Most of the time our days focus on what is immediately in front of us, with the trivial and frustrating as its highlights. A coffee spill as we stop short driving, the silly joke with somebody, a radio jingle that won’t leave out head. But sometimes at night or especially late night you might talk with companions over drinks about a friend of a friend dying as the conversation lags when people turn to reflect about death and possibly their own death. Somebody asks when “the end” comes, and if you had your choice, how would you want to “go”? The answer is often to die on your our own terms, nobly and in little pain. But like most, as was the case with my father, we have little choice.

My father knew his life was winding down, but the farm knew it before him. A family wheat farm in semi-arid country was always a difficult proposition. In earlier days, having a large family with strapping and able boys as ready labor was the preference. But with near poverty for many farm families in our area, large bank loans for operating capital, increasing economic uncertainty, and the weather, many families had fewer kids. It was simply cheaper. In our family, it was just my brother and me. My brother loved the idea of farming but found his future in another trade. I was a skilled farmer, but I had dreams like Luke Skywalker in the movie Star Wars to leave my little dusty farm for the adventure that awaited. Eventually, Dad farmed the 7,000 acres, a total of 11 square miles, alone, but he could make do. “Make Do” is the farmer’s mantra.

Then the 1980s Farm Crisis arrived. The worst economic tragedy for farmers since The Great Depression. The price of wheat plummeted and remained low due to massive grain stockpiles from over production. The inflation of the 1970s continued for agricultural fuel and equipment. High interest rates and expensive land made it difficult to pay bills or buy more land to increase crop production. And then the value of farmland deeply fell, with farmers owing more on bank loans for more than the land was worth. Drought during most of the 1980s resulted in mass crop failures. The death of family farms was a side job for The Grim Reaper in the form of farm sales that ended the heritage and life’s blood of many farm families. The banks began foreclosing on farmers that hung on to high debt with little income. Some 60 banks went under from the farm debt that they carried. But Dad, like most farmers, was resilient and had a plan. He and many of the farmers in the area enrolled in the federal government PIK program that paid farmers to not farm. Scarcity increases crop value. Now, Dad just had to keep the mounting bank debt at bay, repair aging equipment, hope for good crop years for his remaining land, and ignore the ominous letters from the IRS to “clarify” on some of his deductions. But The Grim Reaper had other plans for Dad.

Working on a farm is often a marathon in feeling like “crap”. While many people believe that farming is an adventure in fields brimming with buttercup flowers, smiling cows, fresh air, and tiring but satisfying work, farmers have a slightly different perception. The fields are dry, dusty, and the sweat you have from hard work only bonds the soil to your body more. Your hands are calloused, often cut while toiling, and at least some time along the way fingers are broken and mend but with the after effect of early arthritis. The cattle smile because you step in their “crap”. The dust fogs when you plow the soil, it is hot inside the tractor or grain harvester because the air conditioning is not working in the combination fishbowl and oven-like glass cabin where you sit, and hard labor is the currency demanded to bend the land to your temporary will. Many farmers are broken down and prematurely old before their time with so many bodily ailments that the complaints of a professional football team after a game makes the players seem like sissies.

With so many “check engine lights” on the dashboard of my father’s middle-aged 53 year old life, he did not notice the increasingly painful discoloration in his legs. But why would he notice when his head ached from long days in the sun, his throat burned from acid reflux, and the high blood pressure that quietly grew and raised the bar for what a “normal” day felt like. Some days his legs became swollen and painful, causing a man who never took time off to do nothing but stay in bed for several days. But eventually he would summon up stubborn determination, drag out of bed, and get back to the long hours of work. Each time, a little slower, slightly more stooped, but still standing.

In Eastern Colorado there is a medical clinic with one tired and busy doctor and limited equipment for every 50 square mile region. Each county has one small hospital. Just feeling bad is not reason enough for most rural folk to see the local doctor. The reason you didn’t see the doctor until you couldn’t stand it anymore is complex. In a land where severe injuries and illnesses are common, visiting the doctor is reserved for those who can no longer make do. Severe cut but no infection and things still work: No doctor. Severe cut that doesn’t stop bleeding and you don’t have enough bandages: Doctor. Broken finger, wrist, or ankle that you can do what the doctor will do: No doctor. And the list goes on. The local clinic is for handling the child kicked by a horse or the all too frequent farm accident victim. A rugged individual for a harsh land. And while the local doctor is an almost miracle worker at helping the community, the diagnosis is almost the same, “Stay off of it, get some rest, and you should see a specialist in Denver”. Seeing the doctor and following the prognosis always meant money that the farmer didn’t have, usually due to no insurance and costs out of pocket. Besides, everybody has to deal with some kind of ache or pain that costs money and time taken away from the farm.

It took a few years of swollen and jaundiced limbs, headaches, and feeling terrible as the new normal of life before Dad saw the local doctor. After 30 years of practice, people like my father still frustrated and amazed him. He calmly but firmly said to Dad, “You should not be alive. You have extreme diabetes and your sugar levels should have you in a coma. And you have severe hypertension. I’m surprised you haven’t had a heart attack yet”. Several prescriptions later, and my father was feeling well enough to put in a full day of work again. What the pills didn’t remedy, my father’s willpower shored up the difference. But like telling bill collectors, “The check is in the mail”, Dad had only delayed paying the negative health debt he had accumulated.

The sunburn-like pain, combined with the feeling of ants under your skin, began in his legs and gradually spread across his body. Specialists called it neuropathy. A neurological condition caused by your own nerves acting out in messages of pain as they are devastated by diabetes. Over the course of six years it consumed my father. It was a relief to him that the pain began to subside, only to be replaced with the horror as he felt a numbness, then no feeling at all. My father could not feel when a metal was too hot to hold, when his foot was starting to become pinched in machinery, or when his body was aching from too much work. Eventually, the numbness led to a creeping paralysis that started in his feet and slowly crept to his knees, then hips. The specialists said when the paralysis had crept to his torso and diaphragm, he would stop breathing. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic were amazed when they witnessed a man walking in their exam room who should have been unable to move. It was sheer force of will.

One summer I visited my father. We all knew that he was in his final days with no idea of exactly when the end would come. I was shocked to see an imposing, intimidating, force of nature who once broke the family scale to weigh himself, now reduced to a thin and fragile man of only 165 pounds. His farming days were behind him and now his only exercise was not swinging a hammer to bend bent farm machinery back into place, but an exercise bike. The lanky and withered man, who had never before those days considered an exercise bike, leaned on its handle bars as he peddled, an unfiltered Camel cigarette dangling from his lips. He answered my stare at the cigarette with, “It’s the only thing left now that gives me pleasure”.

At one point during our visit, alone and talking in the home’s machine maintenance building, my father confided how he was “going to go”. In a slow and raspy voice he said, “While I still have the strength, I’m going to ride my motorcycle on the interstate one last time. I’ll time it so that I goose the throttle and take the bike into oncoming traffic in front of a semi truck. It won’t hurt the trucker. Your mother will get the insurance”. With a sudden afterthought he added, “Just wanted to you know, it’s not the same as suicide”. For a few moments, tears in both of our eyes, we held hands. I could feel his weathered, scarred, and aged hands. He could not feel mine.

Not many months after our final visit between father and son, I received the telephone call that I expected but was unprepared to receive. My father had passed, but not by the motorcycle ride he had in mind. The day my father died started out with a choice: Pain medication or blood pressure pill; he did not have money to pay for both prescriptions and he was rationing the pills he took. My mother watched his finger move between one pill to the other in an adult version of “eenie, meenie, miny, moe”. He chose the pain medication. He bid his wife goodbye and left for work. The Grim Reaper had already punched in for work and was waiting.

My father died alone and in a final act of heroics. He was doing landscaping in the yard of a resident in town, using a road grader to move, level, and contour the initial shape of the yard. When the owner stepped outside to see his progress, he found the machinery stopped with the engine running. My father was slumped over the controls, dead from a heart attack. The Grim Reaper had climbed the steps, entered the glass cabin and squeezed my father’s chest like it was in a mighty vice until his heart stopped beating. While fighting the agonizing pain, loss of bodily control, and wild confusion of the attack, Dad managed to bring the 17 ton piece of moving machinery to a stop, keeping it from smashing through the resident’s house. His test in life was over and he was instructed to put down his pencil and stop trying to find life’s answers. There was no more pain.

Nobody understands more than farmers that life is only what exists in the moment. The past is no more and the future may never come. All we really have is the moment. We would like to think that when our final moments come that we will be prepared with the right clothes, the perfect location, the memorable last words we will say, and the people we love around us. But when it is our time “to go”, all we can really do is live in the moment and be who we are that time, the same as we should be in the present and in the moment every day until then. Embracing life itself in a single moment that in itself becomes enough. And if we are lucky, we can step outside of that moment to recognize the beauty, humor, and joy of just being alive that people miss when they let life’s frustrations get in the way. It is not the worst way to go.

~ Mason