Friend’s sudden death reminds me that love is all we have at the end

By David McElroy · May 14, 2013

On March 4, I got an email from Chris Kahn. We had only been friends on Facebook for about a year and a half, but I’d come to like and respect him. He remembered that I’d had a bout with cancer last year, so he had some questions.

“I have not gotten the results from the biopsy yet, but my gastroenterologist and oncologist are fairly certain the tumor in my esophagus is cancerous,” Chris wrote. He said the doctor was making plans for chemo, radiation and surgery. “I am not really happy with the idea, but there may be no other option. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, I’d appreciate it.”

Just 41 days later, Chris was dead.

After his initial message about the surgery, I posted the details of his situation and asked others for treatment options. Nothing interesting and viable turned up.

I didn’t keep up with the specifics of how he was doing, but I knew he was getting treatment. On March 12 — just eight days after his initial message to me — he posted on Facebook about the way his situation looked.

“It has started to spread,” he wrote. “The reality kind of sunk in today. This may kill me.”

I could tell from the pictures and short comments he made over the coming weeks that he was having surgery. On April 12, I sent him another email to ask how the recovery was coming along.

“David, thank you for your continued interest,” he wrote. “My response may seem a bit disjointed and rambling as my brother-in-law is hovering over me with my prescriptions. For the most part I am on hold until we can discover who wants this info. Generally speaking, healthy.”

I saw that as very positive news. He was recovering, surrounded by family. And his health was, “Generally speaking, healthy.”

I felt he was someone else who had beaten cancer and that he was going to be fine. I didn’t hear from him after that. I got busy with life and didn’t check on him again until this past weekend. When I went to his Facebook page to send him a note, I found a message from his sister and brother in law:

To all the friends of Chris Kahn,
He passed away Sunday evening [March 14].
Please post your messages on his Facebook wall.
He died in our home in hospice care.

I know that people die every day. That’s just the way the world works. But it’s not every day that someone I know dies, so it leaves me with the same sorts of melancholy feelings that such deaths bring to so many of us. As much as I’d like to pretend that the feelings we experience are grief for the loss of a friend or loved on, I think the feelings tend to be about ourselves.

Other people’s deaths remind us that we’re mortal. They remind us that we’re going to die, too.

Chris Kahn was an intelligent and thoughtful man. He was a principled libertarian who frequently had insightful comments about subjects related to politics and society. In the short time I knew him, I came to see him as someone interesting enough that I’d like to have known him better. (When Chris posted this picture in January, friends joked that he was going for the record of “longest beard for someone who actually has a job.”)

At this point, though, his politics and his intelligence don’t matter. He’s just another mortal man who’s “gone beyond the gate we must all pass some day,” in the words of the great songwriter Terry Scott Taylor (in “One More Time“).

From the day a doctor told him he thought it was cancer until the day he died, Chris didn’t quite have six weeks. It reminds me of how fortunate I was last year when a doctor told me that I had breast cancer and lived to tell about it. It reminds me of the cliche that none of us know how much time we have left on earth.

More than anything, though, it reminds me that we’re here to love and be loved. Some people mistake that for just the physical things they do for people and that they allow people to do for them. Those things are important, but the real point is the feeling of loving connection and understanding that exists between two hearts — at least every now and then.

Don’t waste the time you have in this world. Don’t accept less than a real loving connection. Don’t let any kind of pragmatism or “what others would think” get in the way of having what you need. When you lie in a bed dying one day, you’re not going to worry about what people thought of you or whether people thought you made the right decisions. You’re just going to want to know you’re loved and understood.

I’m going to miss my friend, Chris. And I thank him for forcing me to think — one more time — about what I really want and what’s truly important in this life.

Goodbye, Chris.

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