Aspects of mortality

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

All this mortality stuff tends to pile up like drifts after a blizzard.
Jimmy's dying comes in the middle of my own medical issues this fear of death that we all sort of get at this time of life when some medical condition rears its ugly head.
I have had prostate issues for several years and at the beginning largely ignored the condition or went to the doctor and he ignored it missing the initial symptoms.
When finally, I decided maybe I should see a specialist the one my doctor sent me two seemed so unreliable that I never kept the appointment.
Finally I was feeling so badly I went to the doctor over other issues and found that I had a huge spike in blood pressure and this put me on the road to salvation, making me determined to check myself out before somebody else -- such as God decided that I should check out.
I just had to do the whole ritual not Just prostate and went through all of those tests doctors suggest we do at this age: chest x-rays, stress test, even the colonoscopy. I made an appointment and kept it with urologist in Bayonne and I was well on my way to the first of a series of tests when I got a call saying that the doctor was shutting down his office.  He apparently had come down with a terminal illness of his own.
At this point I lost my job and my insurance and so had to delay again -- the next move finally finding a urologist in Kearny to continue the test.
And what a horrible test they were. The first of these was a camera up my penis which naturally I mentioned to Jimmy during our long phone conversation a few weeks afterwards. But at the time we were talking about the small inconveniences that our age had provided and the shadow of mortality that hung over us not as individuals but as a generation.
That part of our conversation was largely an evaluation of where we were at the moment and how we had managed to survive so far.
Although Jimmy admitted to some relatively minor issues, he seemed fairly good health. We were both concerned about Garrick who has not taken care of himself since we were kids and appeared to be in the worst shape of all of us.
Death did not enter into our thinking perhaps because we still lived in the twenty-five-year-old shadow of Frank's death back in 1995 and did not want to admit our own mortality.
Since the results of the test indicated a possibility of cancer I had to go through the next phase which is a biopsy -- something I told Jimmy I really did not want to do but I knew that if I did not I would regret not knowing.
Since this was due to be done in January, we agreed we would put off a meeting until after we all knew where we were and then we would reconnect not in his trailer - which he said was a mess - but someplace else like a restaurant.
I got the news of his death late last Thursday and so when I drove to the doctor for this test yesterday that shadow also hung over me as morbid and terrible as the one Frank had for years after his death.
I couldn't get it out of my head that we had finally reached that time in life when we are mortal,  each of us doing what the generations before of us had done watching our numbers diminish one at a time and the worst suffering wasn't to the ones who had perished but the ones who survived.
The biopsy turned out as bad an experience as the camera up my penis and I kept thinking the whole time of the Spanish Inquisition, a metaphor Jimmy would have appreciated and would have thought funny if the end result did not seem potentially grim.
 I thought for a while about driving out to the old neighborhood to Little Falls in the hill and the laundry, but the hour was late, and I did not want to get caught up in the rush and so I drove home instead.