In these days, when the anniversary of my father's death is near, I reread The Disease, a novel that won the famous Herralde Prize in 2006 and is by the Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka. Because of those things that you don't quite understand and that in one way or another you don't need to understand either, the book came back to my hands (or I came back to it) in one of those moments when you are waiting for a little bit of loneliness and pain to collapse, question yourself, revive the person who left and his last moments. With that solitude and with that reading it was not only to think about my father's death, it was also to think about his illness.

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When we are born and as we grow, maturing, we understand that the only sure thing we have is death. She doesn't need arguments, evidence. Death is proof, a consequence of having been alive. Death as that imminent, unavoidable end. And as we live, I don't know if they are my things, we get attached, fond of what we call life and the idea of dying, perhaps because it is closer and more threatening, is a shadow to which we turn our backs and from which we even take away our greetings. I don't know, but we don't like to talk about death, maybe because if we talk about it we might think we're calling it. I have to recognize that I value those people who maintain a cordial relationship with her; her state speaks of a human elevation different from the normal one, the common one. A friend of mine would say: they are from another heaven.

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Rereading the lines of Barrera Tyska's novel, I came across that "alcabala" called disease that some people suffer before dying. And it seems that we are all on this path, towards death, but there are some who remain as at the entrance, who cannot cross this threshold because they lack something, a role, one more suffering. In short, to pay a sin that for bureaucratic reasons was not paid at the time and you must pay it off before leaving; and it is then that person is forced to stay in a painful area, visible and sometimes for a long time waiting for that moment that should be more expeditious, easier. Simply put, death should be kinder.

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As I write, my father's last days come. He bore his kidney disease for 12 years as a hero: in silence and with a gallantry of cured Indian. Shameful, inhumane examinations and treatment, which not only wounded his old age skin, but his dignity, were endured with unutterable pain and grief that only a 65-year-old man can have. But he never complained, never shed a tear, never. One day, as the novel says, it dawned little by little, we used to say in my house, and from that dwarfed corner he never left, or did not want to leave. The illness, like a boxing match, had taken him to a corner and blow after blow, had made him stagger. The disease is a terrible opponent, that gives you no truce, that doesn't know the rules of life and those of boxing: the one that says you can't keep hitting the "man who's already fallen" because he's cruel and inhuman.

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When father was first told he was sick, or "very sick," he went to war with God, with the world, with life. Why me? It was the question to the great omniscient. Love, care, hope and seeing that at his age life had taken a wrong account of him and was rather "paying" little for all the excesses he had committed, led him to a process of reconciliation, acceptance and with this, improvement. My father was not a negative or pessimistic man, on the contrary; but one October he woke up as if he had already decided to leave, had already paid everything and that pass to death was ready. That would be his last rounds. The disease had won.

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Susan Sontang in The Disease and its Metaphors (1981), another book that I also "found" these days and that I also recommend, says that the person dies when he decides to die. So much truth thrown in the face can be considered an offense. Especially for those of us who are stranded in this season called life, trying to postpone that sad farewell to the handkerchiefs, that definitive farewell. At that moment we do not believe that the decision to die should be made by the patient and we do the impossible, despite our loved one, to keep him alive, to have his body even though his organs are functioning artificially. We become selfish beings that we desire, we beg a God until that moment absent for us, that although useless, prostrated in a bed, our relatives continue with life, although the sorrow and the sadness annihilate them later. We weep, we weep much at the end, but our weeping, though we think it is, is not for the person who goes away, but for us who stay. Death is not the pain of the sick; on the contrary, it is their rest. Death is pain for us, those who suffer the loss, those who do not find ourselves without the loved one.

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As we read the last lines of the novel Sickness, two illuminating certainties come to us. The first, many of the things we do with our sick, we do for ourselves; not for them. Spending his last days alone in a cold intensive care room, receiving minutes of life that only lengthen suffering, is not the desired end of any human being. And the other thing is that when we close the book, we think that before we are born, someone, God perhaps, should ask us how we would like to die. Surely many of us would say: give me death fast and fulminant, please!

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I hope you enjoyed the reading. I invite you to vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our server in discord. Until the next smile. ;)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE

http://gumilla.org/biblioteca/bases/biblo/texto/SIC2007691_40-42.pdf
Alberto Barrera T. (2006). La enfermedad. Anagrama: España
https://revistareplicante.com/la-enfermedad-y-sus-metaforas/
Susan Sontag (2003). La enfermedad y sus metáforas. Taurus: Argentina

Written by: @nancybriti

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