4 days ago
'Before His Time,' Reflections On An Early Death
Trigger warning: this article will discuss suicide, and the death of children.
My first real encounter with death came when I was barely 20. My favorite uncle, Larry, was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer at 53-years-old. He was given a prognosis of just 3 months, but didn't even last half that. Over the last few weeks of his life, over Christmas and New Year's, we watched him wither away on a hospital bed in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I watched my cousins grieve for their father. I watched his own elderly parents grieve in real time, helpless to save their only child. When he died, my grandfather—who went on to live a beautiful 87 years—pulled me aside and said, 'It shouldn't be this way.' No doubt, the thought of losing his own children before his time shook him to the core. And my grandpa was not a man easily shaken.
A few months ago, one of my friends—one of the few I have in my adopted home of Denmark—committed suicide. He was just a few months older than me at the time, and one of our 'board game lads.' He survived his bout with colon cancer a few years prior, but the experience left him emotionally and physically scarred. The aftermath gave him pain on a daily basis, which just became too much to bear in the end.
Although funerals and wakes are never joyous affairs, his was especially sad and subdued. We grieved for our loss, but also for his loss: what he would never experience, and what his family and child would miss out on in his absence. And we also grieved with the knowledge that this person we cared about was going through such severe pain that he could not bear another day.
We all wished we could've told him how much he meant to us, but of course, it was too late.
I've been thinking back about these losses in particular a lot these last few days after Diogo Jota's passing. Losing someone 'before their time' is, luckily, not something we are used to dealing with so much in recent decades.
It feels so unfair, especially when it happens to someone as decent and talented as Jota. When you also consider the larger tragedy of his parents grieving the loss of both of their sons, his brand-new bride, and three adorable kids, it is almost unimaginable.
I was not a parent when I lost my uncle. Now, the haunted look on my grandfather's face takes on a much deeper meaning. It is one thing to understand that losing a child is something that no parent should have to endure, it's another to feel it.
A few years ago, I had to leave a work meeting early because I got a call from the daycare. My daughter fell and needed to go to the hospital. One of the colleagues in my call sent me a quick, polite message hoping my daughter recovers quickly. A long few hours later, my wife and I were leaving the hospital; our daughter had just dislocated her elbow—which we found out was apparently super common for toddlers under 2—but was otherwise completely fine (once the elbow was popped back in place).
My wife, said, rather annoyed, 'All of that for nothing.'
To which I replied, 'Nothing is the best possible outcome.'
That conversation took on a whole new meaning when I found out that the same polite colleague who wished us well also ended up at the hospital—the same hospital—with his daughter that day. His daughter, just a few months shy of 1-years-old, did not survive.
I said at the time that I don't know how you, as parents, come back from that. I still don't. It is a horror beyond comprehension.
There are no guarantees in life. Any one of us could take our last breath today, tomorrow, or (hopefully) decades from now.
If there's anything we can and should learn from Jota's death—and others who we lost before their time—is that we need to be here for each other. We need to tell those closest to us that we love them. We need to support each other. And we need to try to make each day count. Because you only get so many of them, and you never know when something unforeseeable cuts your life—or the life of those you love the dearest—short.
I recently saw an interview with Paul McCartney. He was asked what he would tell John Lennon and George Harrison if they were still around, if their lives hadn't been cut short by gun violence and cancer. He simply said, 'I'd tell them I loved them. They were my brothers.'
Don't wait until it's too late. Love and support each other while we still can.
YNWA.
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