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This is a little difficult to write. Introspective columns about morbid topics usually are.
This is what has happened in my life over the past few weeks:
• A good friend, Denny Klepper, a Huntington County Highway Department employee, died when his mower was struck by a vehicle near the Huntington-Wells county line.
• A former colleague of mine in church leadership, Jack White, died unexpectedly. I’m not exactly sure of all the particulars, but it appears Jack was having otherwise routine prostate surgery and didn’t make it off the operating table.
• I was a groomsman when Dave Fish got married and he was the best man at my wedding. Dave’s wife, Rose, had surgery for breast cancer at the beginning of October. The pathology report is good, but the doctor removed one of her breasts.
• A good friend of mine, Chuck Clampitt, got to feeling a little tired while helping a friend move a couple of weekends ago and wound up in Bluffton Regional Medical Center’s intensive care unit for a few days. He has chronic leukemia. It’s not acute leukemia; this is a more manageable kind. Still, leukemia is leukemia and cancer is cancer.
• I went to the doctor.
Now, you may ask, what does that last thing have to do with the others?
Everything, and nothing, all at the same time.
The visit to the doctor was scheduled well before any of the other things happened. I am starting to get active again, exercise-wise, and I thought it would be a good idea to check out the biological machine and see if it can handle the stress of throwing basketballs at backboards and denting them (the backboards, not the basketballs).
From a between-the-ears standpoint, everything has come together all at once. It provokes discussion of those end-of-life decisions — which funeral home to use, what cemetery to put the body in, who to officiate, and who’s in charge of telling the Cubs that it was probably the heartbreak of the sweep by the Dodgers that did him in.
You may not know this about me, but I’m living on bonus time. In January of last year, I surpassed my father in longevity. I have now lived longer than he did. Everything in my life from here on out is a gift, another day of life that my dad didn’t get to experience.
People ask me how I am and I say: “I am sitting upright and taking nourishment.” That response has something to do with what I was just talking about. I know people who aren’t sitting upright and taking nourishment. More of them every day, it seems.
I was talking with my doctor about this, and she talked about hearing another doctor talk about avoiding death. “I don’t know how to say this,” she quoted him, “but all of my patients die. One hundred percent.”
I am reminded of Woody Allen’s quote: “I am not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
I’ll be fine. I’ve just had a reminder of how finite life is.
And now, so have you.
by DAVE SCHULTZ
daves@news-banner.com
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