There's a cliché that the only constants in life are death and taxes. I had my fill of both this week. Well, the death part might not have happened yet, but it seems imminent. My elderly neighbor collapsed twice in the past three days and is now in the hospital for some sort of emergency procedure. I'm no medical expert, but I feel confident stating that the recovery rate for a man in his mid-90s from whatever it is that ails him is not super high. And he was almost bedridden before this. He seemed to be chair-ridden. He would get up in the morning, make his way to a chair, and basically sit there the entire day. S and I are just waiting for the grim, inescapable word from his wife. He might be able to make it back home, but if he survives to see autumn, I'd be surprised.
And when he goes, there's a good chance his wife will join him shortly thereafter. She has already had a stroke, about a year ago, and I saw this with my own grandparents, where my grandma, who was hanging on decently, deteriorated extremely quickly after the death of my grandpa and died just a few months later. It's like she just didn't want her husband to be alone, and once that was no longer a possibility, she surrendered to the inevitable.
I would say that all this is sad, but I think that's the wrong word. It's more hard. I don't feel melancholy; I feel a sort of helplessness. As the Flaming Lips put it, "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" (Great song, by the way.) Since moving into this neighborhood, inhabited by a lot of elderly people, I've definitely realized this. Two people in the house to one side of me have already died in the past five years (and a third one is close), and now, it seems, two more on the other side are well on their way. I lived the first 45 years of my life without ever once being asked to lift an old person who had fallen and couldn't get up, and now it seems to be a semi-regular occurrence.
It also doesn't help my general mindset on this matter that my parents just came out to visit last week, and my mom spent most the trip in her PJs lying in bed or on the sofa. She got hit with a bug, and although she recovered, it really laid her up, and it had me slightly concerned. My parents aren't yet at the same stage as my neighbors, but they probably aren't that far behind. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not that far behind, as I don't think we are going to crack immortality in the next 40 years, despite what you might find from "life maxxers" on YouTube.
Maybe that's a silver-lining of being focused on the nonexistence of others. It distracts me from thinking about from my own departure from this mortal coil. It is so much worse to think about your own death, not just because it's your death (though of course that's part of it), but because you lose your frame of reference. There's still something when somebody else dies. When you die there's a good chance there's just nothing, and contemplating nothing will mess your head, even if it's not in the context of your own demise. An existential freakout is a double-whammy: You are going to die, and you will never understand why you (or anything else) ever even existed in the first place. It's no wonder religion is still pretty popular these days.
Well, at least I'm gainfully employed while I still exist, as I was reminded when I did our taxes a few days ago. As I've said before, I get so resentful every tax season, not because of the amount we pay, but because of how ridiculously confusing and time-consuming it is to figure out how much you owe. I used TurboTax, and the estimated time was one hour and 45 minutes. It's been over twice that, and I'm not even completely finished yet. Maybe we need to go back to having somebody do our taxes for us, like we did last year. But the thing there is that you still have to spend the time gathering all the necessary documents, which is a large part of the overall workload. I imagine the CPA is basically just entering all the stuff into a computer program the same way we are. That's not nothing, but it's also probably not worth the relatively hefty fee, especially considering we paid almost the exact amount last year as we did the year prior when we did our taxes ourselves. Also, if I do our taxes it gains me some emotional capital with S. That's also not nothing.
Well, that about does it for this morbid entry. Until next time...
