Category: Death Meditation

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How dying offers us a chance to live the fullest life

The price of a humanity that actually grows and changes is death.

By Rowan Williams

[P]eople still sometimes discuss the question of how you could tell that you were talking to some form of artificial intelligence rather than an actual human being. One of the more persuasive suggested answers is: “Ask them how they feel about dying.” Acknowledging that our lifespan is limited and coming to terms with this are near the heart of anything we could recognise as what it means to be human.

Once we discovered that Neanderthals buried their dead with some ritual formality, we began to rethink our traditional species snobbery about them and to wonder whether the self-evident superiority of homo sapiens was as self-evident as all that. Thinking about dying, imagining dying and reimagining living in the light of it, this is – just as much as thinking about eating, sex or parenting – inseparable from thinking about our material nature – that to have a point of view at all we have to have a physical point of view, formed by physical history. Even religious systems for which there is a transition after death to another kind of life will take for granted that whatever lies ahead is in some way conditioned by this particular lifespan.

Conversely, what the great psychoanalytic thinker Ernest Becker called “the denial of death” is near the heart of both individual and collective disorders: the fantasy that we can as individuals halt the passage of time and change, and the illusions we cherish that the human race can somehow behave as though it were not in fact embedded in the material world and could secure a place beyond its constraints. Personal neurosis and collective ecological disaster are the manifest effects of this sort of denial. And the more sophisticated we become in handling our environment and creating virtual worlds to inhabit and control, the looser our grip becomes on the inexorable continuity between our own organic existence and the rest of the world we live in.

It’s a slightly tired commonplace that we moderns are as prudish in speaking about death as our ancestors were in speaking about sex. But the analogy is a bit faulty: it’s not simply that we are embarrassed to talk about dying (although we usually are), more that we are increasingly lured away from recognising what it is to live as physical beings. As Kathryn Mannix bluntly declares at the beginning of her book about pallia-tive care, “It’s time to talk about dying”. That is if we’re not to be trapped by a new set of superstitions and mythologies a good deal more destructive than some of the older ones.

Each of these books in its way rubs our noses in physicality. Caitlin Doughty’s lively (and charmingly illustrated) cascade of anecdotes about how various cultures handle death spells out how contemporary Western fastidiousness about dead bodies is by no means universally shared. We are introduced to a variety of startling practices – living with a dead body in the house, stripping flesh from a relative’s corpse, exhuming a body to be photographed arm in arm with it… all these and more are routine in parts of the world. And pervading the book is Doughty’s ferocious critique of the industrialisation of death and burial that is standard in the United States and spreading rapidly elsewhere.

Doughty invites us to look at and contemplate alternatives, including the (very fully described) composting of dead bodies, or open-air cremations. A panicky urge to get bodies out of the way as dirty, contaminated and contaminating things has licensed the development of a system that insists on handing over the entire business of post-mortem ritual to costly and depersonalising processes that are both psychologically and environmentally damaging (cremation requires high levels of energy resource, and releases alarming quantities of greenhouse gases; embalming fluid in buried bodies is toxic to soil). Doughty has pioneered alternatives in the US, and her book should give some impetus to the growing movement for “woodland burial” in the UK and elsewhere. At the very least, it insists that we have choices beyond the conventional; we can think about how we want our dead bodies to be treated as part of a natural physical cycle rather than being transformed into long-term pollutants, as lethal as plastic bags.

Talking about choices and the reclaiming of death from anxious professionals takes us to Kathryn Mannix’s extraordinary and profoundly moving book. Mannix writes out of many years’ experience of end-of-life care and presents a series of simply-told stories of how good palliative medicine offers terminally ill patients the chance of recovering some agency in their dying. Those who are approaching death need to know what is likely to happen, how their pain can be controlled, what they might need to do to mend their relationships and shape their legacy. And, not least, they need to know that they can trust the medical professionals around to treat them with dignity and patience.

Mannix’s stories are told with piercing simplicity: and there is no attempt to homogenise, to iron out difficulties or even failures. A recurrent theme is the sheer lack of knowledge about dying that is common to most of us – especially that majority of us who have not been present at a death. Mannix repeatedly reminds us of what death generally looks like at the end of a degenerative disease, carefully underlining that we should not assume it will be agonising or humiliating: again and again, we see her explaining to patients that they can learn to cope with their fear (she is a qualified cognitive behavioural therapist as well as a medical professional). It is not often that a book commends itself because you sense quite simply that the writer is a good person; this is one such. Any reader will come away, I believe, with the wish that they will be cared for at the end by someone with Mannix’s imaginative sympathy and matter-of-fact generosity of perception.

Sue Black’s memoir is almost as moving, and has something of the same quality of introducing us to a few plain facts about organic life and its limits. She moves skilfully from a crisp discussion of what makes us biologically recognisable as individuals and how the processes of physical growth and decay work to an account of her experience as a forensic anthropologist, dedicated to restoring and making sense of bodies whose lives have ended in trauma or atrocity. The most harrowing chapter (and a lot of the book is not for those with weak stomachs) describes her investigations at the scene of a massacre in Kosovo: it is a model of how to write about the effect of human evil without losing either objectivity or sensitivity.

Perhaps what many readers will remember most vividly is her account of her first experience of working as a student with a cadaver. For all the stereotypes of the pitch-dark and tasteless humour of medical students in this situation, the truth seems to be that a great number of them actually develop a sense of relatedness and indebtedness to the cadavers they learn on and from. Black writes powerfully about the sense of absorbing wonder, as the study of anatomy unfolds, of the way in which it reinforces an awareness of human dignity and solidarity – and of feeling “proud” of her cadaver and of her relation with it.

For what it’s worth, having taken part in several services for relatives of those who have donated their bodies to teaching and research, I can say that the overwhelming feeling on these occasions has been what Black articulates: a moving mutual gratitude and respect. And the book is pervaded by the sense of fascinated awe at both the human organism and the human self that comes to birth for her in the dissecting room.

Richard Holloway writes not as a medical professional but as a former bishop, now standing – not too uneasily – half in and half out of traditional Christian belief, reflecting on his own mortality and the meaning of a life lived within non-negotiable limits. His leisurely but shrewd prose – with an assortment of poetic quotation thrown in – is a good pendant to the closer focus of the other books, and he echoes some of their insights from a very different perspective. Medicine needs to be very wary indeed of obsessive triumphalism (the not uncommon attitude of seeing a patient’s death as a humiliation for the medical professional); the imminence of death should make us think harder about the possibility and priority of mending relations; the fantasy of everlasting physical life is just that – not a hopeful prospect, but the very opposite.

He has some crucial things to say about the politics of the drive towards cryogenic preservation. Even if it were possible (unlikely but at best an open question) it is something that will never be available to any beyond an elite; any recovered or reanimated life would be divorced from the actual conditions that once made this life, my life, worth living; how would a limited physical environment cope with significant numbers of resuscitated dead? The book deserves reading for these thoughts alone, a tough-minded analysis of yet another characteristic dream of the feverish late-capitalist individual, trapped in a self-referential account of what selfhood actually is.

****

Odd as it may sound, these books are heartening and anything but morbid. Mannix’s narratives above all show what remarkable qualities can be kindled in human interaction in the face of death; and they leave you thinking about what kind of human qualities you value, what kinds of people you actually want to be with. The answer these writers encourage is “mortal people”, people who are not afraid or ashamed of their bodies, those bundles of rather unlikely material somehow galvanised into action for a fixed period, and wearing out under the stress of such a rich variety of encounter and exchange with
the environment.

None of these books addresses at any great length the issues of euthanasia and assisted dying, but the problem is flagged: Black says briskly that she hopes for a change in the law (but is disarmingly hesitant when it comes to particular cases), while Mannix, like a large number of palliative care professionals, strikes a cautionary note. She tells the story of a patient who left the Netherlands for the UK because he had become afraid of revealing his symptoms fully after being (with great pastoral sensitivity and kindness) encouraged by a succession of doctors to consider ending his life. “Be careful what you wish for,” is Mannix’s advice; and she is helpfully clear that there are real options about the ending of life that fall well short of physician-assisted suicide.

Like all these authors, she warns against both the alarmist assumption that most of us will die in unmanageable pain and powerlessness and the medical amour propre that cannot discern when what is technically possible becomes morally and personally futile – when, that is, to allow patients to let go. The debate on assisted dying looks set to continue for a while yet; at least what we have here goes well beyond the crude slogans that have shadowed it, and Mannix’s book should lay to rest once and for all the silly notion occasionally heard that palliative care is a way of prolonging lives that should be economically or “mercifully” ended.

The most important contribution these books make is to keep us thinking about what exactly we believe to be central to our human condition. It is not a question to answer in terms simply of biological or neurological facts but one that should nag away at our imagination. How do we want to be? And if these writers are to be trusted, deciding that we want to be mortal is a way of deciding that we want to be in solidarity with one another and with our material world, rather than struggling for some sort of illusory release.

Richard Holloway doesn’t quite say it in these terms, but the problem of a humanity that doesn’t need to die is that it will be a humanity that needs no more births. The price of a humanity that actually grows and changes is death. The price of eternal life on earth is an eternal echo chamber. As someone once said around this time of year: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.” 

Waiting for the Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death
Richard Holloway
Canongate, 176pp

All that Remains: a Life in Death
Sue Black
Doubleday, 368pp

From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death
Caitlin Doughty
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 272pp

With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
Kathryn Mannix
William Collins, 352pp

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Your Body is a Teeming Battleground

It’s time to rethink the quest to control aging, death, and disease—and the fear of mortality that fuels it.

By Barbara Ehrenreich

[I] went to medical school, at least in part, to get to know death and perhaps to make my peace with it. So did many of my doctor friends, as I would find out. One day—usually when you’re young, though sometimes later—the thought hits you: You really are going to die. That moment is shocking, frightening, terrible. You try to pretend it hasn’t happened (it’s only a thought, after all), and you go about your business, worrying about this or that, until the day you put your hand to your neck—in the shower, say—and … What is that? Those hard lumps that you know, at first touch, should not be there? But there they are, and they mean death. Your death, and you can’t pretend anymore.

I never wanted to be surprised that way, and I thought that if I became a doctor and saw a lot of death, I might get used to it; it wouldn’t surprise me, and I could learn to live with it. My strategy worked pretty well. Over the decades, from all my patients, I learned that I would be well until I got sick and that although I could do some things to delay the inevitable a bit, whatever control I had was limited. I learned that I had to live as if I would die tomorrow and at the same time as if I would live forever. Meanwhile, I watched as what had been called “medical care”—that is, treating the sick—turned into “health care,” keeping people healthy, at an ever-rising cost.

In her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich ventures into the fast-growing literature on aging, disease, and death, tracing her own disaffection with a medical and social culture unable to face mortality. She argues that what “makes death such an intolerable prospect” is our belief in a reductionist science that promises something it cannot deliver—ultimate control over our bodies. The time has come to rethink our need for such mastery, she urges, and reconcile ourselves to the idea that it may not be possible.

Ehrenreich is well equipped for her mission; she has a doctorate in biology and years of social and political work behind her, as well as decades of writing. I first discovered her in medical school, when I read her early book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1973). From it I learned that my small group of nine women in the otherwise male class of ’77 belonged to a long, if forgotten, tradition. I also learned that social progress is not always an upward-trending line. The author of more than a dozen books, Ehrenreich has a reputation for chronicling cultural shifts before others notice them. She delights in confronting entrenched assumptions, popular delusions, grandiose ambitions—and in teasing out their unexpected consequences.

Often she incorporates firsthand experience into her analysis. For her best-known book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), she spent a year working at unskilled jobs. In Living With a Wild God (2014), she recounted her own spiritual epiphanies in adolescence and her struggle, as a determined atheist, to understand her “furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once.” Before all that, in 2000, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and begun paying special attention to surprising new science about cancer, cells, and our immune system. Now 76, Ehrenreich explores that science in Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. Once again, she is swept up by big questions. Not least among them is “whether the natural world is dead or in some sense alive” and behaving in unpredicted and unpredictable ways that have much to tell us about our approach to mortality.

She starts by looking at the many preventive medical procedures we are encouraged, even badgered, to undergo—those regular physical exams, colonoscopies, blood tests, mammograms. She had always pretty much done what doctors advised (she underwent chemotherapy), figuring that it made sense to treat disease before illness overwhelmed the body. But after watching many fitness-obsessed people die early, and realizing that she herself is now “old enough to die,” she questions that premise. Where is the evidence that all the effort at prevention saves lives or delays death?

It’s hard to find, she discovers. In people who have a strong family history of heart disease, treating high cholesterol does decrease mortality, on average. But for those who don’t have that predisposition, it doesn’t. Colonoscopies have not been proved more effective at reducing deaths from colon cancer than other, cheaper, less-invasive tests. Sometimes procedures cause more trouble than they prevent. Mammograms, for instance, detect tumors that might never be fatal, and can lead to over-treatment, which carries its own risks. The insight is counterintuitive—although finding diseases early on should prolong lives, the screenings we undergo don’t seem to lower mortality rates overall—and Ehrenreich decides that she will no longer get most preventive care.

She is just as clear-eyed about other approaches to delaying our decay—exercise, diet, meditation. Though she became a “fitness devotee” herself in middle age, she finds symptoms of cultural malaise rather than health benefits in the fitness and diet obsessions of the past 40 years. Wellness programs do little to reduce companies’ immediate health-care costs, and the pursuit of fitness, Ehrenreich argues, is often simply one more “class cue.” Workouts easily become just that—work, another demand for self-discipline, competition, and control. Ironically, when she reached her 70s, her knees began giving her trouble not from age-appropriate arthritis but from overexertion.

[T]urning from her critique of preventive medicine and fitness culture as death-postponement strategies, Ehrenreich is even more unsettled by research indicating that our immune system is not the magical “protective cloak” she learned about in graduate school. What really gets her rethinking her scientific beliefs is the evolving story of the macrophage—the specialized white blood cell that she always thought of as her good shepherd “through the valley of the shadow of death.”

Macrophages have traditionally been understood as one of our crucial first-line defenses against disease. They are found throughout our body—in our bones, brain, lymph nodes, lungs, and breasts—and circulate in our blood. They look like the amoebas we learned about in high school, those slippery, one-celled, independent creatures that move by stretching out and contracting, and eat by wrapping themselves around their prey, invaginating and absorbing it. The usual story went like this: Whenever macrophages find threats to our well-being in our midst—bacteria, viruses, fungi, or cancer cells—they kill them and eat them by engulfing and absorbing them. Ehrenreich assumed that keeping her immune system—and valiant macrophages—strong through exercise, diet, and positive thoughts was the key to not getting sick, not getting cancer, not getting old.

But research around the turn of the millennium suggested a different view. Macrophages do not always kill our cancer cells; sometimes they even help them grow and spread. They escort certain cancer cells through the tight walls of our blood vessels, and protect them as they circulate in our bloodstream, looking for a congenial new home. When such a site is found—in a bone or breast, liver or lung—macrophages then support those cancer cells as they mature into the metastases that will go on to kill us.

Scientists are now discovering that the macrophage is as much wolf as shepherd in other diseases as well. It may play a role in auto-immune disorders, and even in the usual afflictions of aging—heart attacks, strokes, arthritis. We thought we knew the causes of those (cholesterol, cigarettes, inactivity) and therefore the recourse (diet, abstinence, exercise); but now it appears that inflammation, caused in large part by our macrophages, may be a trigger. Ehrenreich ponders the heretical question: Can it be that instead of working to keep our immune system healthy, we should all along have been doing the opposite?

[E]hrenreich is not, however, an apostle of unwellness, and Natural Causes is not a how-to book. Instead she focuses on the conceptual and “deep moral reverberations” of the discovery that our immune system can aid and abet a “cellular rebellion against the entire organism.” What if our convenient “holistic, utopian” view of the “mindbody” as a “well-ordered mechanism”—kept in harmony by positive thinking and solicitous tending—is wrong?

Ehrenreich proves a fascinating guide to the science suggesting that our cells, like the macrophages that sometimes destroy and sometimes defend, can act unpredictably and yet not randomly. It is almost as if our cells can choose when and how to behave—unregulated by any deterministic mechanism. But that would mean they have “agency, or the ability to initiate an action,” as she puts it. And what would that imply? If macrophages are actually deciding which cancer cells to destroy or to preserve, “maybe, crazy as it sounds, they are not following any kind of ‘instructions,’ but doing what they feel like doing.”Researchers are now finding this same agency everywhere, Ehrenreich reports—in fruit flies; in viruses; in atoms, electrons, and photons. Such discoveries must mean that agency, the capacity for making decisions—electrons jumping up a quantum level or not, photons passing through this hole in a screen rather than another—is not the rare, and human, prerogative we once thought.

Ehrenreich detects a paradigm shift in the making, away from holism and toward “a biology based on conflict within the body and carried on by the body’s own cells as they compete for space and food and oxygen.” This vision of the body as an embattled “confederation of parts”—the opposite of a coherent whole, subject to command and control—is “dystopian,” she writes. And yet it has liberating, humbling implications. “If there is a lesson here,” she proposes, it’s that “we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else.” Of course, the struggle to win the battles within our body may be one we’ll never be able to resist. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll devise high-tech ways to induce, or persuade, our traitorous immune cells to cooperate with our health. But whatever technological miracles appear in our future, Ehrenreich hopes we can come to accept that the ultimate outcome will be, as it has always been, out of our control.

Researchers are now finding this same agency everywhere, Ehrenreich reports—in fruit flies; in viruses; in atoms, electrons, and photons. Such discoveries must mean that agency, the capacity for making decisions—electrons jumping up a quantum level or not, photons passing through this hole in a screen rather than another—is not the rare, and human, prerogative we once thought.

Ehrenreich detects a paradigm shift in the making, away from holism and toward “a biology based on conflict within the body and carried on by the body’s own cells as they compete for space and food and oxygen.” This vision of the body as an embattled “confederation of parts”—the opposite of a coherent whole, subject to command and control—is “dystopian,” she writes. And yet it has liberating, humbling implications. “If there is a lesson here,” she proposes, it’s that “we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else.” Of course, the struggle to win the battles within our body may be one we’ll never be able to resist. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll devise high-tech ways to induce, or persuade, our traitorous immune cells to cooperate with our health. But whatever technological miracles appear in our future, Ehrenreich hopes we can come to accept that the ultimate outcome will be, as it has always been, out of our control.

No, because I’ve noticed, in my life as a doctor, that the truism is true: People die the way they’ve lived—even the demented and even, somehow, the brain-dead. The brave die bravely; the curious, with curiosity; the optimistic, optimistically. Those who are by nature accepters, accept; those who by nature fight for control die fighting for control, and Ehrenreich is a fighter.

Yes, because I’ve also noticed that everyone I’ve seen die does come to accept the inevitable loss of control at his or her finally unevadable death. Usually that happens over weeks or months, sometimes over years; occasionally it happens over days, hours, or even minutes. This acceptance is perhaps as developmentally determined as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. At the end, something magical appears to occur—something beautiful, something Other—that seems to heal the spirit, allay all fear, and settle, finally, the struggle for control.

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What a dying old woman taught me about love

Was this a cause and effect of true love?

By Tom Tanno

[I] was a newly trained hospice volunteer, and E. was to be my first patient. I had to work up the nerve to cross the threshold.

After gently clearing my throat and shuffling my feet in an attempt to wake her, I bent low to look at her face. Suddenly, her eyes opened wide.

She was as startled as me and said, in a forced whisper, “Who are you?”

“I’ve come to visit for a while,” I replied.

“Why, are you being punished?” she deadpanned.

I laughed a little, mostly with relief. I introduced myself to the dying woman who was a few decades my senior and then nervously began a monologue, telling her all about me. She listened attentively for a while but soon closed her eyes. On a tray table was a wedding photo. I peered at the circa 1940s picture and was taken aback. “Wow!” I said out loud. In her youth, E. had been stunningly beautiful. Bright eyes, fresh face. I looked up and saw her once clear but now milky eyes examining my face, watching my reaction to the photo.

She was bedridden, her bones fragile. During our next visit, I asked the nurse if E. could go outside in a wheelchair. The nurse said it was up to E. We rolled out into the sunlight and fresh air, and that’s when everything began to move faster for us, literally and figuratively.

I maneuvered her down the cracked and bumpy sidewalk into a nearby neighborhood. She lifted her face to the sun and opened her mouth to its warmth. She stayed that way until I parked the chair under a shade tree. I sat down with the trunk as my backrest.

For the longest time, she simply stared at me. Until she slowly stretched out her arms and beckoned me to her. I jumped up, although she didn’t seem in distress. I leaned toward her and she gently cupped my face with her hands. I could feel the pressure of each finger on my face. Suddenly, with purpose, she pulled me close and kissed me. On the lips, with a dry pucker.

I was not made uncomfortable by the gesture. Quite the opposite. I sensed in her a genuine joy and appreciation. So she kissed me. Perhaps the most meaningful kiss of my life.

Those meetings under the tree became our routine, where we shared stories of our lives. We quickly bonded through unabashed, intimate conversations. I told her things about myself that I had never, nor would ever share with anyone else. We simply started talking to each other that way. Instant trust, instant karma. Instant honesty.

E. told me she wasn’t so much afraid of dying as she was of going to hell. She had married young, to a very ambitious man, and as the years progressed, his business flourished, but their marriage did not. He increasingly spent more and more time at the office, with colleagues and away from her. Estrangement set in.

She found a job as a secretary and over time fell prey to the attentions and intentions of her boss — afternoon “lunches” at a motel.

One day, on the ride back to the office, her boss spotted his wife in town, waiting to cross a street. With a violent shove, he sent E. into the passenger side footwell, hissing at her to stay down until he was sure he had avoided detection.

It was a humiliating and illuminating moment for E. She ended the affair. But the deed had been done. She was officially an adulterer. Worse, a mortal sinner. And now, as her life was about to end, she could not shake the guilt and dread that God was about to deliver her to the eternal fires of damnation.

She wept as I knelt beside her chair and held her.

I know something about the Catholic church, having been an altar boy. I reminded her about the convenience of confession. “From what I just saw, I’ll assume you are truly remorseful.” “Yes of course,” she said. “And you have formally confessed this, yes?” “Once a month for the past 66 years,” she said. “Well, then, I think God has gotten the message … you’re off the hook!” “Do you think so?” she asked earnestly. “I know so,” I told her.

As our visits continued, I also shared stories I was not proud of, of my regrets, sins, character flaws, abuse of drugs and alcohol, tales of ruined relationships and marriages and career paths gone awry. How I blamed others and circumstances as if the bad things that happened in my life were not of the choices I made. She was at times scandalized by what she heard, but never judgmental. The process was cathartic, cleansing, transformative.

I felt a lightness of being I had never experienced before.

Within a year, she began to rapidly decline. During the day, I’d find her in a deep sleep. The nurses said she’d lay awake most nights and was eating very little. I started setting my alarm for 1:30 a.m. to make the 40-minute drive to her facility in the San Fernando Valley. I’d sit on a folding chair and move in close, so our whispered conversations would not wake others.

She was comforted and calmed by my presence. She was grateful that I had re-arranged my visiting times. (I know because she told me so.) And she also told me that she loved me. Too weak now to even raise her hands to my face, I fulfilled the need for that contact by tenderly kissing her cheek and forehead often. I needed it too. Time was slipping away.

I soon realized her truth, raw honesty and tenderness had created in me a level of introspection and self-examination that had previously been inaccessible. Was this a cause and effect of true love? And I did grow to love her — for her courage, candor and kindness. She was well aware her days were numbered. But for all of her failing health issues, she never expressed bitterness. It was another lesson learned for me.

For the first time in almost two years after I started visiting with E., I was going to be away from her, to make good on a long-planned vacation in the Yucatán. I told her that I’d be gone only a week and during that time there would be a full moon. I suggested that since she was awake at night she should look up for the full moon, and I promised I would too, and maybe we’d do it at the same time. Corny, maybe, but she didn’t think so.

One night during the middle of my trip, I couldn’t sleep and walked outside to where a hammock was strung between two palm trees. I laid back and looked up at a crystal clear moon and said out loud, “See? I told you.”

Upon returning home, it took me a few days to get back into the groove of work and life. But before I could make my next visit, I got a call from the hospice volunteer coordinator. E. had died while I was away. Peacefully, in her sleep, at age 87.

I often think of E., of how a dying old woman helped me to access and express my true, honest feelings about life and love. Not only did I get to learn from my mistakes, but from hers, too. I was able to affect the quality of her life for a time, but not the direction. She did both for me.

In real ways, we set each other free.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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When do you know you’re old enough to die?

Barbara Ehrenreich has some answers

Author and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich at her home in Alexandria, Virginia, on 2 March.

By

With her latest book, Natural Causes, Barbara Ehrenreich notes that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation

 
[F]our years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich, 76, reached the realisation that she was old enough to die. Not that the author, journalist and political activist was sick; she just didn’t want to spoil the time she had left undergoing myriad preventive medical tests or restricting her diet in pursuit of a longer life.

While she would seek help for an urgent health issue, she wouldn’t look for problems.

Now Ehrenreich felt free to enjoy herself. “I tend to worry that a lot of my friends who are my age don’t get to that point,” she tells the Guardian. “They’re frantically scrambling for new things that might prolong their lives.”

It is not a suicidal decision, she stresses. Ehrenreich has what she calls “a very keen bullshit detector” and she has done her research.

The results of this are detailed in her latest book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, published on 10 April.

Part polemic, part autobiographical, Ehrenreich – who holds a PhD in cellular immunology – casts a skeptical, sometimes witty, and scientifically rigorous eye over the beliefs we hold that we think will give us longevity.

She targets the medical examinations, screenings and tests we’re subjected to in older age as well as the multibillion-dollar “wellness” industry, the cult of mindfulness and food fads.

These all give us the illusion that we are in control of our bodies. But in the latter part of the book, Ehrenreich argues this is not so. For example, she details how our immune systems can turn on us, promoting rather than preventing the spread of cancer cells.

When Ehrenreich talks of being old enough to die, she does not mean that each of us has an expiration date. It’s more that there’s an age at which death no longer requires much explanation.

“That thought had been forming in my mind for some time,” she says. “I really have no hard evidence about when exactly one gets old enough to die, but I notice in obituaries if the person is over 70 there’s not a big mystery, there’s no investigation called for. It’s usually not called tragic because we do die at some age. I found that rather refreshing.”

In 2000, Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer (she wrote the critical, award-winning essay Welcome to Cancerland about the pink ribbon culture).

The experience of cancer treatment helped shape her thoughts on ageing, she says.

“Within this last decade, I realised I was not going to go through chemotherapy again. That’s like a year out of your life when you consider the recovery time and everything. I don’t have a year to spare.”

In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich writes about how you receive more calls to screenings and tests in the US – including mammograms, colonoscopies and bone density scans – as you get older. She claims most “fail the evidence-based test” and are at best unnecessary and worst harmful.

Ehrenreich would rather relax with family and friends or take a long walk than sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She lives near her daughter in Alexandria, Virginia, and likes to pick up her 13-year-old granddaughter from school and “hang out with her a while”.

Work is still a passion too. She fizzes with ideas for articles and books on subjects that call for her non-conformist take.

Once a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America, she is also busy with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project she founded, which promotes journalism about inequality and poverty in the US, and gives opportunity to journalists who are struggling financially. (The Guardian often partners with the organisation.)

Ehrenreich, who is divorced, has talked to her children – Rosa, a law professor, and Ben, a journalist and novelist – about her realisation she is old enough to die, but “not in a grim way”. That wouldn’t be her style. While a sombre subject, she chats about it with a matter-of-fact humour.

“I just said: ‘This is bullshit. I’m not going to go through this and that and the other. I’m not going to spend my time, which is very precious, being screened and probed and subjected to various kinds of machine surveillance.’ I think they’re with me. I raised them right,” she laughs.

“The last time I had to get a new primary care doctor I told her straight out: ‘I will come to you if I have a problem, but do not go looking for problems.’”

She pauses: “I think I beat her into submission.”

Natural Causes is Ehrenreich’s 23rd book in 50 years. Much of her work is myth-busting, such as Bright-sided, which looks at the false promises of positive thinking; other work highlights her keen sense of social justice. For her best-selling 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, she went undercover for three months, working in cleaning, waitressing and retail jobs to experience the difficulties of life on a minimum wage.

A recent exchange with a friend summed up what Ehrenreich hoped to achieve with Natural Causes.

“I gave the book to a dear friend of mine a week ago. She’s 86 and she’s a very distinguished social scientist and has had a tremendous career. “She said: ‘I love this, Barbara, it’s making me happy.’ I felt ‘wow’. I want people to read it and relax. I see so many people my age – and this has been going on for a while – who are obsessed, for example, with their diets.

“I’m sorry, I’m not going out of this life without butter on my bread. I’ve had so much grief from people about butter. The most important thing is that food tastes good enough to eat it. I like a glass of wine or a bloody mary, too.”

Barbara Ehrenreich: ‘Cancer is a cellular rebellion.’

Yet despite her thoughts on the “wellness” industry with its expensive health clubs (fitness has become a middle-class signifier, she says) and corporate “wellness” programs (flabby employees are less likely to be promoted, she writes), Ehrenreich won’t be giving up the gym anytime soon. She works out most days because she enjoys cardio and weight training and “lots of stretching”, not because it might make her live longer.

“That is the one way in which I participated in the health craze that set in this country in the 70s,” she says. “I just discovered there was something missing in my life. I don’t understand the people who say, ‘I’m so relieved my workout is over, it was torture, but I did it.’ I’m not like that.”

In Natural Causes, Ehrenreich uses the latest biomedical research to challenge our assumption that we have agency over our bodies and minds. Microscopic cells called macrophages make their own “decisions”, and not always to our benefit – they can aid the growth of tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening results.

“This was totally shocking to me,” she says. “My research in graduate school was on macrophages and they were heroes [responsible for removing cell corpses and trash – the “garbage collector” of the body]. About 10 years ago I read in Scientific American about the discovery that they enable tumour cells to metastasise. I felt like it was treason!”

She continues: “The really shocking thing is that they can do what they want to do. I kept coming across the phrase in the scientific literature ‘cellular decision-making’.”

This changed her whole sense of her body, she says.

“The old notion of the body was like communist dictatorship – every cell in it was obediently performing its function and in turn was getting nourished by the bloodstream and everything. But no, there are rebels – I mean, cancer is a cellular rebellion.”

Ehrenreich, an atheist, finds comfort in the idea that humans do not live alone in a lifeless universe where the natural world is devoid of agency (which she describes as the ability to initiate an action).

“When you think about some of these issues, like how a cell can make decisions, and a lot of other things I talk about in the book, like an electron deciding whether to go through this place in a grid or that place. When you see there’s agency even in the natural world. When you think about it all being sort of alive like that, it’s very different from dying if you think there’s nothing but your mind in the universe, or your mind and God’s mind.”

Death becomes less a terrifying leap into the abyss and more like an embrace of ongoing life, she believes.

“If you think of the whole thing as potentially thriving and jumping around and having agency at some level, it’s fine to die,” she adds reassuringly.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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There is more than one way to die with dignity

By Ing Wong-Ward

“Who are you here to see?”

On this day, I was at Mount Sinai Hospital, in the oncology ward. The receptionist I usually check in with wasn’t at her desk. I was being greeted by a volunteer. Dark hair, wide eyes and a smile like a child’s doll. High school co-op student, maybe?

I handed over my health card and told her my doctor’s name.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who she is. What are you here for?”

Her smile widens.

“Because I’m a patient?” I retort.

I know I’m being rude. But it’s an oncology ward. What does she think I’m here for? To discuss the weather? The shortage of wheelchair-accessible parking spaces in the lot?

What I really want to say is, my doctor is a palliative-care specialist. I’m seeing her because I have cancer. I’m preparing for my death.

I don’t look like I have cancer, let alone the incurable kind. I have all my hair. My friends and husband assure me my colour is good. Dressed in my normal clothes and not the pajamas I currently favour, I look reasonably well – for a middle-aged woman who also has spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital neuromuscular condition.

I rely on a motorized wheelchair to get around and need personal support workers to assist me in all aspects of daily living. It’s been this way forever, but now I have colon cancer, and two external abdominal bags to collect various bodily fluids.

This, to put it mildly, complicates things.

My palliative-care doctor is a compassionate young woman who wouldn’t look out of place in a medical drama. She has been guiding me through my own recent hospital drama: I was readmitted to hospital a couple of weeks earlier, for yet another emergency.

I’ve been fighting off a major abdominal abscess for more than a year now. At one point, my abscess was so large, one of my doctors admitted surprise that I was upright. This is what initially led to my cancer diagnosis. A colon biopsy confirmed the cancer was malignant. In October, I was told my cancer was inoperable, despite 28 rounds of radiation.

At least it’s not metastatic. Localized, but nowhere else. For now, anyway. Plus, my surgeon tells me, I likely have years with this cancer. Not months or weeks, like some of his other patients.

The challenge now is the infection associated with the abscess. During this current crisis, antibiotics are working. What my surgeon can’t tell me is when the next infection will hit, or when antibiotics may fail.

Some patients reinfect every month, he tells me. I’ve done well, he adds. I tell him I couldn’t handle being hospitalized every month. He acknowledges I would need to evaluate my quality of life, if this became my reality. In that moment, my decision to seek palliative care early seems the smartest decision I’ve made in a while.

Like most Canadians, I had limited understanding of palliative care before I had cancer. To me, “palliative care” was synonymous with “you are about to die.”

That’s not the case. On my first palliative visit, the doctor explains the word is Latin for “to cloak.” She personally likes that, seeing her role as guide and protector to patients who are coping with the most difficult time of their lives.

I need her guidance. There is no clear path around how to deal with cancer while living with a disability. I’m used to being disabled. It’s my normal. My quality of life up to now has been exceptional, complete with a husband I adore, a sweet, sassy daughter and a brand-new career.

Like everyone else diagnosed with cancer, my life has suddenly imploded. I find myself in this new world, navigating how to continue while knowing the end is coming much sooner than I’d like.

That’s why I’ve sought out palliative care. My own research leads me to studies showing that having a palliative-care expert can help me prolong my quality of life through the management of symptoms, such as pain that I know will likely worsen over time. My family doctor concurs, telling me outright that I need this.

This new relationship has enabled me to talk about my greatest fears. After my conversation with my surgeon, I fear dying slowly of sepsis, waiting for my organs to fail. I’ve agreed to a Do Not Resuscitate order, which ensures I won’t be hooked up to machines in the ICU, prolonging The End.

During this particular admission to hospital and based on what my surgeon has said, my choices seem stark. Down the road, I could die slowly from an infection that will shut down my organs, or sign up for a medically assisted death.

Then, my palliative-care doctor arrives at my bedside. She points out I have bounced back from severe, acute episodes before. She also knows I don’t want an assisted death and takes the time to explain there are options available, such as palliative sedation, a process where I can have large doses of morphine to keep me comfortable. She firmly tells me I am not close to needing this. My goal needs to be focused on getting better and getting home, to my daughter.

As she explains this, I start to relax. She’s given me the window I need to live my life, as compromised as it now is. It is not the life I would have chosen, but it still has meaning. My task now is to figure out what that meaning is. And her task is to help me to define my priorities while maximizing the quality of my life with medical therapies and emotional support.

It’s an interesting time to be thinking of my life as a person who is both disabled and has cancer. Less than two years ago, the federal government enacted a new law enabling Canadians with incurable conditions, whose death is foreseeable and are suffering irremediably, to ask a doctor to end their lives.

It’s been called “dying in dignity,” but for me, that’s not the way I want to go, at the hands of a doctor, wielding a poisoned syringe.

I believe no one with a terminal illness should be forced to endure suffering – but, if there is one lesson for me in the past year, death is not the only way to alleviate suffering. Managing physical suffering feels like traveling a winding road. Some days, it feels never-ending; other days, manageable, almost like the life I had before. Some days are so bad, I’m convinced death really is the only relief, but I’m brought back to reality when I think of what I could miss out on.

My life is definitely smaller now. I doubt I will ever work full-time again. I barely leave my apartment. Thanks to my father’s financial generosity, my husband has been able to take unpaid leave from his work to be with me. The time we spend together is precious. Even in its ordinariness, it is meaningful.

I appreciate the world differently now. It is as though time has slowed for me to see the small details of life, whether it be the softness of my bed sheets or watching snow drift down through my apartment window.

I’m trying to live with dignity, as I always have, despite the very real medical indignities I have been subjected to.

Which is why it dismays me greatly there are continuing attempts to make it easier for people without terminal conditions to ask a doctor to end their life. It dismays me that a lobby organization calling itself Dying With Dignity is not actively lobbying for increased access to palliative and hospice care, or advocating for more community supports for people with disabilities to live as productively as possible. In other words, to live with dignity.

We are all going to die, but before we do, each one of us has a right to a good quality of life, even to the very end. Yet too many Canadians do not have adequate access to palliative and hospice care. The lobbying efforts of those to equalize this are rarely discussed in our media.

I’ve chosen my path, thanks to the help of empathetic doctors and my own advocacy. My hope now is that more Canadians have the right to do the same, without the implied suggestion there is only one real way to die with dignity.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Learning how to think about death changed how I live

Viewing death as unrelated to life, or antithetical it, does a disservice to the days we have, because we don’t know how to value them, says John Leland. The journalist and author explains how an elderly friend changed his perspective on the importance of acknowledging our mortality.

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Judy Woodruff:
New York Times reporter John Leland began following a group of men and women in 2015 who ranged in age from 87 to 92.
What he learned shattered his expectations about aging and death, as he explains in his Humble Opinion.

John Leland:

[P]eople are always telling us to live each day as if it’s our last, but we don’t really do it, and for two good reasons.

The first is that, if you really thought today was your last day, you wouldn’t pay the utility bill or save for retirement, and, before you know it, you’re in the dark warming a can of beans over an open flame.

And the second reason is that we don’t like to think about death or dying, except as something that happens to other people.

A few years ago, I met a man named John Sorensen, who taught me how to think about death, and it changed my outlook on life. He was 91, and he missed his partner of 60 years. And every time I visited him, he said he wanted to die. He wasn’t depressed or even sad.

In fact, talking about dying always got him in a good mood. Wanting to die, for John, was the best reason to live.

And what I mean is this. He loved opera and he loved old movie musicals. And wanting to die meant acknowledging that this might be the last time he heard Jonas Kaufmann sing Wagner or watched Gene Kelly singing in the rain. This made each time more worthy of his attention.

And the same went for visits with friends. It’s a textbook economics of scarcity. His days weren’t fleeting. They were saturated with pleasures of his own choosing.

In our culture, we have come to think of death as a kind of failure of medicine or an affront to the self, rather than seeing mortality as built into all of our days, the first as much as the last.

Viewing death this way, as unrelated to life or antithetical to it, does a disservice to the days we have, because we don’t know how to value them. We enjoy a movie more knowing it’s going to end in a couple hours.

That ski run in the Swiss Alps, it’s only fun because you know there’s a bottom. The end of the run gives meaning to each curve on the way down, even when you’re still near the top of the mountain.

I have heard this acceptance of the end from most of the older people I have spent time with.

But you don’t have to wait until we’re 91 to enjoy it. We should rethink what it means to live every day as if it’s your last. The way I learned it from John, it means embracing that part of the end that exists in this moment, and then in the next.

You don’t have to quit your job or stop paying your utility bill. There’s enough to live for in the things you’re already doing. Each brush with a stranger, each moment with friends, each kiss or caress, there’s a little bit of our mortality in all of them. But their ours for now.

And that is reason to be happy.

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Coming to terms with the end of life

by Penny Heneke

[B]eing well ensconced in my senior years, I am faced with the daunting prospect of my mortality. An article I read recently commented that people are afraid to face and to speak of this pending permanent change of address. For me death lurks in the dark like a boogey man under the bed. An elderly, crabby aunt I boarded with as a teenager scanned the death notices each day. She positively cackled with delight when she discovered an acquaintance she had outlived.

Nor is death and dying a scintillating topic to introduce for conversation in an evening entertaining friends. While seniors are renown for recounting “organ recitals” of their many health problems in great detail, death itself is a taboo subject. For some, life is a painful battle against debilitating health issues and for most of us it is trying to find strategies to deal with the everyday evidence of our evaporating capabilities along this final stage of our life journey.

Perhaps a sense of humour is a valuable tool to deal with our aversion to death. A friend on his 90th birthday decided to deal with his advancing age by walking around with a sticky note plastered on his forehead announcing, “expiry date: overdue.”

In the meantime, seniors have to cope with the everyday incomprehensible things we seem to do as we amble along to this dead end. If the solution were only as simple as one friend remarked: “Oh, for some happy pills.”

One morning, my husband, Ken emerged from the unlit walk-in closet attired in my fluffy, light blue, terry housecoat. It fitted him to a tee, as today my hubby is a shell of his former robust five-foot-10. Shrinkage of over 4 inches has occurred due to arthritis. When he realised his faux pas, he looked sheepish and commented: “I’m really losing it.”

I couldn’t laugh too loud as I find myself in the same category. At my recent optometrist appointment, I was squinting through the phoropter the optometrist was using to test my eyesight, not wishing to admit that the finest print was a blur. I had always had 20/20 vision. In an attempt to improve the images, I closed one eye. As the consultation continued with the instrument going back and forth, I suddenly could not see anything in the one lens — just blackness. My optometrist was puzzled and made some lens adjustments.

“Can you see now?” she asked.

“No, it’s still pitch black,” I replied. “I can’t see a thing.”

She sounded puzzled and moved the machine aside. After a moment’s hesitation, she placed a hand gently on my shoulder and remarked: “My dear, you have your eye closed!”

While my vision might be fading fast, Ken suffered a mini-stroke and lost the use of his right eye. Family and friends responded sympathetically by telling him of someone they knew with the same predicament and yet was still legally able to drive. Neither Ken nor I felt reassured learning how many one-eyed people are out there on the roads driving.

I don’t think it was his eyesight that caused Ken to panic as he was leaving for a doctor’s appointment. He patted his pockets frantically looking for his car keys until I pointed out that he had them in his hand.

Never mind the missing death discussion, aging itself takes a great deal of adjustment. My recurrent nightmare of losing my teeth has been replaced by one of losing clumps of my hair and going bald.

After spending a life time amassing material objects, I have reversed the procedure by decluttering. Now I am fine tuning the unburdening of my “stuff.” I am in the last stage, which I am calling, “closure.” This is as close to the “D” word as I can get.

Preparing for the end, I announced to my children that I was drafting my own obituary notice. I don’t trust them to get the facts right. This resulted from my perusal of the obituary notices each day in the daily newspaper. My first feeling is one of sadness looking at all the smiling faces of people who have passed. However, I am also struck by a few who have had unflattering photographs placed with their notice. In order to avoid this dilemma, I have picked a photo — admittedly a good few years younger — of myself for my obituary. My daughters love to tease me by saying that I will have no control over the whole issue. At least I would have tried.

The lyrics from the English punk rock band, the Clash, “Should I stay, or should I go” underscore that we really have little choice in the timing of our departure so it’s best to make the most of what you still have left of life.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!