More Time

I held his hand as his life slipped away.

Moments before, he had been setting the table while his wife was cooking in the kitchen. They were expecting their children and their families for a Sunday brunch, and the husband and wife talked about various things in anticipation. He never saw it, as the crash of a dish on the hardwood floor marked the end of his life.

Try as we might, there was no saving him. I can still hear his wife begging us to save him. “I need more time” is all I could hear her say, a mantra that would not be honored on that day.

I held her hand as her life slipped way.

This grandmother and her boyfriend were on their way to visit her daughter and infant granddaughter when the accident happened. I had come across it, not as a responder but just as a skilled citizen. I made my way into the car, knowing that she was injured and the fire department would likely have to cut her out of the car. I talked to her, heard all about her love for her daughter and her boyfriend. I learned about the infant granddaughter, one the grandmother had long hoped for. I heard about the pain in her chest and neck, as I held her head in stabilization, gently and calmly telling her what the rescuers were doing around her. I warned her of every noise that was coming, and told her just to focus on my voice until they could get her out.

“I just need more time,” she said to me. I assured her she had more coming, but for now she had to focus on my voice and be calm with me. In the end she said, “you’re a beautiful man, Tom. I am glad we met, although I wish it wasn’t like this.”

She never made it to the hospital.

I’ve not always been a beautiful man. Any beauty within me has been exposed at a cost; hard lessons learned often in the hardest way possible. Those lessons countered equally hard lessons that hid any light within me. Yet with each chop of life’s chisel exposed a layer beyond the surface of who I believed I was. I am grateful for the masterpiece in me, and the sculptor I’ve used to grow beyond my condition. To watch the end of someone and the pain that comes with it has left an indelible etching in stone on my soul.

I’ve lost four friends in the line of duty, and I’ve never heard a loved one left behind satisfied with the time they’ve had. In fact, the prayer I’ve always heard was about more time.  The lesson I’ve always taken from it has always been predicated on trying t understand why we waste so much of it yet I understand that most of us learn our lessons just like I have. The hard way.

We will all have our “lasts” in life. Our last breaths. Our last words. Our last kiss. Our last embrace. While I realize we will always wish for more at the end, I just don’t want it to be because I’ve wasted so much of it. That would be shameful.

What prompted this reminder was the recent Thousand Oaks shooting and a Dad’s last words to his son.

“I love you, son”.

Dad certainly wants more time. I honor him for not leaving such a beautiful truth left unsaid. We humans often take such matters for granted until we no longer have a choice. Then, we wish for something different.

Maybe, just maybe, we could try something different. Maybe we make it a point not to leave such words unspoken regardless of how often we’ve said them. Maybe we just try to stop wasting so much time.

There will be two dates on my tombstone separated by a dash. I want to make the most of that dash. To use the words of Pearl Jam, “I know I was born, and I know that I’ll die. The in-between is mine” (I Am Mine). What if we owned the dash in such a way that even if we wanted more time, it would never be because we spent to much of it hiding in our box? What if we chose to trust, and to live, in love and light and the potential of the Universe?