Days Away From Christmas

No major public holiday is a good time to die. But Christmas had to be the worst time to kick the bucket.

      If I died over Christmas my family would be saddled with the memory every year. It would take away from their joy of opening presents and the gusto with which they normally attacked the turkey and cranberry sauce. Maybe I was overstating my worth, but I didn’t want to be a lingering nuisance. I wanted to die on a plain old nothing special day. I wanted my demise to fall on a rainy mid-winter Saturday when everybody was indoors with nothing to do. They would have played all their computer games and watched their favorite DVDs. They would have grown weary of Facebook and twitter. They would be just on the verge of complaining how utterly bored they were when a delicate and dignified groan from the back room would fill the air. Mom was conveniently dead and whoosh, there was something to do after all.

      My father died on July 4^th  2006 in the USA. I will always remember the day he died because it was Independence Day. If I had to die on a holiday it would be a more obscure one, maybe Labour Day. That way in years to come my family, while enjoying the day off from work, might bring up amusing anecdotes about me over a sausage sizzle.

      But these choices are seldom ours to make. I had received my awful diagnosis on December 16^th. Days away from Christmas I was worried that I would deteriorate quickly. I thought I might be horribly sick over the holiday and I was led to believe this Christmas might very well be my last. It was difficult to sing Christmas carols and enjoy a tender peck under the mistletoe when I was thinking this way.

      So what do you do when its Christmas and you have a couple of weeks to live? I wanted to get high. I hadn’t smoked pot in years. Hidden in our bedroom somewhere was a jar with a small bit of pot in it from a decade ago. It was concealed as soon as the children were old enough to understand what it was. I unscrewed the top from the mayonnaise jar and shook it. The crumpled brown clump shifted across the bottom of the glass. The drug was so old that adding a bit of orange peel or chunk of apple was not going to rehydrate it. I looked at it sadly. It represented my youth and my reckless fun side. I wanted to experience that again. In my last week of life I didn’t want to do anything really risky like bungy jumping or sky diving. It seemed stupidly ironic but I was scared of activities that might kill me. I just wanted to do something a little daring. Then my rational-self kicked in. Would smoking weed interfere with my medication? Would it cut short what little time I had left? Sadly I surmised that I would never smoke pot again. I put the jar back where I found it. Alex might need it one day.