Member-only story
Three Life Lessons From a Dying Man
None of them involve money
One of my favorite jokes I’ve ever heard was delivered to me by a terminally ill man. He knew I was looking for a serving job, so I could quit as a retirement home night-cook and go back to school.
“I was looking in the classifieds today,” he said. “I saw something that would be perfect for you. The pay isn’t great, but the tips are huge!”
“Oh yeah, Hank? What job?”
“Circumcising elephants at the Denver Zoo!” Hank said, proceeding to cackle until his hacking cough came back. After the fit, his wife pleasantly chastised him for being crass, and my half-hour lunch break was over.
Hank would be dead of lung cancer within a month. He was one of many people that I got to know (and lost) in my time working in a retirement home.
Being so close to death, in many ways, taught me to live. I had left my dishwashing job at this same retirement home after graduating high school in the fall of 2011, and by January 2012, I was back, after dropping out of college.
As a dishwasher, I never really talked to the residents. However, the competence of a monkey’s foot can get you promoted out of dishwashing, so it wasn’t long before I was promoted to cook.
That’s when I met Hank. Hank had been a B-17 tail gunner in World War II, at a time when the survival rate for pilots was roughly one in three (according to him). He told me story after story during the many lunch breaks I ate in his apartment. He showed me the “emergency kit” he was given in the war, for the worst-case scenario of being shot down in combat (It was essentially cigarettes and a light snack).
He had a catchphrase that he said over and over “I’ve got a million stories, and some of them are even true.” Some of them were very much not true, like when he swore up and down that the Germans shot green and red anti-aircraft shells at his plane on Christmas day.
