How to die well

Lack of faith is no impediment to a decent death – or to helping another through theirs

Stand by me: Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as cancer patients who fall in love, in The Fault In Our Stars.

By Johannes Klabbers

In the secular age you don’t need special authorisation to console a dying person. Just learning what it means to be there for someone is enough.

Death literacy” is officially a thing. People go to death cafés; books about death are in demand… and around 55 million people worldwide do it every year. But how do you actually do dying well? And who can dying people turn to for support?

Although I know exceptional doctors and nurses who can and do talk with patients about their looming demise, it is something that many don’t feel qualified to do.

Traditionally, expertise in dying was thought to be the remit of religion. The Catholic church recently revived their medieval handbook for dying people, Ars Moriendi, now illustrated with drawings of happy families rather than demons, like the original, and handily available in the form of a website: artofdyingwell.org.

But what are the options for atheists or agnostics today? When it comes to thinking about what it means to be mortal, many people find themselves in a kind of secular vacuum. But living a life without religion doesn’t mean that you have to be alone at the end.

As a secular pastoral carer, I learned that consoling a seriously ill and dying person is something that almost anyone can do, whatever their faith – or lack thereof. You don’t need a special qualification, or a badge, or permission from an authority figure, supernatural or otherwise, just your humanity and determination – and for the suffering person to want someone to be there with them.

The first crucial step is turning up. Too often, our anxiety about saying or doing the “wrong thing” leads us to decide not to visit someone. Offering to be there for someone, even if they decline – and they might – is never wrong. Being there for someone means giving your attention to the person not to their illness, and concentrating on listening, not on worrying about what to say.

You will need to accept that the dying person may not want to discuss their sadness and fears – at least at first. They may want to talk about the football or the latest episode of Bake Off. Or they may just need someone to sit with them in silence.

Remember that it is not unreasonable to feel awkward. You might feel uneasy in the setting, or be distressed by their appearance. But your job is to accept your discomfort and think beyond it. You can show sadness, but do not burden them with your grief. You may need to be supported and comforted yourself afterwards.

While there might not be any formal qualifications in death literacy with which you can arm yourself, there are a number of wonderful, entirely secular, books by brilliant writers who are in the process of dying or supporting dying people, from Jenny Diski’s In Gratitude (to Tom Lubbock) and Marion Coutt’s memoirs, which together form an awe-inspiring document of courage, humility and humanity.

There is a moment which perfectly illustrates how to console a dying person in the Dutch author Connie Palmen’s moving memoir Logbook, when her husband, a leading Dutch politician, lies dying. In a moment of lucidity he sits upright and exclaims, “I am sorry for my sins!”

“I absolve you,” Connie tells him.

Ultimately, our humanity is all the authority we need to offer consolation to dying people.

Complete Article HERE!

What to say to a dying person

A hospice chaplain offers some insight

By Rona Tyndall

[P]erhaps like I, you like to eat pizza and watch movies on Friday nights.

One night, I watched, “Cleaner.” Samuel L. Jackson plays a former police detective who owns a company that cleans up death scenes.
The opening scene takes place at his 30th high school reunion.  His former classmates are all standing around awkwardly with drinks, making small talk about what they’ve been doing for the past 30 years.  Someone asks The Cleaner what he does.   He responds with the utmost respect and compassion necessary for speaking an ugly truth,

“I handle the remnants of heartache and disappointment so that people can go about the business of healing. Most people don’t know this, but someone dies in your home, you are left to clean it up.”  

The classmates look confused.  The Cleaner shares in vivid detail, right down to the special mixture he invented from Listerine to un-coagulate blood.  Everyone is horrified; mouths agape, shifting from one foot to another, coughing nervously.  Noticing their discomfort, he tries to avert attention, asking one of the guys how things have been going for him for the last 30 years;

“Oh, married to the same woman since college, the kids are great, playing a little golf, just got a bigger house so my mother-in-law could move it.  It’s fine; she almost never leaves her room.  Some day she won’t come out.”
Then, a funny look of realization flits across his face and he says to the cleaner, “Um, can I have one of your cards?”  “Sure,” comes the response, “sooner or later, everyone needs us.”  One at a time, each person in the crowd steps forward for a card.

The opening scene touched me; it felt familiar.  People who deal with death know what it feels like to be a skunk at a lawn party.  

That’s pretty much how people react when I tell them I am a hospice chaplain; initial discomfort that such service is necessary, followed by the realization that almost everyone needs hospice care for themselves or a loved one eventually, and finally the realization that the person standing in front of them, who tends to the very deepest of sorrows, does so from a place of deep compassion and love. Then, they ask for my card.

Love, loss and longing…those are the themes that I work with every day in my ministry. 

I love my job, but the most frequent question I get asked is, “Isn’t it depressing?”  It isn’t.  It is sad, often, but not depressing.  Depression is isolating, lonely, hopeless.  Sadness (sorrow) is a point of deep connection, because as human beings, we all experience it at various points throughout our lives.  Joining in that emotion, and the emotions of love, loss and longing that drive sorrow (sadness) begets a deep heart-connection, one to another; the very antithesis of the isolation, loneliness and hopelessness of depression; the very essence of what it means to be in communion, in community, in common, with one another.

Do you know what people talk about when they are dying?  We talk about love; pretty much exclusively.  When we come to the end of our lives and the conversation has narrowed down to, “What was the point of me?” people reflect on love.  It is true that dying people never talk about the unfinished business at work.  We talk about the unfinished business in our intimate relationships.  We talk about the loves that made us whole; the loves that gave us joy and meaning and pride…and the loves that broke our hearts.  We talk about the ones that we loved well and the ones we forsook.  We talk about the intimate love of family and dear friends, and the love for humanity that compels us to reach out to strangers in our professional and private lives.

People are made for love.  We are made to love.  The measure of a life well-lived is always and only a person’s courage in loving.

But though our lives are meant to be a love story, we learn along the way that all love stories end in tragedy.  Whether through choice or through death, someone always is left to grieve. 

Leaving friends and family and home for school or work or marriage is a kind of a death.  Broken relationships are a death.  Divorce is a death.  The end of a life is a death.  The grief that goes with any death is heartbreaking.

Heartbreak hurts!  The feeling of ripping and then aching in our chest, the initial agony of waking up crying, being utterly consumed by the sense of loss, feeling hopeless. 

My eldest daughter loaned me a novel recently.  It was a light read.  Nevertheless, just as even the most simple people contain great wisdom, so does simple reading. 

“When you drop a glass of wine or a plate to the ground, it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters, a table leg breaks, or a picture falls off the wall, it makes a noise.

“But as for your heart, when it breaks, it’s completely silent. You would think, as it’s so important, it would make the loudest noise in the whole word or even have some sort of ceremonious sound like the gong of a cymbal or the ringing of a bell. But it is silent and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain.” If You Could See Me Now by Celia Ahern

Isn’t that the truth?

When a heart breaks, it is completely silent. But loss is the price we pray for living into our purpose, which is to love.  Love, loss, longing; they are all of one piece.  Life.

In the months following my nephew, Mark’s sudden death at aged 7, none of us could have ever imagined that his parents would smile again.  But then, unexpectedly, like a rainbow arching over the deep, wild, mysterious ocean, something struck my sister-in-law funny one night at dinner, and she laughed.  We never stopped missing Mark, of course. His life and his love and his death shaped our lives and expanded our souls.  But his mother’s laughter was testimony that there is yet hope and joy and life to be had after loss.  Something good is always waiting to be had, eventually.  The resiliency of the human spirit is extraordinary.  The human capacity to hope beyond hope is truly amazing.

Every day, I keep company with men and women and children who are dying and with their families.  It can be a time of profound grace, even in the midst of deep sorrow. Time to look back, pay honor to, and close out a life is precious time. 

There are four phrases that chaplains often offer to people who are dying and to those they love the most, to facilitate sacred conversations:

  • “I love you.”
  • “I am sorry for what has gone wrong between us.”
  • “I ask your forgiveness for the part I had in any hurt between us.
  • “I thank you for your role in my life.”

There is no need to wait for such sacred conversations.  We can have them at any time, and be blessed by the sharing.    

I leave you with a reflection on love, from Dr. Peter Kreeft, from “The Turn of the Clock”

“What to say to a dying person: the profoundest thing you can ever say to a dying person is: I love you.  Not even God ever said anything more profound than that.”

Complete Article HERE!

Looking Death in the Face

Mummy of Ramses II

By

[R]amses II, also known as Ramses the Great, was born about 3,000 years ago and is widely regarded as the most powerful pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. The Greeks called him Ozymandias. When he died in 1213 B.C.E., he left a series of temples and palaces that stretched from Syria to Lybia, and countless statues and monuments commemorating his impressive reign. By the 19th century, when European colonization reached Egypt, most of these statues were gone, and the ones that remained were in ruin. In 1816, the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni discovered a bust of Ramses and acquired it for the British Museum. This is when Ozymandias’s life, in one respect, truly began.

“Ozymandias,” perhaps the most famous sonnet Percy Byshe Shelley ever penned, was written in 1817, as the remains of the famous statue were slowly transported from the Middle East to England. Shelley imagines a traveler recounting a journey in a distant desert. Like Belzoni, Shelley’s character discovers a great bust, half-buried in the windswept sands. Next to the wreckage is a pedestal where the monument once stood. Inscribed in shallow letters on the slab of rock: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Of course, as Shelley’s poem tells us, nothing remained of these works or the king of kings. Just sand.

The poem’s message is perennial: All of this will be over soon, faster than you think. Fame has a shadow — inevitable decline. The year 2016 has delivered a string of deaths that serve as bracing reminders of this inevitability: Prince, Nancy Reagan, David Bowie, Elie Wiesel, Bill Cunningham, Muhammad Ali, Gordie Howe, Merle Haggard, Patty Duke, John Glenn. Of course, it has also been a year that has ushered in a new empire and, simultaneously, the specter of apocalypse. The year’s end is a time to take account of kingdoms built, but also the sheer rapidity of their destruction. It is a chance to come to terms with the existential fragility that is overlooked in most of our waking hours and that must be faced even by the greatest among us.

We tend to defer the question of living or dying well until it’s too late to answer. This might be the scariest thing about death: coming to die only to discover, in Thoreau’s words, that we haven’t lived.

Facing death, though, is rarely simple. We avoid it because we can. It’s easier to think of “dying” as an adjective than a verb, as in a dying patient or one’s dying words. This allows us to pretend that dying is something that is going to happen in some distant future, at some other point in time, to some other person. But not to us. At least not right now. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week, not even next decade. A lifetime from now.

Dying, of course, corresponds exactly with what we prefer to call living. This is what Samuel Beckett meant when he observed that we “give birth astride the grave.” It is an existential realization that may seem to be the province of the very sick or very old. The elderly get to watch the young and oblivious squander their days, time that they now recognize as incredibly precious.

When dying finally delivers us to our unexpected, inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve endured this arduous trial for a reason. Dying for something has a heroic ring to it. But really it’s the easiest thing in the world and has little to do with fame and fortune. When you wake up and eat your toast, you are dying for something. When you drive to work, you’re dying for something. When you exchange meaningless pleasantries with your colleagues, you’re dying for something. As surely as time passes, we human beings are dying for something. The trick to dying for something is picking the right something, day after week after precious year. And this is incredibly hard and decidedly not inevitable.

If we understand it correctly, the difficulty is this — that from the time we’re conscious adults, maybe even before that, we get to choose how we’re going to die. It is not that we get to choose whether we contract cancer or get hit by a bus (although certain choices make these eventualities more or less likely) but that, if we are relatively fortunate (meaning, if we do not have our freedom revoked by circumstance or a malevolent force we can’t control), we have a remarkable degree of choice about what to do, think and become in the meantime, about how we go about living, which means we have a remarkable degree of choice over how we go about our dying. The choice, like the end itself, is ultimately ours and ours alone. This is what Heidegger meant when he wrote that death is our “own-most possibility”: Like our freedom, death is ours and ours alone.

Thinking about all of our heroes and friends and loved ones who have died, we may try to genuinely understand that death is coming, and to be afraid. “A free man thinks of death least of all things,” Spinoza famously wrote, “and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” But we don’t even begin to think about life, not really, until we confront the fact that we are doing everything we can not to think about death. And perhaps we’re not so much afraid of dying, in the end, as of not living and dying well.

Everyday life has no shortage of things with which to waste our time: the pursuit of money, intelligence, beauty, power, fame. We all feel their draw. But the uncomfortable, claustrophobic truth is that dying for something like money or power tends not to be a choice at all. David Foster Wallace argued that for most of us dying in the pursuit of wealth or prestige is simply our “default setting.” The problem isn’t that we’re picking the wrong things to die for, but that we aren’t actually picking. We chose to live by proxy. We allow ourselves to remain in a psychological trap that prevents us from seeing what might be genuinely meaningful in our own lives. In doing so, we risk, according to Wallace, “going through (our) comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to our heads and to (our) natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” We might call this the Ozymandias Trap — Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! — and be on guard against falling into it ourselves.

Most days we discover that we’re not quite up to the heroic task of extricating ourselves from the Ozymandias Trap. Others, we fear we’ve failed miserably. It is not realistic to love in the awareness that each day might be your last. But at least we can stop pretending that we will endure forever.

In Tolstoy’s famous story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, the dying hero reluctantly accepts his own mortality, albeit only once he can no longer avoid the truth:

It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but me that I’m dying … it may happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness … When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing …

Ivan Ilyich can’t pretend that he’s not dying. He recognizes what Ramses II apparently did not: With his death, there is no justification of his life, there is no proof of himself to leave behind, there are no monuments where he is going. He has lied to himself all of his life about the fact that he’s going to die.

In the end, Ivan is liberated from his self-deception. And we, too, can free ourselves from this delusion. As soon as today. Right now.

If we succeed, we may find that confronting the fact of our own impermanence can do something unexpected and remarkable — transform the very nature of how we live.

Complete Article HERE!

Life after death and the fear of dying

By Heidi Anderson

Heidi Anderson, with her Nan and brother, has been thinking about life after death.

[O]n the 16th of August this year, my beautiful 96 year-old Nan passed away. Since then, I have rode one hell of a roller-coaster with my emotions all over the shop.

 
Nan and I always had a pact that if there were something on the other side, that she would come back and tell me about it.

She never believed there was anything else after you die and she would always say to me: “Once you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. There is nothing else.”

That is what terrifies me. The thought of “that’s it” petrifies me. I’m seriously scared of dying and for years this has given me anxiety.

I have worked with my psychologist about this fear. Dying is inevitable, but I still find it so hard to comprehend.

I’m not sure any of the sessions have helped, I still think about it a lot.

People constantly say to me: “Why stress about something you have no control of?”

Or, “You won’t know when you’re dead that you’re dead, so chill out.”

Heidi Anderson’s Nan, who passed away in August age 96.

Believe me, if I could switch it off I would but that’s easier said than done. It’s not the thought of how I die that bothers or upsets me, it’s the thought of the unknown. Not knowing what’s next.

This consumes my thoughts far too often and it’s something that I have tried to come to terms with over the past few years with no such luck.

When my Mum told me that Nan was dying and she wouldn’t recover from her fall, I flew straight to her bedside, along with all the family.

Saying goodbye to my Nan was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.

Once Nan knew herself that she was dying and had accepted her fate, she called me into her room to speak. At this stage, she didn’t have much energy but she was putting all her fight into saying goodbye to people individually.

“Heidi, we all die. That’s life,” she said to me. “That’s the one thing are guaranteed in life. We’re born to die.”

Looking back, I think Nan was speaking to herself, as she too was always so afraid of death.

Over the next few days, Nan went downhill and eventually she stopped speaking and just slept.

Family came and went and said their goodbyes, but I stayed around.

I wanted to be with Nan as she exited this world. I wanted to hold her hand as she took her last breath.

Looking back, I think I also wanted to confront my fear of death. If I saw what actually happens, maybe I wouldn’t be so scared.

So I hung around the hospital like a bad smell, rarely leaving Nan’s bedside.

I played her music, told her stories and relived all our good times.

Unfortunately, by that stage she was no longer talking, but she would twitch her lips or flicker her eyes.

I swear she could hear everything, she just couldn’t respond.

In the end, I flew home to Perth. She was holding on and I felt Nan just didn’t want to die in front of any of her grandkids.

12 hours after I got home, Nan took her last breath with her three daughters at her side.

The nurses at the hospital said it was very common for people, when they’re dying, to choose who is with them.

Although I wanted so desperately to be with Nan, I felt she knew it was best that I wasn’t there.

When I arrived home in Bathurst for her funeral, I still felt that I wanted to confront my fear of death and see Nan.

Mum took me to the funeral home the morning of her farewell and I saw Nan for the first time since she passed away.

She was dead and she even looked it. No amount of makeup was hiding the fact that she was gone.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Nan was dead and she was never coming back.

Thoughts started flooding my brain.

“Where is she? Is there something else out there? Is she with Pop? What happens? Where has she gone?”

Her body was there but that wasn’t my Nan.

My friends asked later if she looked peaceful and I found that hard to explain. She looked like she was gone and that is something I won’t ever really understand.

I’m not sure seeing my Nan in her coffin has helped my fear of dying, but it definitely gave me some kind of closure.

I am still waiting for Nan’s spirit to visit me and let me know if there is anything else out there.

I have had a couple of dreams about her and I talk to her all the time but I am yet to feel her or hear if there is life after death.

Complete Article HERE!

In death reunited: 75 years after Pearl Harbor attack, Anderson brothers of Dilworth, Minn., will rest together in USS Arizona

By Helmut Schmidt

anderson

[J]ohn Anderson somehow survived the bloody mayhem of the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

But in that attack, Anderson, a crewman on the USS Arizona, lost his twin brother, Jake.

Jake was among 1,177 sailors and Marines from the battleship who died, many of whom were entombed when the ship sank in minutes after a bomb touched off a massive explosion in one of the magazines.

Throughout an active and full life, Anderson carried the guilt of not being able to find his brother.

Now, in death, the brothers from Dilworth, Minn., will be reunited.

Anderson’s cremains, along with those of another man who survived that attack 75 years ago, will be interred by Navy divers in the No. 4 turret of the Arizona on Wednesday, Dec. 7.

Their cremains will join those of about 1,100 sailors and Marines entombed in the wreck.

“When you grow up in the shadow of a hero, you don’t always realize a hero is there,” one of his sons, Terry Anderson, 53, of Roswell, N.M., said Friday, Dec. 2. “We have a great sense of pride.”

Karolyn Anderson, 73, said that it’s been a difficult year since her husband’s death Nov. 14, 2015, at the age of 98.

“This is what John would want. I want to do that for John, and Jake. It’s very sad for me, but I’m honoring his wishes and his memory,” the Roswell woman said of her husband of 47 years.

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“For years, John was hesitant to even talk about Jake, He always carried a guilt burden that he couldn’t get Jake. And finally one day, I said ‘John, you never really mention Jake, why is that?’ And he said. ‘I always felt funny that I lived and he didn’t. I always wondered why I was spared and he wasn’t.’ He just felt like he let himself down, and Jake down as well as the rest of the family.”

John and Jake Anderson were born Aug. 26, 1917, in Verona, N.D. Their family later moved to Dilworth, where the twins grew up and graduated from high school.

Both joined the Navy in March 1937.

John Anderson began his Navy career on the USS Saratoga, then transferred to a destroyer. He was in China when it was attacked by the Japanese.

“That left an impact on him. He had pictures of a Chinese refugee column machine gunned by the Japanese. Pretty graphic stuff,” Terry Anderson said.

Pictured from left are the battleships USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and the USS Arizona, after the attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. (U.S. Navy photography provided by the Naval Photographic Center)
Pictured from left are the battleships USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, and the USS Arizona, after the attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941.

In 1940, he was transferred to Hawaii and eventually to the Arizona.

John was a member of a crew manning one of the ship’s 14-inch turret guns, and Jake’s station was an anti-aircraft gun. John Anderson also had the duty of setting up chairs for Sunday morning worship services on the Arizona’s deck. After setting up the chairs on Dec. 7, he went below deck to have breakfast when he heard a “kaplunk,” looked out a porthole and saw planes bombing nearby Ford Island, he told columnist Bob Lind of The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.

“They started hearing machine gun fire and explosions going off, and Dad went to the porthole of the ship out of the mess hall and that’s when he saw the Japanese planes flying by and he saw the orange balls and he knew the Japanese were there, because he had seen them in China,” said another son, John Anderson Jr., 47 of Carlsbad, N.M..

John Anderson said in accounts after the war that he then headed for his post, all the while looking for his brother, Jake. He made it to his gun turret, but before he could help load it, a bomb hit the turret’s top, bounced off and penetrated the deck. The resulting explosion killed many of the crew.

Shortly after, the forward ammunition magazine with 1.5 million pounds of gunpowder blew up, virtually splitting the Arizona, and leaving dead and dying men everywhere, he told Lind.

As the ship began sinking, a senior officer ordered Anderson onto a barge taking wounded men to Ford Island, and they picked up wounded men on the way.

Once on the island, Anderson commandeered another boat to go back to the Arizona with a shipmate, Chester Rose. On the way, they pulled survivors from the harbor, but then the small craft was hit and wrecked, and all but John perished.

“He talked about this guy Rose many many times, about how he lost his life trying to help, go back to the ship. After (many) years, he was able to locate the family and tell the family what happened to Rose,” John Jr. said.

John Anderson was wounded, but swam to land and grabbed a rifle and two bandoliers of ammunition. He then jumped into a bomb blast crater on Ford Island and told Lind that he thought, “Let ’em come!”

In a 2014 article, he told the Stars and Stripes newspaper that the next day a Marine patrol told him survivors of the Arizona were to gather on a nearby dock for a head count.

“Everybody I saw there had rags around their heads,” Anderson said. Bandages covered their arms, skin was scorched and hair was burned off. “Beat up something awful.”

Travis Anderson, 45, of Kurtistown, Hawaii, said his father passed on a very memorable lesson learned on that horrible day.

“I don’t remember what we were doing, but he said there’s a reason for rules and doing things the right way, and I kind of smarted off to him and he told me to listen,” Travis Anderson said. “He told me a story about a man locked up on the Arizona. He was in the brig and no one could find the key. Boy, that just hit me like a ton of bricks. That they were trying to get that guy out of there and they didn’t have the key. Pay attention to what you’re doing and do things right. I carried that with me the rest of my life.”

John Anderson joined the destroyer USS Macdonough, and fought in 13 major battles across the Pacific.

After his discharge in 1945, he worked as a movie stuntman and took night classes in meteorology. A friend later convinced him to join the Navy Reserves, where he served for another 23 years.

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While in Hollywood, he met and worked with John Wayne and also worked on the set of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas staple, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Anderson moved to Roswell, where he was “Cactus Jack,” a disc jockey playing mostly country music. He met Elvis Presley and Eddie Arnold in that job.

Anderson later became a television meteorologist and a real estate agent.

“He went after it. He lived life to the fullest. It was like reading a Hollywood book. He really lived. I could just go on and on,” Travis Anderson said.

“He was a wonderful man, very charismatic. He was bigger than life,” Karolyn added.

The interment ceremony on the Arizona is unique in that it is the only ship in the U.S. Navy where the cremated remains of a survivor are returned.

“It will be a chance to say goodbye to dad and a chance to reflect on Dec. 7. A day we should never forget,” John Jr. said. “It will be a time … to thank God for all he did.”

Complete Article HERE!

Immortal prose: how writers deal with death

Julian Barnes, Joan Didion, Jenny Diski, Christopher Hitchens, Meghan O’Rourke and more address life’s ultimate question

immortal-prose

By

[W]oody Allen famously quipped “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” This resonates with all of us who live in a culture that promotes eternal youth through scalpel or scientific miracle and cold shoulders the icy certainty of death.

Kafka stated that “the meaning of life is that it stops” while Anaïs Nin, a daily diarist, wrote that “people living deeply have no fear of death”. Freud recognised that people sometimes did express fear of death, a condition referred to as thanatophobia. Freud felt that it was not actual death that people feared as our own death is quite unimaginable, and in our unconscious we are all convinced of our own immortality. Beckett wrote that “they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”. Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”.

Lately there has been much written about death, narratives and stories that aim to help us negotiate the emotional landscape of grief and death. The novelist Julian Barnes is a self-confessed thanatophobe who sometimes is “roared awake” and “pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world”. In his memoir on the fear of non-existence, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes writes an elegant meditation on death and attempts to address his thanophobia. As an agnostic Barnes doesn’t believe in an afterlife and writes that “I don’t believe in God but I miss him”. He believes that the Christian religion has lasted because it is a “beautiful lie… a tragedy with a happy ending”, and yet he misses the sense of purpose and belief that he finds in a Mozart Requiem or the sculptures of Donatello.

There is a trend over the last few years for a new type of fiction, a genre that moulds memoir with biography to form a literature that feels fresh and hyper-real, a type of reality fiction for the modern reader. David Shields presaged this new trend when in his 2010 publication Reality Hunger he advocated a return to the “real” in literature and he railed against conventional plot-driven fiction in favour of the lyric essay and the memoir.

A memoir of illness and dying is always an emotional read and the pages pulse with life, strife and the emotional intensity of the author’s feelings and predicament. None more so than In Gratitude by Jenny Diski, who died earlier this year of inoperable lung cancer. Diski wrote a series of essays in the London Review of Books about life after her diagnosis with its frailties and sudden fragilities which have been published as this memoir. She writes that she feared the oncologist would find her response cliched after he gave her the prognosis and she turned to her husband and suggested that they’d better get cooking the meth like Heisenberg in the television series Breaking Bad.

Diski’s talon-sharp prose has never harboured a platitude and this memoir touches on her peripatetic early life, abandoned by neglectful parents and in and out of psychiatric hospitals, “rattling from bin to bin”. She was adopted by the writer Doris Lessing for four years as a teenager and shared family dinners with Alan Sillitoe, RD Laing and Arnold Wesker and listened to late-night intellectual discussions about philosophy and psychotherapy which she describes as “a dream come true, but I had to work out how to live it”.

Diski with her unique sense of directness and humour writes that she makes an ideal candidate to play the role of a cancer patient as her lifelong favourite places are bed and sofa and she lives like one of those secondary characters in Victorian literature who constantly languish on the fainting couch. Diski described herself as being “contrary-minded”, delighted at breaking taboos and pushing boundaries. Controversial to the end, she likens having cancer to “an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed, I have been given this role ….I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.”

Christopher Hitchens was on a book tour for Hitch 22 when he experienced the first health crisis that was the beginning of his demise. However, this pugnacious and witty writer was able to channel his experiences into his end of life memoir Mortality, which begins with the line “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death”. When the emergency services arrive to collect him Hitchens feels a psychogeographical shift taking him “from the country of the well to the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”. Hitchens concedes that he has become a finalist in the race of life and quotes from TS Eliot’s Prufrock:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker / And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat / and snicker / And in short / I was afraid

Hitch decided to live dyingly and extolled the consolation of friends who came to eat, drink and converse with him even as these earthly delights become impossible for him as the cancer progressed. His memoir is life affirming, punchy and rich with morbid humour, noting that when one falls ill people tend to send Leonard Cohen CDs. He doesn’t experience rage at a terminal diagnosis as he feels that he has been taunting the Reaper into “taking a free scythe in my direction” and that he has now succumbed to “something so predictable and banal that it bores me”. His wife Carol Blue in the afterword to this memoir writes of the man she admired and loved and ends with the lines that in death as in life Hitch still has the last word.

Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking begins with the death of her husband of 44 years, the writer John Dunne, and brings the reader on a journey through the land of grief that she entered in the aftermath of his loss. In the opening lines of this poised but passionate memoir she writes that “life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” She writes about the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event and writes that when we are confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how “unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell.’’

Didion gives the reader an unflinching account of grief in the year when the shock of Dunne’s death “was obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind”. Despite the unshakeable reality of her husband’s death Joan’s thinking enters the realm of the magical and she writes that “we do not expect to be crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes”.

Zadie Smith wrote that Didion is essential reading on the subject of death and I have bought many copies over the years for grieving friends who have found comfort in its reading, recognition of their suffering in its pages.

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is an unstintingly honest memoir about the loss of her mother Barbara to colorectal cancer. O’Rourke is an award-winning poet and she writes about the consolation that she finds in reading Hamlet. Shakespeare’s hero holds up a mirror to O’Rourke’s own duality of emotion; emptiness and anger, despair and longing for relief. O’Rourke can understand why Hamlet, who has just lost his father, is angry and cagey. He is told that how he feels is unmanly and unseemly, his uncle greeting him with the worst question to ask a grieving person “How is it that that the cloud still hang on you?”

O’Rourke felt a resonance with Hamlet in her grief state when she felt that to descend to the deepest fathom of it would be unseemly and was somehow taboo. She writes that nothing prepared her for the death of her mother, even knowing that she had terminal cancer did not prepare her. There is a stark unearthing of truths in this memoir. “A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky, unimaginable.”

Doctors face death daily and Dr Paul Kalanithi became a neurosurgeon because with its unforgiving call to “perfection, it seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity and death”. When Breath Becomes Air opens with a description by the author of a CT scan that he was examining where the lungs were matted with innumerable tumours, the spine deformed and a full lobe of the liver obliterated. This scan, though similar to scores of others that he had examined over the previous six years, was different, different because it was his own. Kalanithi wrote his memoir in the aftermath of this discovery, fusing his medical knowledge with his love of literature to produce a work that is more than a memoir: it is a philosophical reflection on life and purpose. Kalanithi and his wife have a baby Cady who was eight months old when her father died. His memoir will be his legacy to his little girl as “words”, he writes, “have a longevity I do not”.

The Iceberg: A Memoir by Marion Coutts tells of Coutts’ partner Tom Lubbock’s death from a malignant brain tumour. This account of illness and decline is told with an artist’s eye and in poetic prose that is both razor sharp and suffused with emotion. Coutts writes that there is a filmic quality to their life. A friend suggests that the director is Bergman, “shot flat without affect but deeply charged, with a fondness for long shots, no cuts, ensemble scenes, dark comedy and the action geared always to the man in the bed even though he is frequently off camera.”

Death is the inevitable full stop in the essay of life. Christopher Hitchens quotes this poem by Kingsley Amis in his memoir Mortality: Death has this much to be said for it/ You don’t have to get out of bed for it/Wherever you happen to be/ They bring it to you – free.

The writer Katie Roiphe wrote The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End in part to sate her curiosity about death and dying. It is an account of how the writer found beauty and comfort in the stories of how her literary heroes faced up to dying. For Roiphe religion has never been consoling and feels like a foreign language. She, like many book lovers finds comfort in novels and poems. As a child recovering from serious illness Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium resonated with her. She becomes ambushed by the beauty in the deaths of her literary heroes, Dylan Thomas, Susan Sontag, Freud and Maurice Sendak. Sontag “fought her death to the end, believing on some deep irrational level she would be the one exception”.

Roiphe feels that writers and artists are more attuned to death, that they can put the confrontation with mortality into words in a way that most of us can’t or won’t. The last taboo has been dealt with by memoirists, essayists and poets. If, according to FR Leavis, literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness, then these publications are a gateway to enlightenment.

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