A New Year

The years go so fast. Then you look at how many you've lived and it's such a small number. The total number is tiny and the number at the end, the number which shrivels and kills, is smaller still. Yet we live as if the supply of time is indefinite, which it is, of course, but not for us. Time is bottomless only for itself.

The Loser in Winter

The Complete and Total Loser is in the back seat of his eldest brother's Mercedes Benz while the three sons are on the way to a county courthouse to file papers in order to be executors of their late parents' estate. The car is huge and it's one of the rare times the Loser, a gimp, doesn't feel cramped in a backseat. Earlier, the Loser had mentioned how he likes winter. Now his oldest brother, the driver, says, "I can't see why you like winter. It's cold, it's dreary and grey." 

"Well," the Loser says, "that's three reasons right there!"

A skylight in winter.

The Year the Loser Lost the Most

The Complete and Total Loser's mother died October 25 of this year. His father, though old, was in pretty good health, died December 15, just 52 days later. The Loser never married or had a family of his own, so he is alone, rattling around in their house doing paperwork at his older brothers' command. He's feeling a little self pity these days, which is natural, he guesses. Sometimes he thinks no one he knows has lost more than he has in 2011. Then he thinks of how dumb he is. The answer is obvious.

The Loser's parents in the very early 1950s.

Hard to Believe

The Complete and Total Loser, whose parents died less than two months apart this fall, is finding it hard to grasp at the moment that people can simply die. Cease living. People die all the time and he knows that, and the Loser was present a week ago today when his father took and returned his last breath, but right now it just doesn't seem possible that he'll never be around again. 

Appropriate

My father's service will be tomorrow, December 22. This year, that's the shortest day of the year. Perfect timing. It should remind me that the days will lengthen from now on, but I know that there is still a net loss of heat in the norther hemisphere and that many colder days lie ahead.

My mother visits my father after an operation on Christmas Eve, 2010.

It's hard to believe, isn't it?

It's hard to believe that the 91-year-old man who lay dying, gasping for air on a hospital bed, unresponsive for two days, was ever a young man who grinned easily and had over half a century of healthy years before him. I found a letter a woman had written to my father during World War II, years before he met my mother. They were far apart and he'd surprised her with a telephone call. "Hearing your voice was like rain in the desert," she wrote.
No one's ever said that about me.

My father in his Navy uniform during World War II.

Death Surprises

Having both parents die in under two months has brought some surprises to The Complete and Total Loser.

My father two days before his death.

• Even with palliative care and a high number of morphine doses, there is pain when dying.
• They have to turn you every now and then in a hospital bed even when there is zero chance you'll ever leave that bed. If they don't, your bones will push through your skin and you'll bleed and ooze and die horribly. As gentle as nurses can be, this jars the patient and upsets him even when you think he's completely unaware of physical sensation.
• When dying, you often breathe through your mouth and it gets dry. In my father's case, it got so dry his tongue split open. The nurses do what they can with their sponge swabs and ointments but there are limits. Too much water and the patient can aspirate. I was telling a nurse that I was surprised no one has come up with a better way to hydrate a mouth. She said, cheerfully, that this was my chance to change that.
• You won't see many doctors but you will see lots of nurses. If the hospital is at all good, nurses are gold. Where I was the nurses were fine about being addressed by their first names. Be good to them and don't treat them like their hotel maids. Not that you should treat hotel maids with any less respect than you treat anyone else, but you know what I mean. 
• They say the last thing to go is hearing, so talk to each other and the dying as if he can hear you. I slept in the room with my father on his last night and talked and sang songs. I spoke in normal conversational tones. Told him things like how pretty his nurse was (true) and that the house was being well looked after (also true). Everyday stuff like that, and memories.
• You might find that you can do things you wouldn't have thought you could. Like feed your father ice cream, put a straw in his mouth, hold his hand, touch his face. I didn't do the body washing and things like that but I have no training and I'm not sure if I could have done it well. If the nurses weren't there, I think I'd have figured it out.
• When with the dying, at the end it's all about the breathing. When it gets down to under ten times a minute the end is near. Counting the respiration rate gives you something to do and makes you feel involved. At some point they disconnect the monitors.
• You'll feel awful if you chat on your cell phone or use your iPad to check your Facebook page. Maybe not for years, but you will one day.
• Bring something dry to read. Serious fiction or, better, nonfiction. I read "Longitude," which is about how the first clocks accurate enough to take to sea and use in calculating longitude were made. A fascinating book, by the way. I'm not done it yet.
• Bring something to write in and a pen or pencil. You'll have thoughts you'll want to remember and writing them down is still the best way. For example, I realized for the first time how best to measure someone's worth to you and it's also the simplest way to do so.
• That method is this: How do you feel when that person comes home from work or wherever he or she was? In my father's case, we were always happy.  

As Expected

The Complete and Total Loser's father died today at 1:32 p.m. Actually, he died at 1:25 but the Loser is not a doctor and although he was alone with him he can't pronounce officially. An M.D. must do that. He died of a combination of sepsis, renal failure, stroke and the broken heart he suffered when his wife, the Loser's mother, died on October 25 of this year.
What a terrible thing it is to be no one's son. 

Completely and Totally Bereft

This time, the Complete and Total Loser's father is the one who is expected to die in a matter of days. 

His mother: October 25. His favorite uncle: three weeks later. Now, his father. Yes, the Loser makes much of jesting that he will be an orphan soon. A 53-year-old orphan.

But really, all three were very elderly. The youngest of them, his mother, was 80. This means that the Complete and Total Loser is losing the chance to garner sympathy.

A Loser Tip of the Day

Cling to memories of stupid or bad things you did and never let them go. Embarrassment and guilt are among the few emotions you can summon decades later and have feel as fresh as the week they occurred. Let these emotions stymie your efforts to try new things.

A Loser Tip of the Day

Always take everything very, very seriously. You are entitled to your deadpan wit, but whenever others do the same thing, they're being literal. 

A Loser Tip of the Day

When you know a fact, like, oh, that a ridiculous percentage of heat does not escape through the head, making warm hats essential to surviving the cold, and that the studies that showed they did were misinterpreted military clothing ones of people in refrigerated rooms wearing heavy coats but no hats so of course 60 percent of the heat escaping was through the head, make sure that those around you know this too no matter how long it takes. People will like you for this. 

The Loser is Home

The Loser's father got out of rehab yesterday and is back in his suburban house. Naturally, he doesn't think of telling the Complete and Total Loser this until he showed up to visit on the afternoon of the day the rehab people decided this, despite knowing the Loser is living in the house.

The rehabilitation center the Loser's father stayed in for three weeks.

He told the Loser's sisters-in-law, but not the Loser, who could've used advanced notice to clean up and pack his own stuff.

No matter how much time passes, the Loser still has problems accepting his role as the low man on the family totem pole. Meanwhile, the Loser, back in his grimy apartment, has found that the cold weather has driven mice inside, where they're making making themselves heard, rustling papers at night. He made a ridiculously easy trap out of an empty paper towel tube and a dab of almond butter:

A paper towel tube, a little peanut butter (or something like it), a trash can too deep for a mouse to jump out of and a rodent's lack of intelligence can make a simple yet effective trap.

The Loser, though he eats meat, cannot bring himself to poison or use kill traps on mice. It seems like a dirty trick on a creature not capable of any ethical wrongdoing on its part when it occupies his quarters. When he catches mice, the Loser stores them and sets them free a bike ride from his apartment, in a field. They probably become prey for area hawks, but at least they get a sporting chance. 

A mouse prepares to spend a night in an empty jar of clinged peaches.

The Loser Seeks Love Online

The Complete and Total Loser, needing constant reinforcement of his Loser status, has an online profile at OKCupid, a free dating service. He logs in about two or three times a year and activates his profile. When doing that, it must for a week.

Seven days is all he needs for the Loser to see that there's no one for him. 

You have to read between the lines for most of the profiles. That's when you see that women want rich men, with hair, who love fine dining and vacations. It surprises the Loser how many of them talk about things that are the opposite of what he or any man he knows likes to do but, well, these are women in their 40s and 50s who are single. Indie bands? Dancing? "Exploring" little antique shops on weekends? Cats? Emoticons? 

So far, five days in, just one woman has written to the Loser. He clicked and looked at her picture and, no kidding, it was like a large cockroach had landed on the screen. He moved the cursor to the photo so it brought up any others she may have posted of herself. Worse. And descriptions: "Curvy" = fat. "A little extra" = Get-my-harpoon! 

The Loser feels good about himself these days, however, so he's having fun with this week. He is clicking "not interested" in all the women the service suggests he may like and clicking on "hide" for these and others who's profiles he views. It gives him some satisfaction to be the one rejecting for once.

Not the woman who responded to The Loser, but close.

A Physical Peculiarity

Lately, when the Complete and Total Loser urinates, it feels mildly like an orgasm. He's always liked relieving himself, but it's gotten more pleasurable the past few months. He was happy about this until he realized this grim fact: His pissing isn't getting more like orgasms; his orgasms are getting more like pissing.
Drat.

Not even the esteemed Mayo Clinic can help the Complete and Total Loser.