April 12 is always a dark day for my family.

For me, Saturday will be freighted with a heavy sense of disbelief — it will be the 50th anniversary of my brother Jim’s death.

Half a century. No. Can’t be true.

But it is. I can do the math: I was 13 then, I am 63 now. Still, internally, it’s hard to process. To sober me to this, the hardest of hard facts, I often catch myself doing a bit of simple math. That is, if in 1975, my family had mourned a brother 50 years gone, we’d be thinking back to 1925, eight years after the end of World War I, 14 years before the start of World War II.

That would have seemed a long time ago then. Right?

Whatever the case, I still miss terribly the brother my dad called “Moby Duncan, the Great White Yo Yo,” and whom his many friends called “Pugsly,” or “Jim,” or “James.” I often wonder what he would have done with his life, about the hole in space and time his death tore open that will never close this side of eternity.

Whereas Jim died in a traffic accident, as readers of this column may know by now, I have terminal cancer. And on some day known yet only to God, like my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, like everyone who has ever lived or ever will live, I, too, will die. But more about that below.

It’s a lot to take in.

“If it doesn’t make you drink, by God it makes you think,” said the poet John Davidson, to borrow a line from him. Not being a drinking man, I’ve been doing a lot of the other instead, and often about my mother.

The woman my dad called “Nurse Whale,” out of deep respect and more than a bit of awe, had been surprisingly tough about physical pain all of her life. Indeed, I don’t believe any member of my family ever heard so much as whimper.

As her last days slipped by in that mid-spring 2006, however, and we watched helplessly as the cancer tore at her, ripping away the last pitiful shreds of human dignity she clutched tightly about herself, she gave way.

When she could no longer lift her arms, or move on her own, and the black bags under her eyes gave the truth to her complaint that she hadn’t slept in five days and nights, only then did her deep suffering overwhelm her, and she yelped like a wounded animal.

“Why is it taking so long! I’m ready to go now!”

I’d seen death before, but standing at my mother’s bedside three days later, when the bed clothes over her chest ceased moving up and down as they had done since 1929, and my father turned to me and said, “I think your mother is no longer with us,” death became so much more final.

Now, I am the terminal cancer patient. And my turn is rushing on, to a date uncertain.

On that gray morning in 2024 when my oncologist gave Ann and I the terminal diagnosis I was too stunned to say a word. But as we drove away from the clinic, Ann’s tears flowed. We’d been happily married for nine years. Since that day, we’d made a lot of plans, which now seemed to lie in the mud like so many roses trampled underfoot.

“It’s not fair,” Ann cried. “I just got you!”

The bald truth is that everyone who has ever been, or will ever be, dies. There are no exceptions. We all owe a death. It’s natural, not some freakish anomaly visited only on one person. I just happen to have a rough estimate of the time I have left, now coupled with a determination to make the best of it.

If there is such a thing as eternity – and my Christian faith assures me there is – my final days, however messy they may be, won’t even register as a blip.

As the English poet John Donne wrote 500 years ago:

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

All this to say: I longer fear death itself, though I could do without the dying part.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.