I remember hearing once that in your 50s, you learn what’s going to kill you. It’s like life finally hands you a death certificate in progress and tells you to start taking notes. Maybe it’s the lungs, maybe the heart, maybe some sneaky little bastard of a disease waiting in the shadows like a mugger in a back alley. But the point is, pay attention.
I do. I watch.
I watched Uncle Brown die the good Catholic way, surrounded by too many relatives, wheeled into the house by the ones still strong enough to lift him, parked in a room that smelled of damp old furniture and regret. He lay there, frail, barely a whisper of the man he used to be, spoon-fed rice pudding, sipping 7Up through a straw like it was some sacred ritual. His breath turned into something thick and heavy, each inhale a fight, each exhale a surrender. The gurgling. That’s what sticks with you. That sound of a body folding in on itself.
Grandpa Johnny went the same way. We brought him back from the hospital, laid him in a room like a king returning to his castle, except the castle smelled like piss and Lysol. He looked strong at first. You always do at first. But then cancer does what it does—it strips you down, piece by piece, until you’re just a set of bones waiting for permission to leave.
My father-in-law, same script, different stage. But this one came with tubes, the modern version of medieval torture. Forced air. Machines humming. Needles and numbers on a screen measuring his decline. It was the American way—stretch the suffering out just long enough to empty the insurance. And then, when the paperwork is in order, when the right hands have been shaken, they unhook the tube, tell you it’ll be a few days, and leave you to watch the countdown. You want to know how long it takes a man to die? About a week, give or take. Drip. Drip. Drip. Morphine. Goodbye.
And then my dad. Same fucking thing.
Lung cancer. But none of them smoked. Not one of them. They just died breathing in everyone else’s bad habits. Meanwhile, my mother, my aunt, my grandmother—all puffing away like steam engines, untouched by it all. That’s the real joke. The ones who don’t deserve it get it. The ones who should be six feet under are still out there bitching about taxes and the government.
I wonder if that’s how I’ll go. I stare in the mirror, look for the signs. Do I see it yet? Can I tell? Will it be the lungs? The liver? The heart? What’s going to take me?
And what happens if I do get cancer? I don’t have a big family to wheel me into a bedroom, to spoon-feed me rice pudding while I stare at a ceiling fan, waiting to die. My kids wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t know how. Hell, they barely know how to check in on their old man when things are fine. If I end up with tubes in my throat, their patience will last about 48 hours before they start talking to doctors behind my back, whispering about “expediting” things. “Just pull the plug, he’d want it that way,” they’d say. And they’d be right.
Maybe I’ll go to some foreign country when the time comes, disappear into a beachside hospice in Thailand or the Philippines. Hire a few nice girls to pretend to give a shit, to wipe my ass and tell me I was a great man. But that kind of loneliness—would it be worse than dying in some sterile hospital room, with nurses who see you as just another shift?
There’s no real answer.
And what the hell am I even doing? Fifty-five years old, still playing this game. Counting down how many full moons I’ve got left, how many summers, how many birthdays. What’s the point? Work another job? Chase another dollar? Find another woman, pretend it’s love, add another notch to the belt? Then what? Sixty comes, seventy. “Happy birthday, old man, here’s a cake you can’t eat with teeth you don’t have.”
I should be out the door already. I should be gone. But I don’t have the money. That’s the punchline to this long, unfunny joke. I don’t have the money.
And maybe that’s the real killer. Not the lungs, not the heart. Just the slow, suffocating realization that you spent your life running, only to find out the door was locked the whole time.
