I picked up the title of this post from a randomly stumbled page on personal development, titled “45 life lessons from a 90 year old” – it came in at number 12. I’ll explain the significance of this later, but to fill in some detail, here goes:
My dad’s health is on the decline.
I wrote about this in my last blog post in 2012 and it’s now gotten to the stage where there’s more going against him than for him, physically speaking. He can still hold a conversation and remembers who’s visited, but the sad reality is that the body is failing. No-one knows when the time will come for him to leave us but whilst he’s still here, we’re doing what we can for him.
Today we began the funeral planning process – more to ease our minds as to what’s involved and how things progress once someone passes away and also to make rational decisions without overwhelming emotions clouding our judgement when the time comes. In speaking with our funeral director today I commented that the dearth of ‘funeral plans/funeral insurance’ ads on television are helping people look into these things before they’re needed. It’s going to be an unknown, difficult, emotional journey sometime so getting started and understanding what happens should help make things easier when the time comes.
Some may think it’s not the right time or place to talk about this, but in my world, it is an important topic to talk about. Especially for us men We have a habit of crawling back into our cave(s) at times like this. This is one of the places where I get to share with you how I see things and what’s on my mind. I decided to share this information for 2 reasons: 1) to help me document what’s important/happening in my life right now, and 2) (possibly) to educate others in some small way (this was also a topic of discussion with the funeral director today, about how we can learn from others).
I’ve spoken to my boys (7 & 10, soon to be 8 & 11) about their grandad and whilst I have used the words ‘death’, and ‘dying’ with them during the discussion, it’s been to make sure they are ready to hear those words when others start using them more frequently. In a way it may be an act of priming them to ensure they at least ‘know’ what’s coming – in no way can I guarantee it will help them understand what happens when the time comes. It’s a tough conversation to have but an important and essential one.
So, sometime over the next few days/weeks/months they may yet see us cry – and it’ll be a good thing as we’ve never shied away from it in the past and we’re not about to start now.