Compensation

It's early morning. The small hours. It's darkness outside, the dark of night. This is the time of day when the late night people and the early morning people might overlap, but not due to personalities. It's the small hours. And the dawn is far off. And on this dawn, the one that's hours away, will be denied to you. This particular dawn will be a new day for everyone else but you. You'll be dead. This is the end of the road, the end of the line, the end of your life. This is not a threat, this is just a supposition. In this hypothetical death, you are very very very old. You have lived many years, many days and many nights and this night is the last. And also, in this picture, this late night picture, you are in a peaceful state, there has not been terminal sickness, no pain, no real indication that this is the end. But you know it is.

A thought: you now congratulate yourself on all the hours you got to work in your life. You went to work early, and you wore that badge of honor that you worked more hours than everyone else in your office. You moved more units and made more sales that the other guys. You were a loyal company man. And when you retired, forced to retire to make way for the next generation, you got another job, a retirement job, something to do, you see, to take up the hours. But this job was lucrative too, and the money never hurt. There were hours for you, television in the late evenings mostly after your family had gone to bed. The house is mostly quiet now. The children have left home, some many years ago now, they don't call too often, and they no longer come around for visits as they have families of their own. You miss your spouse, she passed a few years back. You miss your spouse as much as you can, the two of you, despite the years, hardly knew one another.

A second thought: the hours are small. As you look at the pictures on the wall, family pictures, you feel grateful that everyone came to Thanksgiving dinner, even thought the food was a disaster. The oldest grandchild is in her first semester at university. She has taken to the study of history and wants to know what the Cold War was like. You've always liked this child, feeling a little guilty that she's your favorite, but you've had the most time with her, babysitting her when she was very young. She looks more like a woman each time you see her. She looks like your late spouse, like a much younger version. Her father, your son, takes an afternoon a week to do those heavy lifting chores around the house for you. He pays most of the bills. His wife helps with the cooking. You don't have much, but what you have you're grateful for.

A last thought: it's the small hours. You know your time has come. It's a small feeling that starts in the chest, but it's not painful. It's the feeling that you can finally let go. You can finally let go and rest. It's been a time, with the family all these years. You think about the colleagues you once knew at work. Most of them have passed on. They were good people. You had many good years together. It was a good life, comfortable, even the tough times weren't so bad. And now, you think about calling the kids, but the hour is too early. They'll know soon enough that you're gone. They be sad, you're the last parent, but hopefully they'll be relieved too. You'll soon get to meet your spouse in the hereafter. And it's all okay. It's just all okay. You had a good life, and this is a restful feeling. You have long learned not to carry regrets. No regrets, and really there aren't any. It's just you had always wanted to be an actor. An actor, maybe a director too. Who knows what it would have been like? It would have been great. It was just a thought, one of those idling thoughts of what it would have been like. And now, now what? It's too late to get started on that experience. It's too late.

Those end of life thoughts, at least for those of us who are too young to have those thoughts are really only suppositions. What we think our final thoughts would be is both insightful and macabre. I have never shied away from the macabre, but I have seldom had the luxury of insight. When I think about the end of life, all I really have to go on is what I have gotten second hand from the old people I have known, many of them already dead. What I've been able to surmise from most of these people is a sense of peace that I hope comes to me, to all of us at this time of life.

I've also heard a sense of regret from some of them. There was an older person in my life at the time when my first novel Dysphoric Notions was published. He had been a musician in his youth and had had quite a passion for it. He opted to keep his passion contained and instead he went to work as a salesman. He had, I understood, made a great deal of money. He was in failing health. He conveyed to me how proud he was to know me and it made him question what his life would have been like if he had pursued his music. A depressing thought, indeed. What he could have done with his music, I think, is the real question because I think if he had spent his life in music, I doubted he would have missed the money. His life would have been richer.