Your Last Minute

Do you ever picture your last minute? Where will you be when you take your final breath? Who is with you? How old are you?

I never really thought about death till my parents died a few years ago. Death was always some future thing. There’s plenty of time to do whatever I want to do. The end is for old people and I’m not old yet.

My parents, on the other hand, seemed to think about it a lot. The evidence isn’t so much in what they said but in how they planned for it. Dad purchased mausoleum space in the 1960s. He didn’t need it for another forty years. Mom moved in four years later.

Twice in my life I’ve witnessed a person’s last minute.

One person was my Dad. He expected death but he occasionally confessed some fear near the end, telling my sister something about seeing “the devil.” In truth, he had nothing to worry about because he had lived a long, by-the-book life, met nearly every goal he ever had and seemed to decide, in a short clearing of the Parkinson’s-related dementia fog, that it was time to go. He took his last breath with his wife and two children watching. His last minute included several smooth breaths assisted by a respirator, followed by two labored snoring-like spurts, then nothing. His eyes were closed. He was at peace, with his family at his side. The only thing that could have made this moment better was if he had been in his own bedroom and not a nursing home.

The other person was a construction worker, probably in his 20s or 30s. I watched in horror from my office window as he got caught in a crane cable, was pulled right off the open edge of the 6th floor construction site along with a steel beam and fell to his death. No plan, no thought, no warning. His last minute included fifty seconds of attaching a cable to a beam and a ten-second screaming freefall to a concrete parking lot. His eyes were probably open. The only thing that could have made that minute better was if it had never happened.

At fifty-something, my days fly by, wonderful friendships fade away; twenty-four hours isn’t nearly enough time to get everything done yet there seems to be no forward momentum in my life. I know I should live like there is no tomorrow because maybe there isn’t one. Yet I tend to do the same thing day in, day out. My job involves constant change but the process is very similar each day. My commute IS the same every day and it sucks, but it is the tradeoff for living where I live. I have many hobbies and interests but only time and money to pursue one at the moment.

Although my parents led relatively interesting lives for their time, they seemed to have fairly basic expectations: raise kids, work, eat, sleep, go to church, clean, putter around the house, retire. Their hobbies were interesting but always optional: Dad repaired watches and built things as a hobby and Mom painted landscapes on canvas.

Many Boomers, on the other hand, expect to lead interesting, full lives. We want jobs to be fulfilling as well as bringing home the bacon. We want interesting hobbies and active retirement that includes a second career doing what we might have always wanted to do but didn’t because we needed the steady job to fund all the other things we wanted in life.

We want to live forever. Death is not an option. St. Pete’s number isn’t in our Rolodex or Outlook.

And with no warning this week, I pictured my Dad’s final minute and wondered what mine would look like.

I tried to imagine Dad’s last minute from his perspective: did he know his family was with him in that room? Did he see us and think “I can go now?” I tried to imagine Mom’s last minute: did she know she was two hundred miles from home at the end of a hurricane evacuation odyssey with no family members in sight? Did she see a nursing home staffer’s face and think, “everyone I know is gone so it’s time for me to go too?”

If my last minute happened today, and my entire life played back in that sixty seconds, I’d be laughing, crying and wondering in amazement how this shy, straight-laced Louisiana Catholic kid born in the 1950s could have lived such an amazing life. But somewhere during that minute, I’d be screaming, “Wait! I’m not done yet! My bucket list is full of unchecked items!”

Sixty seconds? I want sixty more years!