Boo.

Happy Halloween.

I’m hanging out with my brother and his girlfriend, baking pumpkin scones and watching spooky Tim Burton movies, while simultaneously trying to flesh out some thoughts about death and dying.

So, in honor of today, this is about the grace that being mortal beckons of us all, and how far away we have gotten from embodying it.

BEING MORTAL

I just finished Sally Mann’s Hold Still, which dealt quite heavily with the ideas of ephemerality and decay, ideas that then of course propelled me back to my bookshelf where my fingers instinctively found a morbid favorite of mine, Atwul Gawande’s Being Mortal.

In it, Gawande, a doctor, explains what has gone so wrong in America when it comes to death. He writes that death has become something that we see as a option, something we can pay to inject and surgically operate out of ourselves, as if we are not mortal, ephemeral beings inextricably tied to death from the moment of our conception.

He tells stories of patients who severed their quality of life to haunting extremes, partly because of how poorly doctors are actually trained when it comes to dying. He explains that in medical school, it’s all about saving lives, not letting them go. They had seminars on death, sure, but not so much about dying.

DEATH VS DYING

Because, when you think about it, death itself is not the issue, but rather dying. He explains that we used to just live and then die, with very little suffering between the two. He maps out a nice little graph and everything. Dying was not a prolonged process, the line of your life ran straight and then fell sharply. Now, our lives look more like mountain ranges, perpetually kissing death on the lips only to be yanked back again.

“For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn’t matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.”

-Atwul Gawande Being Mortal

Granted there was a lot of death back then, and young death at that, which, I suppose you could argue was a more natural way to live, albeit tragic and existentially bleak. People were probably a hell of a lot more comfortable with death than we are today. They were definitely on a first name basis.

For, with medical interventions and scientific innovations, we are living longer than we ever have, and putting ourselves through more than was ever possible before, in efforts to avoid it. Sally Mann writes that sex used to be the great, big taboo, and that it has since become death. The thing not to talk about.

It has become something almost unnatural. Something so distant and foreign to most of us that we live the majority of our lives taking time for granted, not remembering enough that we are mortal messes.

MESSY BODIES

One of my professors is always going on about the “abject”, arguing that our bodies are these abject, gross, messy things, and it has become the great mission of our lives to pretend that they are not.

We go to great lengths to be clean, to hide our bodily functions, to control the ickiness that is so inherent in human life. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do these things, there is little as enjoyable as the feeling of being clean out of the shower wringing water out of your hair, but it is an interesting concept. We’re always hiding our naturalness, perfuming it, covering it, walking around in nice clothes to our nice jobs, pretending that we are not just wild, breakable things.

MEMENTO MORI

If you were to ask me, that is what I fear more than anything in this world. Forgetting that. It’s not the idea of dying, but rather the idea of not living while alive. That’s why I’m so obsessed with dissecting both philosophical nuances and the earthly realities of mortality. It is so beyond easy to take life for granted when death doesn’t feel imminent. How often do you hear people say that they only truly began to live once they found out they were dying?

I suppose all of my books about death, (Tuesdays With Morrie, When Breath Becomes Air, The Last Lecture, Do No Harm, The Year of Magical Thinking, to name a few) and my ongoing studies of artists like Ana Mendieta and Patti Smith are all just ways of trying to never get too complacent with life.

Gawande writes:

“The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task.

Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.”

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”

-Atwul Gawande, Being Mortal

NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT

For as extraordinary as medicine can be and is most of the time, there is this grey area when it comes to death and dying. We like to think that we have it figured out, but I really don’t think that we do. To suffer, and for how long, to take the chance, and at what cost? These have become the questions, the ones that wreak havoc on families as they watch their loved ones die, slowly, for years.

I would like to think that there can be a grace to dying, just as I try to have grace with living. I would like to think that there is a beautiful way to do it. I remember watching a show recently where someone was dying and when she told this old, wise woman, the old woman responded without a beat:

You’re dying? Nothing wrong with that. Most natural thing in the world.

Those words stood out to me severely, for when is that ever the response to death? We crumble, cry, and look with pity. We ask about prolonging measures. We infer about time, how much of it is left.

TO LIVE & DIE

But never, in my limited experience, has anyone ever just looked that dying person in the eyes and told them that it was okay. It would seem rude, insensitive even. But that scene didn’t feel that way. It placed death back into it’s organic state. Because Gawande is right, of course. In a war that can’t be won, you don’t want to be fighting with your teeth until the bitter end. Maybe you just want to live, until you die.

I mean, my mom tells us all of the time that the hospital is the last place that she ever wants to be. We went to visit my grandmother the other day who just has knee surgery and she almost passed out just standing in the hallway. She wants to live and die, even if it means dying earlier than torturous medical methods of prolonging life could promise.

I tend to feel similarly. I think it’s a healthier outlook, to be comfortable with the concept of your own death, rather than running so fast from it that you die a million small deaths along the way.

So maybe it’s morbid, but the more I read and think about death, the less frightening it becomes. They say we are most afraid of the things we don’t understand, after all.

On that note, have a spooky Halloween.

Love, m.

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