No Regrets, No Sympathy
There’s been a strange confluence of events this past week. It seems the repercussions are catching up their offenders. I will not go into all the details because this is not exactly an anonymous writing outlet for me, so let me talk about the father of a “friend”, who was not unlike my father.
My father, from what I can recall, smoked cigarettes and drank beer nearly his entire life. When he served in Vietnam, I am told that he wrote for the Stars and Stripes, though I’ve not been able to find any way to access back issues. He also did B&W photography for them as well; not only do I possess some pretty disturbing images from the war that he took, but I also have the Nikon F1 he brought back with him. My Dad spent 20+ years with a small town newspaper covering local politics. He had a column that people actually read and cared about. Having visited him and his friends many times at the Gazette, I remember the strange smell of the newsroom, the marble floors and the smoke-filled air (before the computers were installed in the 80’s). After making deadline for the day, usually between 2-3PM, Dad would walk down one block to “The Pro Shop”. There the smoking would continue, the beers would start to flow, greasy cheeseburgers for lunch and everyone would focus on the Chicago Cubs for a few hours or talk about the horse that probably wasn’t really a horse.
When he retired from the paper, my Dad did what any self-respecting writer would do, he opened his own bar. More days, weeks and years of cigarettes and beers, and those damned Cubs. “Maybe next year” his best friend Charlie would add, to keep things positive. Despite being estranged from my Dad nearly 16 years, my soon-to-be wife insisted that we find him and invite him to the wedding. We caught up with him, in his bar, right around my 30th birthday. It was more than strange, because we had just so much in common.
Dad was invited to the wedding in October and he came with his “girlfriend” of 25 years. We drank, danced and celebrated. About a month later, that cough he had, that wouldn’t go away wasn’t pneumonia. It was lung cancer and it was bad. Nearly 40 years of cigarettes, coffee, cigarettes, beer and cigarettes (in that order) caught up with my dad in the cold of January and took him out in a bad V.A. hospital in Iowa. Looking back, it was both surreal and so real, it’s hard to grasp. Here we were newlyweds, spending four sleep-deprived days in this hospital watching him try to get enough air into his lungs to survive.
At the funeral, I’ll bet 400 people came. Not just friends and family, but newspaper workers from many years ago and even local politicians that he wrote bad things about. Guess what he wrote must have been true because they didn’t seem to be holding any grudges and talked about what an ethical guy he was. Lots of customers from the bar came and then went; back to the bar I’m sure. Sadness and nostalgia mix well with alcohol. And while I met many people who knew my Dad and liked him and appreciated him, what I didn’t see was too many people really broken up or surprised that he died at the age of 53.
Earlier this week, a friend mentioned that he had not been getting any sleep because his father was on his deathbed. Another lifelong cigarette smoker enjoying their final breaths while saying good-bye. My friend talked about feeling bad because he felt that the time is now. That we would rather see his Dad pass, as opposed to be suspended further in his current state. I knew that feeling. When I sat in that hospital room staring at my Dad’s body, the one thing that crossed my mind was that he would have never wanted to be an “old” man. He would have never wanted to be a burden on someone else. He would never want to reach a point in his life where he had to rely on other people to do simple human things, like feed himself, bathe himself or other various functions.
Ultimately, I think both of our Dads lived the lives they wanted to live. It is easy to look back on someone’s life and make judgments. “If he would have smoked less, drank less, ate better, exercised more, etcetera and so forth, he could have lived until 70.” But that wasn’t the life either of these men chose. I’m sure they recognized that they were not living well (healthy), but they were living as they wanted. This wasn’t about quantity, but quality and happiness. So when someone lives with no regrets, it’s really hard to have much sympathy for the outcome, when it comes.
-pjc
A bit of lyrics from John Mellencamp’s – Your Life is Now:
See the moon roll across the stars
See the seasons turn like a heart
Your fathers days are lost to you
This is your time here to do what you will do
Chorus:
Your life is now, your life is now, your life is now
In this undiscovered moment
Lift your head up above the crowd
We could shake this world
If you would only show us how
Your life is now