The Dying Know Their Time

“Dearest Dalva,
I am putting my affairs in order, and that is why you have this short letter from a dead man. I don’t intend to tip over tomorrow but I sense this will be my last summer. Unless we are insensitive we know our own weather” (Dalva, Jim Harrison; Dutton, 1988. pg 287).

My good friend Leo started to say things like this six months before he committed suicide. He saw himself as not a weather pattern, or a change in temperature, but rather a leaf on a tree. He admitted that he could see himself dropping from the limb “any day” and that he wasn’t meant for this world. Over and over, leaves were his symbol of life and death was the act of disconnecting from the branches. Falling gracefully.
I had no idea he was planning his own end. No idea that his suffering was something no doctor could cure. There was no medicine that could soothe him. Despite a daily raw onion eaten like an apple (!) his pain was the very act of aging itself. Failing eyesight, faulty plumbing, noisy hearing aids. Shaking fingers. Uncontrollable, unstoppable aging. Repeatedly he kept telling me it’s time. “Not today,” he would gently assure me, “but it’s time. It is time” Over the phone his breath sounded raspy and his voice mean. I swear I could smell onion juice. 
One time he was taking me to the Bronx to look at plants. As a member of the Botanical Gardens he had all sorts of access to all sorts of green things. He wanted to buy me a huge tree. Remembering his analogy of death I refused. Plus, I had nowhere to put it. ‘Just walk with me and tell me the names of plants’ I begged. He smelled of onions and vodka like always. He walked with hands clasped behind his back asking “does this make me look Jewish? No? Too bad! Because I am.” And laughing loudly, scaring away pigeons in the brush. It was hard to believe he wanted to fall with a laugh like that. I ended up allowing him to buy me a small fern which dried up and whithered away the following fall, despite my diligence to watering and worrying.
On the day I learned of his death, confused and angry, I threw up at the first sight of an onion. I couldn’t understand the meaning behind “I Quit” written on a calendar. Leaves weren’t supposed to pluck themselves from the limb. Whatever happened to falling off gracefully?
In the end Leo taught me that you don’t have to be sick to be dying. It was years before I really accepted it. Even still I don’t think I understand it. The dying know their time.