Death's Surprise

Some people might think it’s foolish to mourn the loss of someone you met only once—and on Zoom at that—but that is where I find myself. I only talked to Peter that one time. He was obviously suffering. He was pale, thin, and frail, and every so often his eyes would flutter, and his chin would tilt forward as he tried not to fall asleep. I knew even a thirty-minute Zoom meeting was costing him, and costing him dearly—this man who only had a month (at most) to live. You see, he had been told by his doctor that he was dying, which was why we were talking in the first place. He wanted to get his affairs in order and one of those affairs was finishing the book he was writing. And so, he had hired me through a ghostwriting agency to complete the task.

I had mainly spoken to Peter through the agency’s owner, who communicated Peter’s wishes to me. I started out by reading what he had written, which, for a non-writer, was surprisingly funny, poignant, and insightful. It was a collection of short vignettes and by reading it, I could capture a lot of his life which seemed to jump out onto the page. He liked sports. In fact, he had almost a holy devotion to football—something as a sports fanatic I could definitely respect. One of his stories was about how he set off to watch his favorite football team play a home game. He set off with plenty of time to spare, but the universe was against him as he got lost, was delayed by construction, and had difficulty finding parking. It was an experience that, I think, most of us could relate to, only he told it with a dry wit that gave me a few belly laughs. As I continued to read what he had written, I was amazed. Each of his stories spoke of adventure—some large, some small. His best story was about driving across the country with one of his best friends during his college years and the hilarity that ensued, resulting in a random table tennis game with some small-town locals at the end. It was the quintessential American tale. It spoke of the whimsical nature of youth and living live to the fullest. His writing had range. He also had a story that contemplated his demise, the ultimate ending and what it means to live with most of your life behind you rather than in front. It was melancholic. But also practical and insightful.

But then he up and died on me—on all of us—before we could complete the book. I felt it was a personal affront that he would have the audacity to leave a project unfinished. I should have suspected the worst when I got an email from the owner of the ghostwriting agency telling me that Peter had been hospitalized and we were suspended the worst. But somewhere my internal optimist told me that he would be back. He would fight this. Like a prize fighter he so admired he would get up again. Only he didn’t. He died about two weeks later, leaving a wife, a couple of kids—and, of course, an unfinished manuscript. I remember staring at the email surprised that Peter would have left things so… messy.

As a ghostwriter, you, of course, work with an elderly clientele. That’s the nature of the business. It’s both a privilege and a bit of a curse to be able to sit down with somebody and listen to everything: their heartbreak, their love, their passion, their triumphs, the little moments that make them tick, and what scares them. And when you work with an aging population, as is the way of the world, that they sometimes die on you. It’s just a fact of life, I suppose. I imagine hospice nurses feel the same way. I think it must be incredibly draining for the nurses when they lose a patient, no matter how sick they were, how much nature had taken its course, or even how much the patient wanted to die. It’s draining for me too when I lose a client. As someone like Neo, who, in the end of The Matrix, could see the code, I can see all the stories a person has wrapped up inside of them, both the often-told ones and the ones left unsaid. When I lose a client, I sometimes lie awake at night, looking up at the black ceiling and wondering why—even when we are constantly bombarded by death in stories, in the news, and in real life, why we aren’t more concerned about it. For some reason, our human brains aren’t logical enough to do the calculations. We keep getting back to a ‘do not compute’ error.

I remember my grandfather was approaching his 90^th birthday, and he had been diagnoses with cancer. It wasn’t something our family talked about a lot, as if naming it somehow gave it power. I would go visit him while he was doing his chemo. He was always a funny, stoic, principled man, but during chemo, he softened a bit and reminisced about the old days. I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate then, only that he seemed like a different person—not better or worse, only different.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the doctors weren’t aggressive in his treatment. I think they knew, even if I didn’t, that they were treating for quality of life, rather than quantity. I remember he needed a heart operation as his heart was failing him at the same time as the cancer was taking over his body. I only knew that everything was going to be fine; I was told so, so I wasn’t worried. I told myself it was routine even. I went to work (I was managing a Starbucks at the time, the late shift) and then sometime around seven or eight o’clock the phone rang. It was my father and he told me my grandfather had just died. I instantly felt numb. I remember gripping the phone tightly. I didn’t quite grasp the words coming from the other end. I couldn’t possibly imagine a world where my grandfather—or indeed anybody—was just gone. I sat in the back room and cried. I cried and then went back to work, to close up shop because I think that was what my grandfather would have done.

That night, my family all gathered at my aunt’s place, just up the road for I suppose a sense of community, of togetherness. We were all heartbroken. We searched for old photos on our phones and told old stories. It was comforting. We were all deeply in pain, but we wouldn’t let each other cry. That stuff was done in private. I’m not sure how long we stayed there but I don’t recall staying late. And then we all went our separate ways.

Much later, my sister, always the practical one in the family, had said he was a ninety-year-old having heart surgery. Of course there was danger. Of course there was a change he was going to die. There is nothing routine about that. She’s right of course, but somehow, I had gotten into my head that there was no risk. That everything would work out.

I have a theory about this. If we really could contemplate our own deaths, then perhaps we would live a lot differently. For one, we wouldn’t be so scared—god, we are always so scared to do the littlest thing. We would travel a lot more, give our heart freely, and not stay in that same shitty job for years upon years. Because there is an end in sight—and yet, we somehow look away from it.

I don’t think Peter was scared—he was an engineer by trade and thought very logically, very practically as a result. He knew his time was up. He had calculated it. He wasn’t one to waste effort in wishing things were different or cursing the sky for his misfortune.

One of the longer pieces I edited for Peter was called “Murder in the Dog Park,” which was partly fiction, partly fact, but full of his classical wit and humor. The only thing was that it had a bit of a lame duck ending and I emailed him my thoughts. He said that he had a better ending—a knock-your-socks-off ending that was a hundred times better, and he would scour his hard drive for it. I eagerly awaited this ending. Only it never came. He emailed back that it he had saved it on his phone, only he had dropped it in the swimming pool.

I was sad that I would never get to uncover what he truly had intended, just another lost story. But I suppose we can’t keep them all, can we? There is no infinite database, no person to hold onto all the memories like in the book The Giver by Lois Lowry. What is one more lost story? I guess it depends on who you ask.

But I can still grieve over a lost story, over what could have been great. Sometimes I imagine what that ending could have possibly been. Would it have been Agatha Christie-esque? Would it have truly been as monumental as he said? Perhaps. We have a tendency in our minds to romanticize what could have been, thinking it’s always better than what we have. Another fallacy of human nature. If only we could do one more thing… Maybe no matter how imperfect things are, they are also perfect because as much as we like polish and shine, perfectionism isn’t what makes life worth living.

I haven’t spoken to Peter’s widow, so I don’t know whether she will bind them in a beautiful book as intended. Perhaps they are just as good when printed on US letter-size paper using a blotchy LaserJet printer.