This weekend is unlikely to happen again

Last night, at around 23:45, I kissed my wife goodbye, shouldered my backpack and set off into the darkness. I used my bicycle to follow a well known route to a town some 20 kilometers away, to join my mother, my brother and his girlfriend, to watch my father die.

No death comes expected. No parting is ever easy. But as I held him, while he struggled with all the energy he had left just to swallow a painkiller, I figured that sometimes it's maybe just not worth it anymore. Sometimes a person has to admit that life is not life worth living, and that death is our kinder option. Maybe even a friend. A friend who scares us, since he does not share our common desires or fears, and discards them as irrelevant, for life is life and that is signified by a beginning and thus, by an ending as well. And that is what he is there for.

This morning around nine o'clock, that ending came for my father.


I wrote the above the evening of the my father died. Since then, we've been through quite an odd week. We managed to do well, as a family. The whole thing has come to pretty good ending, regarding the circumstances. No doubt I'll be feeling some grief and pain along the way, but that is just what life is about. Like my mother said: "pregnancy and birth, death and disease, those are things that make life unique."

Ashes to ashes, you know the drill.