An Untimely Death

A few weeks ago, my wife pointed out a paid obituary notice in the Times, mourning "the untimely death" of an 80-year-old man. I laughed. Eighty is not untimely! But then I remembered that I'm 78, and I stopped laughing.

When my father died 33 years ago, he was 77. At that time, I thought that a man who died at 77 had lived a long life, that 77 was not an unreasonable age at which to die. Seventy-seven was old, man, and old people die. Dad was pretty sick at the end, on dialysis for the last six months of his life, and reduced to "watching the grass grow," as he once told me. By the time he died, his quality of life was so poor that he probably would not have wanted to extend it, but I don't know if that's true because he never gave us advanced directives, either orally or in writing.

His last words to me were "I'm dying," uttered in the same matter-of-fact tone of voice he might have used to tell me the time. He was sitting up in bed, staring straight ahead as he said it, not looking at me at all. I watched his blood coursing through the tubes of his dialysis machine, not knowing what to say, so I said nothing. Ever since, I've felt I failed him, since I found nothing to say that could comfort him. I could at least have acknowledged what he said, but I was silent. Soon it was time for me to leave him, to return to New York, and to fly from there to Jerusalem. He was still sitting up, still staring straight ahead. I kissed the top of his head and said goodbye, but he didn't respond to my farewell, not even to look at me. He died two weeks later.

When I consider his suffering, I think that his death was timely, but when I consider his age, I can only view it, more than three decades later, as untimely indeed.