COMMENTARY

By David Shapiro

I don't dwell on my mortality often, but it was difficult not to give it thought as I lay in a hospital bed for a couple of days last week with little else to do.

There was no serious threat of death — just a routine infection that needed to be controlled before it lit up my multiple sclerosis.

But you never know with these things, especially in these days after poor Terri Schiavo, when every nurse entering the room is waving an advance-care directive for you to sign.

A sensible precaution, certainly, but it makes you wonder if they know something about your chances that you don't.

Hospitals are full of the sounds of despair. A woman down the hall from me spent all of her waking hours wailing, "Help me!" She obviously thought she was near her end and was scared out of her mind about it.

I kept hearing a line by bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins: "I ain't afraid of dying; it's just that you have to stay dead so long."

And I thought about how my dad died just shy of his 65th birthday. I always felt he'd willed it; his life insurance expired at 65, and he wanted to leave Mom comfortable.

It wasn't much of a life he left. A massive stroke years earlier had taken the left side of his brain and the right side of his body.

Dad had issued explicit instructions that his life not be artificially prolonged, so I was surprised when I arrived in Los Angeles after his stroke to find him in critical care writhing in restraints, with a respirator down his throat, a feeding tube up his nose and a catheter draining his bladder.

His mind was destroyed, with no hope of recovery, and doctors said he was too weak to breathe without life support.

But the family wasn't ready to let him go. By the time we consented to removing the tubes, he'd regained enough strength to breathe on his own and lived another four years pushing his wheelchair around the VA hospital with his one good arm, always trying to bum cigarettes.

I figured it didn't matter anymore and brought him a carton whenever I visited.

I'd take him driving on those visits, but he communicated little except to point with animation when we passed funeral homes.

Mom visits Dad's grave on his birthday, their anniversary and Father's Day. Instead of flowers, she leaves him a cigarette.

He's buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery in Griffith Park, along with many other departed members of our family. I know it's disappointing to Mom that my siblings and I won't likely take our rest there.

I wonder who will visit these graves when she's gone, the last of her generation.

Will these people I loved become forgotten names in a big cemetery, or will somebody from a younger generation assume responsibility for keeping their memories alive?

A hot wind blew the day my wife drove me home from the hospital. I saw a kid walking his bike up the hill to his home, his legs too tired to pedal any more.

You could feel the gritty mixture of dirt and perspiration that settled in the creases of his forehead and irritated his sunburn.

I waved to the kid and wished him a good journey, and in that instant I realized that the point is to cherish whatever time we're given for our journeys through life — and not spend it wishing to begin that long trek up the hill all over again.

I think that was all Dad wanted.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net.