For those of us whose lives don't end suddenly, we experience a decline. Surgeries lead to long recoveries. Hospital visits turn to long-term stays. Long-term stays turn to hospice.
Sometimes we make it out. Sometimes we don't.
Regardless, during the fight, one's body is ravaged, pummeled by anesthesia, the surprisingly violent gut tumbling that happens during surgery, chemo, and various other medications that sort of kill us in order to hopefully save us.
And once the procedure is finished, once the course of action is decided upon, we sit. And wait.
The patient is often weak and must rest.
Or maybe they're past that stage. Maybe they must be made comfortable as the inevitable creeps closer.
In the sterile rooms of rehabs, hospitals, and hospices all over, the weak and waiting all share one pastime: watching TV.
As I sat with my friend during his last week of life, we watched Independence Day and Armageddon. Full of commercials. Old school TV. The kind of TV most of us cord cutters don't watch anymore.
It was July 4th, and despite the party outside, the cancer inside meant that this was all there was energy for.
The TV became the excuse - to spend time, to not sit in silence due to his weakness despite the fact that is exactly what we were all doing.
Still, it didn't feel that way. It never does. It feels right. Like we're keeping on keeping on. We're doing something normal. Not just recovering, or waiting, or dying.
It's the great distractor - these little stories, these puffs of nostalgia. Hours of TV administered like medication to those at the end of the line.
TV is fluff, it's entertainment.
But in this context, it gives a bit more. Not much. But enough. It doesn't demand anything of us. It lets us sit, it lets us remark, it lets us decide. It lets us be. It lets the time pass until the time is up.
