Right On Time

I turned eighty-one this year, on the Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June. There’s a lady down the way, a neighbor, and her birthday is the second of July or thereabouts, and she’s the same age as me. She was telling me she was eighty, and I said, “Well, you’re eighty, so am I, I’m June the twenty-fifth.” So now we call ourselves twins. A week apart, near enough, and twins. That’s the kind of thing you say to each other when you get to be our age and you’ve still got somebody left to say it to.

There are a lot of privileges when you get old, you know. Real ones. Once you’re past seventy-five you don’t have to take your shoes off at the airport anymore, and they’ll send you to a different screener, a separate one, just for the old folks. A couple of years back we went down to Mexico, the whole bunch of us, with Eric and Jan and them, and the fellow at the airport told me, “You can go to the different screener if you like.”

“No,” I said. “I’m going to stay good with my family. I’ll wait in line with everybody else.” But it’s there if you want it. That’s a privilege.

The only privilege you don’t get, the one nobody hands you, is being free from the arthritis. That one you keep. And it gets worse after seventy-five, it does, it really does. These days it seems like whenever I get up in the morning, everything hurts. Everything. That’s the part of getting old that’s not very much fun. There was a bricklayer I knew, years ago, and he had a line about it I’ve never forgotten. He said before he turned fifty, all his joints were flexible except one. And after he turned fifty, all his joints were stiff except one. That’s the bricklayer’s line. I think of him most mornings now, getting up out of the chair.

So don’t get old. That’s my advice. Don’t get old. Except there’s the other thing, isn’t there. The alternative. And I’ll get to that.

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It was about six years ago now they found out. We were drinking mate one morning, the way we always do, sitting there with the mate, and all of a sudden I thought I was having a heart attack. Just like that. I fell right over. I was very, very sick, sick in a way I’d never been, and I was sure that was it, that was my heart finally going. I still get that same attack sometimes, even now. It comes over me, and I get the water into me quick and I breathe through it, slow, a little at a time, and then it’s gone again. But that first morning I didn’t know what it was. I just knew I’d fallen over and I thought I was dying.

So I went to the hospital and they did all the tests. The ultrasound, the MRI, all of that. And they came back and told me it had nothing to do with my heart. Nothing at all. My heart was fine. But while they were in there looking, that’s when they found this other thing. The aneurysm. On the aorta. They’d never have gone looking for it — that’s the trouble with it — but there it was on the picture, and that’s how they stumbled onto it.

They call it the silent killer. You have no pain, you see. None. A man can carry it around for years and never feel a thing, never have the first idea it’s there, and then all of a sudden it bursts. That’s what the surgeon told me. A lot of people have no idea they’ve got it. And when that thing bursts you have a heart attack right then, because when it goes your heart almost stops pumping blood. That’s the end of it, just like that, and most of them never knew.

So they watched mine. They’ve been watching it the whole six years — a specialist, and I’d go in once a year and they’d measure it. It grows slow. And then last year, in September, I went in and they measured it and it was five and a half centimeters, and they said, “That’s it, it’s very serious now, we have to do the surgery.” The surgeon put it to me plain. “If you don’t do the surgery,” he said, “you won’t make another two years.” That’s how he said it.

Now the doctors, they tell you people are born with it. He said to me, “Yours could be that you were born with it.” I don’t think so, myself. I disagree with them there, gently. Because I asked him, “What does a thing like this come from?” And he allowed that high blood pressure could do it, a lot of stress could do it. Well, that’s what I had. I had a number of years there with very high blood pressure, terrible blood pressure, and a lot of stress with the work and the men. And the thing is, since I stopped working, since I haven’t got the employees anymore, my blood pressure’s been fine. Just fine. So you tell me. I think that’s what created it. Not something I was born with. Something the years put there.

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When they told me about the surgery I did what the Bible says to do. James, chapter five. It says if somebody is sick, call the elders. So that’s what I did. I called the elders of the church and they came and they anointed me and they prayed over me.

It didn’t come to me all at once, mind you. Back in January I read that part, James five, the elders and the anointing and the prayer. Just read it, the way you read anything. Then a couple of weeks later I read it again. And then I started reading it more, more and more. Come March I was reading it almost every day. And all of a sudden — all of a sudden — I realized it was talking about me. That’s what it was. It had been sitting there on the page the whole time and one morning it just stood up and pointed at me. That’s when I could finally get myself going. Down to the church, to the pastor, to the elder, and the elder set the whole thing up.

And I’ll tell you, deciding to do that was a battle. A real one. For three nights before, I could not sleep. Not at all. Satan was right there the whole time, saying to me, “Forget it, it won’t happen, don’t bother, none of it’s real.” Three nights of that. That’s a battle, that is, and don’t let anybody tell you different. You’re lying there in the dark and the voice keeps on at you.

And the hardest part of the whole thing is that you get hardly any support. Hardly any. Even Grandma. The first thing Nettie said to me was, “You don’t trust the doctors, the surgeons.” As if calling the elders meant I’d given up on them. Well, sure I trust them. Three surgeries a day, those men do. They must know what they’re doing. I trust them fine. The praying goes right alongside the doctors. It always did. She didn’t see it that way at first. Most people didn’t.

And I’ve seen it happen. That’s the thing. I knew a fellow back in the seventies, a friend of mine, and he was already in the hospital waiting on his surgery. He called the elders, and they came and did the same thing, laid hands and anointed him. And then they went in to have a look and there was nothing wrong. Nothing. He went home and he never did have the surgery. And there’s a lady, older, I don’t know her myself but a friend of mine knows her — she was supposed to have heart surgery, the very same as me, and they did this over her and she was healed. Two of them, both heart, both healed.

And then there’s the cancer one, the newest one. Our senior counselor, Les Bergman, he knows a man, Henry Tricard. This man was full cancer just recently. Full of it. And his whole family came over to him, and the pastors came, and they prayed over him. And he’s completely free of it now. Completely free. That’s not the kind of thing Satan wants going around, I’ll tell you. It’s against his rules. So you hardly ever hear it from the pulpit. Nobody preaches it. And then people don’t believe it, because who’s ever told them? But I’ve heard it. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.

So I feel that I am healed. I do. I feel that I could be wrong about that — I could be — so whatever. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I still believe it every day. I believe it’s a done deal. But if it isn’t, it isn’t, and I’ll still be happy and thankful either way. I’ve outlived two generations already, you know. The men before me, and the men before them. I’ve outlived the both of them. Whatever’s coming, I’ve already had more than my share.

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I think about the dead a lot now. More than I used to. I still go out for coffee, mind you — there’s a group of us old fellows that meets at eight o’clock in the morning, and it’s a good bunch, a lot of BS going around and a good laugh. That group’s a couple of years old now. But I used to have three other coffee buddies, from before, and every one of them has passed away. George Nichol, he was one from our group — prostate cancer, and he died about a year ago. Never lasted long once they found it. Then Jake Dick, a friend of mine from my church, I used to go out with him for coffee, and he’s gone. And another one, David McBig, he passed away too. All three of them. So you sit at eight o’clock with the new bunch and you laugh, and you think, well. I guess I’m next.

When I moved back and started working again with a couple of fellows in Abbotsford — good guys, both of them, real good guys to work for — well, both of them are gone now. Both of them. And once you start down that road, once you sit and really start counting up the people you’ve known who are gone now, in the ground now, I get to two hundred of them very easy. Two hundred people, easy, and still going. There was a whole churchful from the old days — — a lot of people came out of that church in those days, and they’re all gone now. All of them. A family of boys I knew, four boys from Paraguay — all of them gone. You sit and you count and it just keeps going.

It gives me a warning, is what it does. You don’t think about it, most days. You don’t. But really, we should think about it more than we do. Could this be our last day? That’s the question. Could this be the one. You go around not asking it, and you shouldn’t.

I had a second cousin, Blinkev — he had heart trouble. The doctors gave him pills to take for it, and he never took them. Not one. After he was gone they found them all hidden away in a drawer in the washroom, the whole lot of them, never touched. He had what they call heart congestion — water on the heart, all this water building up on it. And he did nothing about it, no exercise, nothing. He was out golfing one day, and he got up to the second hole, just the second hole, and all of a sudden he said, “I’m feeling very, very sick.” And he leaned right over onto his partner there, leaned on him — and then he just went down. His heart stopped. Right there at the second hole.

And then there was the accident on Number Three Road, in 1984. A big one. Thirty-five vehicles. A fellow we knew and another man with him — Hedman, and a friend with him — they were on their way to Surrey to a hockey tournament. Five minutes. Five minutes after they left the house, that’s all. They got crunched in that pileup and killed instantly, the both of them, killed right away. And Hedman left a wife and five kids behind him, all of them young ones. Five minutes out of his own driveway.

Now here’s the thing I’ve come to, after all of it. The wagon that pulled me in, the plank that came down on my head in that basement, the truck that hit me on my birthday — and Blinkev going down at the second hole, and those men on Number Three Road five minutes from home. I’ve thought about it a long time. And I don’t believe Blinkev died one minute too soon, or one minute too late. I believe everybody dies right on time. Right on time. Believe it or not — and a lot of people won’t — but to my mind, that’s how it is. You die right on time. Not a minute either way. That’s what I hold to, and it’s carried me through everything that’s come, the three times the Good Lord sent my arm up or my sister down to the barn or that insurance to run out one day later. He didn’t want me yet. And when he does, that’ll be right on time too.

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So I’m not afraid of the surgery. When the surgeon was telling me how it goes — they open the machine up to your blood, and they’ve got to get right in there to the heart — he said, “We’re going to have to cut your chest open.”

And I said, “Well, should I bring my chainsaw?”

“I’ve got a chainsaw,” he said. Then he laughed, and he said, “That might be a good idea.”

“The rougher it is,” I told him, “the better it’ll heal. Matter of fact, maybe I ought to just cut it open myself before I come in, take the whole thing off, and save you the trouble.” He got a good laugh out of that one. You’ve got to be able to laugh at it. You’re here for a good time, not a long time.

I’m a framer. I’ve built houses my whole life, over two hundred houses, put up the walls and set the floors and finished the rooms. And I’ll tell you how I picture the place I’m going. The room that I’m going to be in up there, it’s going to be all granite. The whole thing, granite. And the floor is going to be gold. And the contractor who’s doing the work on it — well, he’s having a hard time getting the supply. He’s behind. That’s how I see it. The room’s not quite finished yet, the granite and the gold, and the contractor’s waiting on his materials, same as any job I ever ran.

I believe it’s a done deal. I do. But if it isn’t, it isn’t. And either way, I’ll still be happy, and I’ll still be thankful.