Life is Full of Variables with a Consistent Outcome

Life is Full of Variables with a Constant Outcome

There’s an unusual sense of po erlessness in the knowledge that death is inevitable. You can sit there as a twenty-one-yearold and feel the freedom of your own youth and your body’s full range of motion, but in time, as the years progress without your consent, it slowly leaks out of you like a broken faucet.

Ryan was twenty-four, and this would be the second time he would see someone dying. The first time was five years ago when his Nana was in the hospital with pneumonia. Most of that day he had forgotten or blocked out, except the potent smell of the hospital—latex and cleaner—and the sound of her wrestling against her own body as she tried to breathe. This time it was his Pop-Pop.

Unlike his Nana, he had not been sick for a long time, or struggled with his health. He had not been placed in a nursing home, nor was family alerted to say their final goodbyes. He was a man of few words and even fewer complaints. Ex-Navy, he was tough and quiet—a good soldier. Ryan’s father looked the most like him out of all four brothers, but his personality, rough and hostile, couldn’t have been more different.

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“Do you really want to go out like this, Dad? Do you really want to starve yourself in front of your children? Your grandchildren?” Ryan’s Uncle Frank said.

Frank stood over his father’s hospital bed. He had been the closest to his father, Ryan’s Pop-Pop. He raised his own family just around the block from his childhood home. The other three brothers, Ryan’s father included, had moved away from Long Island at a relatively early age. When Frank saw Ryan standing in the door frame of the bleak, white hospital room, he stopped talking.

“Hi Ryan,” Frank said.

Frank grabbed his tan raincoat, and started to walk to the rooms’ entrance.

Ryan walked into the room and looked at his Pop-pop. His cheekbones seemed more chiseled under his thin skin, and his lips seemed thinner then he remembered, and they were covered with a layer of white ash. His eyes looked tired above the dark circles and pushed his skin down into ripples of fine lines and wrinkles. Two months ago he had talked to him on the telephone. It was usually hard to get ahold of him. His Pop-pop was always going out with his friends at the senior center in town, and when Ryan did have time to call between class, work and his girlfriend he mostly got his voicemail that was never changed from his Nana’s recorded voice.

“Ryan,” Pop-pop said, the words sounded like marbles hitting the floor in uneven syllables.

“Hey, Pop-pop,” Ryan said. He pulled up a chair to Pop-pop’s hospital bed.

“Frank is always getting mad, he gets that from his mother,” Pop-pop said.

“Why aren’t you eating?” Ryan asked.

Ryan noticed the bruises on Pop-pop’s hands from an untrained eyes failed attempts for a vein. “I drink water,” Pop-pop said.

Ryan had always noticed two things about his father’s side of the family, they had limited social skills and they aged disturbingly

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well. At seventy-four, Ryan had just started to notice Pop-pop’s face wrinkling—most likely from the sudden weight loss.

“You have to eat food,” Ryan said.

He tried not to sound like he was pleading or scolding. He didn’t want to act like he was in a position of authority over his grandfather because he didn’t want to be. He didn’t want to treat a man who had seen war, who had had children, a wife, a career, like a child.

Pop-pop ignored him and looked around the room. Ryan thought about the call he had gotten from his father yesterday that made him want to come to New York from Oklahoma in the first place. The sadness and desperation in his father’s voice, that reminded him of a child that he once found lost in the grocery store.

“I’ve been around for seventy-four years. I’ve watched my wife die, my brothers, my parents,” Pop-pop said. “I even dated in the last three years. I went out with friends and left the house.”

“It’s been a good life for you, Pop-pop,” Ryan said, clearing his throat.

“It has,” Pop-pop said. “So is it more selfish for me to want to go, on my terms, or for your father and uncles wanting me to stay on theirs?”

Ryan didn’t have the answer to this question. He grabbed his Pop-pop’s hand and squeezed it, letting the frail tendons roll over the bones beneath his palm. He took note of every line in his Pop-pop’s face, every freckle and sunspot. He painted a mental portrait.

Over a year later Ryan still lets that day mingle with his dreams and daydreams. He thinks about the question he was asked and the different answers he might have given. The answers change, every few months or so the old answer seems to be forgotten and replaced by the new one. One could argue, much like Ryan’s answer to the question, the concept of dying, like life itself, mutates and metamorphizes as you age and as you change and pass through time.

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