringes begin the infusion to the iv connection in his other hand. He closes his eyes. The End for the man. The beginning for the woman.
