June/July 2002
Community
Consciousness
Eric Sirotkin
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: A Call to Action
Congressman Dennis Kucinich
We
Are Not An Isolated Fringe
Kayla M. Starr, MPH
Rejecting
Neo-Liberal Globalization Will Diminish Causes of War and Conflict
Gerald Cavanaugh
War,
Inc.
Mike Ferner
Hell
to Pay: The Proving Ground
William Rivers Pitt
Liberation
Psychology and The Power Elite
Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
The
Age of Inequality
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Industrial
Agriculture Poisoning Our Water and our Home
PR
Firms Help Corporations "Infect the World"
George Monbiot
Book
Reviews:
The Democracy Owners Manual and The Global Activists Manual
Green
Beings: Plant Mind, Planetary Mind
Jesse Wolf Hardin
The
Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl
Keep
Your Tubes Outta Me … It's a Good Day to Die
John Darling
The
Movie Mystic: Waking Life
Stephen Simon
Soy
to Enjoy and Soy to Avoid
Rebecca Wood
Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
Keep
Your Tubes Outta Me … It’s a Good Day to Die
By John Darling
“Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.” —William Burroughs
This past winter, for the first time, I saw someone die. It’s quite ridiculous it should have taken these many decades before I saw death. Death happens often and we should see it often, understand it a lot better and have a whole bunch of rituals and songs for it. Instead, my sisters and I and a few of our partners stood around an ICU bed, glancing back and forth from our mom’s face to the monitor which fed out its blipping lines about heart rate, breath rate, blood pressure and oxygen absorption.
When someone would leave the room and come back, they looked first, not at dying Nan, but at the monitor. At some point in the early evening, after Nan realized for the 15th or 20th day in a row that she wasn’t going to get her white wine before dinner, she began to let go and, over an hour, her lines began to flatten. The lines, not our instinct, told us she was going to die. That’s when we began to tell her how much we loved her and what a great mom she’d been and how she’d find Bill and her parents on the other side and we’d be fine without her (lie). We began to sing her favorite old swing and jazz songs from the 30s and 40s. I sang “It’s a Wonderful World” softly into her ear, especially the line, “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do; they’re really saying I love you.” On her lips, I put a drop of Canadian whisky, the kind in the purple bag that she and her dad and his dad loved.
Then the lines dropped precipitously. There were a few more breaths with long pauses between, then the breath with the endless pause after it. I know I wasn’t imagining it—I could feel her happiness to be in the spirit world and the happiness of those waiting for her there. It was a lot like being at the birth of my children, a mystery so silent and honest and beyond any rational assessment. Where does the spirit go at this moment? Where does the spirit come from when the children are born and they open their eyes and very soon, over several days, you realize they already have a personality, a way about them, a personal power and destiny—and they didn’t learn it here. They came with it from—where?—from the same place Nan just went to.
We held hands around her and I did a prayer asking that she be taken happily into paradise, which apparently, she was. I cut a lock of her hair with my Swiss Army knife and kissed her forehead. The sweat of death was on it. I tasted it on my lips. I pulled the monitors off her body. I poured shots of Canadian and we all tossed them back and let them burn. During lunch the next day at Goose Hollow, I had to go outside in the clammy March wind and smoke and cry in privacy of the driveway. A redtail hawk suddenly appeared, soaring over downtown Portland. It cut several graceful circles over my head. It was her, somehow—her spirit. How do they do this? In so many cultures, birds take part in signs to humans. In the wake of it all, death pushed lots of buttons. One sister found something to fight about—the ashes, I think. Another cruised on with extra positiveness. Another became a patient herself, seeing the docs about palpitations and trouble breathing. They told her she was depressed (I think it’s called grief, doc) and prescribed antidepressants.
I went home and danced in the dark with Martine to all the old swing-jazz songs Nan loved and which I grew up with. I wept for hours and felt numb in my guts for weeks. A few weeks later, Nan came to me in a dream and was young and happy and talked angel talk, which I couldn’t understand, then she woke me up so I’d remember it. I got the meaning of her words, though: she was ok. Later, I caught a Star Trek episode in which the sad crew are trying to plan a funeral for someone. They ask Worf if he has any ideas. He says, well, I don’t think I have anything sad to contribute, because in my culture death is a time of celebration about passing into the hall of heroes, where life is much better. Wow, I thought, that sounds true. Why do we—though most of us say heaven/paradise is better—feel so pole-axed, so riven with shock, so full of regrets that more love didn’t happen, so aching with soul-stripping loss?
The FedEx guy brought several boxes of photos and letters, most of them sent to Nan by me over the decades. It’s bizarre. I don’t know what to do with them—probably keep them in a box for my children to have when I go to the hall of heroes. Going through them, I get a sense of a big life, Nan’s, flattened into a thin archaeological layer about a quarter inch thick. Now it will never change; it’s fixed. And, really, for the first time, I get a sense of my life being two-thirds of the way down the same conveyor belt. Yes, yes, the dead live on as the love they nurtured in the hearts of their kin and friends, but, say a century from now, they’ll just be a box of pictures of someone’s great-grandparent.
Suddenly, one day I’m playing wall tennis in the brilliant spring sunshine and marveling at the purple vetch and mustard all over the hills and I have one of these moments where I say, “You’ve got to be kidding me! It goes by so fast. What’s it all about anyway?” Everyone says we’re here most of all to love and be loved and most importantly to pass that love on to our children. Yes, I know that. I do that. But seeing this death—my mom’s—far from loading me with the weight of grief, has lightened me. I feel freed. It’s killed off that Protestant Work Ethic-temperance-superego-inner parent voice thing and I suddenly decide life is what I say it is. I’ve tried to do this all my life, but now, like the slashing of a great sword, these things are cut away and I’m free.
Life seems burst out of its blossom. I hear people gossip and I don’t care what they’re saying and have nothing to add. I don’t care what people do or what’s in the news. Well, some, but not a lot. People warn me that my kids are entering those adolescent years and I should brace myself for their wild goings-on around sex, drugs, cars and rebellion. I say, I don’t care, I know they will do those things, just as I did, but they will do them well. They won’t hurt anybody. Or themselves. People warn me I should blow several hundred dollars a month on health insurance but I just refuse. It feels evil. I don’t care. They signal that cancer or heart bypasses or strokes or some combination of the above are my inevitable fate and I should plan for them—invest in them!—so I can, well, live through them, and then what? Be a very old survivor and have more years to “love life.”
But I don’t love life, I finally tell them. It’s been good, yes, (especially the 1960s!) but if I haven’t done what was important to me by 65 or 70, then what’s the point in stretching it out into the 80s and 90s, where I might do some watercoloring, see the pyramids at Teotihuacan, but realistically spend most of it with a 500-channel zapper in my clawed hand. I know one thing: I’m not going to let the docs get their hands and monitors on me and have their little conferences in the hallway with the next of kin, talking about how they have good news and bad news. The bad news was anything that might let death get nearer to this 82-year old person, Nan. The good news was the next sonogram, xray, transfusion, radiation, bypass or shunt—each one of them costing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s not likely they’d be interested in doing these “procedures” if the patient didn’t have several good health insurance policies covering everything imaginable.
With the passing shock and the acceptance of loss, I found myself in the anger phase, but not anger at death. I was angry with those who tried to stand in death’s way. If she’d lived before all this medical wizardry, Nan would’ve died 15 years ago. When I say this, others counter that it “gave” us those extra years of Nan. Yes, yes, she got to see grandchildren she would never have seen and got to grow in her wisdom and caring. But it also pulled everyone into this burgeoning cult—industry, even—of life extension. What right have we to do this, to tease out lives a generation past their time? I was angry because I never got to come to grips with the fact of her death when death was ready. As the docs tricked death time after time, they seemed like they were preserving something we love—the life of a mother—but they were also trashing something natural and good: death itself. I only got to accept her death as fact when they sat us down in the conference room and said, well, we’re out of tricks. She will die today. We’ve made her “comfortable” (whammied her on morphine). Now we’re done; you can go ahead and accept it. And that’s exactly what happened. It was managed and comfortable, like the antidepressants they gave my sister to help distance her from grief—or like a Caesarean, which docs do to too many mothers now, saving them from the vice of birth. Just as the dying are saved, until the last hours, from the vice of death.
But then, I don’t care. Martine and I have both asked each other, when death is come round, to let us say our goodbyes on our feet, then take us over into the desert and leave us with some water and maybe a drum and a pad to lie on. The turkey vultures will recycle us. That makes me comfortable. I hope the stars will be out and that it is a good day to die.
John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor. His book, A Gathering of Voices, is available for $20 at jdarling@jeffnet.org
