How Not to Die Alone in a Chair in Your Living Room

My mom spent the last nine months of her life in a chair in the living room. 

Cancer diagnosis in August. 

Died in May. 

Nine months between diagnosis and death. 

But she had accepted it a long time before it happened. 

After she died we were going through her bathroom and closet. We found used gallon milk jugs full of used insulin needles and empty insulin bottles. None of her four children knew she was taking it. But there were a dozen jugs and hundreds of needles. She had been doing this for years and no one knew but her and whatever doctor had prescribed the insulin. 

I sat in the chair across from her bed in the cancer center where she went for the biopsy after she had been diagnosed. I watched the nurse ask her the normal questions someone answers before they get sedated. 

“Have you had anything to eat in the last 24 hours?”

“Do you know what we’re going to do today?”

“Is this the first time you’ve been put under anesthesia?"

Then one stood out. 

“Have you ever thought about suicide?” 

My mom’s eyes quickly fell to the floor and she shook her head, smiled weakly and said “No. Never.”

Liar. 

I knew she was lying. Not because I could always tell when she lied. I just knew. 

And I think in that moment, I knew my mom wouldn’t survive this disease. It wasn’t because she wasn’t strong enough. It was because she didn’t want to. 

I haven’t said this to a lot of people, but I always thought my mom allowed the cancer to take her life because that’s what she really wanted. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s what I thought.

She was finished with life a long time before the diagnosis. Apparently she had been bleeding for months and hadn’t told anyone about that either. Another secret tucked away like the needles in the jugs. 

But her will to live started waning years, maybe decades before her diagnosis. She had been in survival mode for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t remember a time when I saw her truly enjoying her life, especially in the last ten years of her life. There were moments of happiness. 

Her children getting married. 

Her grandchildren being born. 

Taking care of those grandchildren. 

But nothing sustaining. There was no consistent happiness in her life. Even though people loved her. Not just her family either. Her coworkers loved her. Her friends loved her. 

I don’t think she believed it because I think she didn’t love herself. She couldn’t accept the love of other people because she hadn’t loved herself in years. 

If you saw younger pictures of her you could see the light in her eyes. She had a love for life and what looked like a love for herself. She was comfortable in her own skin. She knew what she wanted to do. She at least had an idea of who she was and who she wanted to become. 

She lost that though. And she withered away in a chair in her living room over nine months. She died in a hospice bed in the middle of that living room sometime in the middle of the night. 

Even if she had lived, the only thing she was thinking about was going back to work. That made more and more sense the deeper my brother and I got into her financials. Tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. A house that wasn’t paid off. Not much in savings. And a life she was tired of living. Work was the main thing she was thinking about. I don’t know many people who would stay alive if 40-60 hours a week and trying to pay off ever-growing debt was the only thing waiting for them. 

Henri Nouwen writes a similar story in The Wounded Healer. A young catholic priest is visiting a man at the hospital who’s about to go into surgery. The man has no family and no one waiting for him after surgery. All he has to look forward to is going back to work. 

He died on the table. 

My mom died in the living room. 

Similar fates. Many such cases. 

These stories aren’t just things to be read. They are cautionary tales. Especially for me, because I see the same temptation in me. It’s only gotten more real since I got married and became a father. 

People living without some deeper purpose. Something calling them forward into their future. There’s only work. There’s only the next day and the next paycheck and maybe getting a little closer to being out of debt. Sure, there’s some happiness sprinkled in along the way, but it’s momentary and then it’s back to work. 

This is no way to live. This certainly isn’t the way God called us to live. We’re all called to work in some way. God wants us to be productive. He wants us, as men, to provide for our families. But the way we provide and the calling He places on our lives don’t have to be the same thing. 

For some reason, we think they do. Or I think they do. Or that’s what I have thought since I was 16.

It’s easy to let something else co-opt your purpose. Work. Children. Pleasure. Fill in the blank. We’re steadily fed some lie about purpose from an early age, then we meet Jesus, we hear He has a plan for our lives, and we combine that with whatever we’ve believed about purpose since we were young. 

The problem is, the lie sounds good. It’s a good thing to be good at your job, to be the teammate and employee your boss and coworkers can count on. There’s nothing wrong with moving up the ladder and making more money. 

(I’m focusing on work here because I think it’s the main thing men allow to become their purpose. It’s also the thing I’m struggling with right now.) 

But if we’re trading being important at work for being useful to the Kingdom, then we’ve lost the plot. The big cosmological plot we’re all part of. 

If that work has taken so much of our time and attention that we’re unable to focus on almost anything else, then we’re missing purpose. Eternal purpose. 

And maybe we’re on the way to dying in a chair at 61, because we’re starting to believe purpose is attached to paychecks, or miles flown to work trips, or the amount of meetings we get invited to, or a VP title next to our name beneath our black and white headshot on the company website. 

But there’s more. So much more that God has planned for us. Like the good works God planned beforehand so we would walk in them. That doesn’t mean your work can’t be part of it, but it certainly isn’t the only thing. 

But what is the only thing? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As work consumes more and more of my waking hours. As my son grows up and seems to need more to live. As my wife depends on me, and thinks about quitting her job. How can I not look at them and pour more of myself into work? But is more really what we need? Is it what they need from me? Or do they need a man who is fully present with them when he is with them? Do they need a man who is fully alive? 

If you’ve been thinking about the same thing, then I think you’ll like part II of this essay. Coming next week…

If you’ve been wondering and praying about purpose and maybe that your life is slipping away too quickly, I’d love to hear from you. Send me an email at sheep@sheepish.life. I read every one.