Over the last 10 years I’ve been to Ted’s house a few times to fix his retic. He’s a retired carpenter, now 81 years old and up until I saw him yesterday he was a fit, strong man with an aging Hilux and a half cab boat for pulling his cray-pots.

I like Ted. He’s your very down to earth, Aussie bloke who calls a spade a spade and never allows a sentence to pass without an expletive. He always wants to pay cash even though he knows there is no such thing as a ‘cashie’ for us. He doesn’t get a discount, but he’s from that era. The deal is done when the ‘real’ money changes hands.

So when I knocked on his door yesterday I was taken aback, as I didn’t recognise the man who opened the door. Ted was a rugged 85kgs last time I saw him – a fair bit of it muscle and the rest beer.

‘Will you take a look at me?’ are the very first words he says.

‘How you goin mate?’ I ask. ‘What’s the deal?’ His eyes are bloodshot and he’s skinny.

‘F*ckin cancer,’ he says. ‘They cut out me f*ckin stomach and I can’t eat a decent meal. I’m just wastin away. All this baby food mashed shit…’

‘Not good.’ I reply.

He tells a bit of the story. In between expletives, I make out that he is putting his house in order because there isn’t long to go. (Better get those sprinklers fixed so its one less thing for Mrs Ted to worry about.)

‘I guess we all have to die some time. You’ve got 300 thousand ks on the clock – you’ve done pretty well mate!’ I say to him. Sam thinks this is a bit too blunt, but Ted speaks ‘blunt’ natively. It’s not offensive to him.

He heads inside and we wander around and fix his sprinklers. It’s a quick half hour job and when we are all done and showing him the result we get chatting. I never hesitate to ask dying people how they feel about their impending exit.

‘How you feeling about dying?’ I ask him. We both know he isn’t gonna make a comeback.

‘Its a bit shitty, but we all gotta go some time. It is what it is.’ he says. And I think he means it. ‘I’ve had a good innings so no complaints. I just don’t want to hang around in this f*ckin state.’

‘Fair enough.’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t want to either. ‘What do you think happens when you die?’ I ask. It’s not an ‘evangelism strategy’. I want to know what he thinks. I want to get inside the head of a man who is facing death and hear his thoughts.

‘Back to dirt’ he says. ‘Nothin. It’s over.’

‘Really? There is nothing more to life than that?’ I ask.

‘Not to me,’ he says roughly. ‘The family were all bloody Jehovahs but I’m not into that shit.’

‘Ok, fair enough,’ I say.

He rattles on a bit and then I get the sense to offer to pray for him. I wonder if behind the gnarly exterior there might not be at least a little fear.

‘Look I’m a Christian, Would you like me to pray for you?’

‘Yeah – I would,’ he says – a bit to my surprise. So I put a hand on his shoulder, look him in the eye and I pray for him. I pray he will have courage to face the end. That his final days will be full of joy and that he will get to know the God who loves him.

I say ‘amen’ and he nods. He thanks me, shakes my hand with his strong, gnarly carpenter hands. He gives me the cash and we say ‘goodbye’ – but it’s with a bizarre sense of knowing that it’s a final goodbye. He grabs a business card ‘for the wife’, just before I leave. ‘She’ll need to know who to call.’

He’s just a client and I don’t know him that well at all, but I drive off a bit misty eyed as i realise that one day very soon Ted will be gone and the next time I go to that house there will be a conversation with Mrs Ted about what its like to be a widow – to live alone and to be without her man.

God bless Ted – and Mrs Ted.