Looking at the mouth of the gun barrel, a local name for a long straight canyon on the Cheticamp River, from Montagne Noire (Black Mt),
The camera is likely on the trail up the mountain. Twenty years ago my hunting partner came down the trail with a 215 class Boone and Crockett moose. He would have looked up the barrel many times. He is 70 with late stage dementia and now he is staring down the mouth of another kind of gun barrel.
The two of us were up in that wild lonely country many times looking for shed antlers. The last time was 8 years or so ago. I may never go back. My friend will not for sure. I knew the last time something had changed about him and that he likely was done but I didn’t guess dementia would grab him.
I saw him in January for the first time in a year and the change was dramatic. His body was ravaged by the illness and the best he could communicate was unintelligible mumbles. I was unsure if he knew who I was. The nurses said it was not likely. He is in stage 6 of 7 and not much can be done for him. It is hard to say how much longer he has. The memories he had of all of those trips up there are being robbed from him now.
In my teens, a friend of my dads told me if you want to do something you better do it while you are young, He was younger then than l am now. He had tuberculosis issues throughout his life so his advice was from experience. He was right and l did do some of what l wanted, like looking for moose sheds, but much more was missed.
Do not go gentle into that good night
Overused but still applies here.
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” — Paul Bowles‘ The Sheltering Sky
Time is the fire in which we burn. Delmore Schwartz