Sadness around the household today. After waking up, Jessica told me Fred's son has passed away during the night. He had been diagnosed with metastatic cancer last year. They were in the process of moving him into hospice.
Jessica asked me if I would call Fred this afternoon, and I said gladly. I had been praying in my room for his son's soul, saying the Rosary several times. Fred is going to fly up to Cincinnati later today.
I love Fred tremendously. He was one of the few people I can talk to. He worked for many years as a Ford engineer in Ohio before retiring. He is a congenial man and gruff in his conservative look on life. He married Jessica's mother some time in the 1980s. He and Jessica's mother live down in Mesa at an RV park, where they own a permanent pre-fab home. We have breakfast with them pretty much every Sunday morning up here in Scottsdale.
I generally get along with men of his generation more than my own. There is something that happened to Americans right around the time I was born in the mid 1960s. We can't make friends and connect to people in a genuine way like older generations could do. I've known this my entire life. At one time I realized that the parents of my high school friends were much dependable as "friends" than the people my age, for whom friendship is something that comes and goes, and can be discarded. It was one of the things that made me realize early in my life, from childhood, that the world was a broken and lonely place, and for much of my life it has felt like that. I don't get how people just let friendships die, but they do, as if you can just order new friends online and have them delivered. Human relationship are commodified.
I guess I'm a little off topic, but since I didn't know Fred's son, I can't speak about him. I know he led a troubled life and had a difficult time taking care of himself, going through one addiction rehab program after another, and living in squalor.
Some days I cannot bear feeling the pain of people out in the world---all the pain and suffering, and the isolation and abandonment. Some days I can look out the window and almost see it out there, the desperation of lost souls, and in between them, the people who seem to be able to not care about it all, and how weird that seems. Some days every human contact feels like a gift of mercy. Some days it feels like we are all just holding on by our fingernails.
1 comment:
I just called Fred. He was packing for Ohio. He was very broken up about it, even though we had seen this coming for the last seven months, when he was diagnosed. Stage 4 of any cancer is typically a death sentence. I watched my father die that way. Like my father, Fred's son also did the "all in with chemo" track despite it offering very little but making his life miserable at the end, and even hastening his death. I call Stage 4 chemo, at least for adults, "hemlock". In my father's struggle, I saw him doing his duty facing death the right way. Fred's son, who had so neglected his body, did the right thing in the end with hospice. His brother even gave him one last cigarette, like a captured officer in wartime, I said. Or dying on the battlefield. "Here you go, solider," I said, imitating a scene from a famous western. Fred laughed. He got the movie reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRVopoG6q8
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