Farewell

In my life I haven't seen many very sick people in their last days, weeks or months. Most people who died and who had been close to me died suddenly. But yesterday I learned a little more about what terminal sickness looks like. After months of fighting the cancer in his lungs, a friend's father was forced to surrender. The war force objective was changed from "freeing the patient from captivity" to "making his life as comfortable as possible within the circumstances". Checkmate.
People walk in and out, children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, friends, nurses. They bring flowers, look him in the eyes with pressed lips, frowning their eyebrows, watery eyes. He sees, he hears and he knows. I'm dead. I tried to imagine how I would feel, lying in a bed with three months to go, or one week, or maybe one year. Would I feel a sense of relief, of relaxation, no responsibilities any more? Or would it make me cry when I see love in the eyes of the people visiting me, wanting badly to apologize for failing them, but missing the breath to say the words? Would there be love at all, or would it surface that love has been less than I thought? How would I look back on life? Would it be the disappointment in all the things I hadn't achieved that would dominate or would I feel grateful for having had so many chances and nice and caring family and friends? Or would I be tortured by fear for the decline and the pain ahead? When running a marathon, I know where it ends, when the pain will be over and well-deserved rest awaits me, when I will be able to thank my supporters. How would I run a race in which the only certainty is that it will hurt, a race of which the distance is unknown, that I would want to last as long as possible, but in which the finish line could be around the next corner? I don't know. Most likely the many questions and confusion would leave me thoughtless, clinging to small easy things, like sipping my glass and zapping the channels, letting time go by.