We all need to debate death and dying, and consider our own deaths

By Arnoldo Kraus

“Everyone’s death is different,” writes Jennie Dear at the end of her book, What Does it Feel Like to Die? Inspiring New Insights into the Experience of Dying. Dear is correct: just as every life is different, so every death is different. The dissimilarities in deaths lie in whether or not we accept the inevitability of death and especially in our internal dialogues about the necessity of death. Dear’s book tries to answer an old problem: how to speak openly and freely about the different ways of dying? The power of modern medicine makes these discussions particularly urgent—to preserve autonomy and avoid harm at the end of life. What does it Feel Like to Die? is an open invitation to talk about the limits of life as well as of the limits of medical technology.

Real life experiences are “the best teacher.” In Dear’s book readers learn how her family members and friends confronted the existential crisis that comes with dying. The book is directed to readers eager to understand the meaning of facing our mortality, the significance of dying, people’s deep denial about what is happening, and the ways to cope with dying. She uses many ways to answer the difficult question: What does it feel like to die? In richer societies, modern death is sometimes a kind of disease as instead of prolonging life, medicine prolongs death.

Dear discusses how in rich societies assisted suicide and euthanasia were until recently largely taboo. The major impression of the West of the Buddhist monks expelled from Tibet after the invasion by China was the almost absolute negation of death. In many Eastern cultures knowledge of self precedes knowledge of the world. The order is clear: first the inside, then the outside. In the West the order (or disorder) is upside down: first the exterior, occasionally the interior. When people do not reflect on themselves, and the purpose of living is seen in material achievements, it is difficult to accept and understand the dying process.

What Does it feel Like to Die? is not a medical book and is not directed at health professionals, but an increasing number of health professionals are themselves unfamiliar and uncomfortable with death. It is a vivid book about the process of dying by a daughter, a former journalist, and long-time hospice volunteer. The triad of daughter, journalist, and volunteer allows Dear to study the soul of very sick patients who will die in weeks or months despite the best attention from doctors and nurses. She understands the implications of end-stage disease, “a disease that cannot be cured or adequately treated that is reasonably expected to result in death of the patient.” She explains in plain language the feelings of dying patients: “dying is different for everyone. There’s no textbook”; “pain seems to dissipate in the very last few hours, and, for most people, those hours are peaceful”; “in the last two weeks of her life, my mother was ready and eager to die”; “I’ve also tried to convey some sense of the beauty and joy that often surround dying, the sense of meaning it can give to the dying person and people around her.”

Dear includes topics like the existential “slap”, where people die, whether dying hurts, and the last few hours of someone’s life. She considers doubts and questions that we should all contemplate. The language is clear, and she mixes personal reflections with the words of doctors, hospice nurses, and other published accounts of the dying process. This book can help the internal debate we should all have about death and dying and our own deaths.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

August 7, 2020August 6, 2020

You Can’t Avoid Death, But You Can Make It Easier

By Lara Vapnyar

LIFE EVENTS
By Karolina Waclawiak

Do you know how to euthanize a bird? If not, you will just a few pages into “Life Events,” Karolina Waclawiak’s astute and distressing new novel.

Technically, euthanizing a bird isn’t that hard. All you need to do is make a concoction of simple syrup, a crushed anti-inflammatory pill and a crushed anti-anxiety pill, and administer it via an eyedropper. But as the protagonist, Evelyn, discovers, “the agony was in the waiting.” She has to sit by him for hours, watching him die after “dropping the mixture onto his tongue, hoping he would take the sip that would finally dull his pain.”

We meet Evelyn at 37, aimless, jobless, in the last stages of her dying marriage and consumed with grief over her parents’ impending death. It’s in this state that she notices a “hummingbird in distress” on the patio of her Los Angeles apartment, and resolves to put it out of its misery.

A few weeks later, Evelyn enrolls in a program for so-called death doulas, or people who come to patients’ homes to prepare them for euthanasia and be with them until the end. The narrative follows her training and then her work with three very different patients. Evelyn approaches the job with true devotion, but she fails at detachment — a requirement in this position. Evelyn is too present, too involved, too reckless — to the point of having to seek a Plan B pill after an encounter with one of the patients.

The job would’ve been unbearable if not for the alcohol and anti-anxiety pills that Evelyn takes to dull her own pain. Waclawiak accomplishes a brilliant feat here, creating an atmosphere of almost palpable, effortful dullness that presides over the entire novel. With so much opportunity for raw emotion, the author seems to avoid it at all cost, going for exceptional clarity instead.

In the absence of any real emotional attachment to the characters, the reader is forced instead to engage intellectually, to actually face the tough questions about our own inevitable death.

In the novel, the death doulas have to make sure that their patients make an informed decision rather than an emotional one; so as part of their training, they have to fill out the same questionnaires they give to their patients. In these passages the reader can’t help pausing and applying the questions to herself. One of the toughest questions asks what degree of livelihood constitutes a life worth living, on a scale from 100 percent (full health) to 0 percent (death). “By 60 percent, mobility was reduced and disease was significant,” Evelyn explains with clinical matter-of-factness. “Consciousness could waver between full, drowsy and confused.”

Imagining yourself functioning at 60 percent is scary enough, but it’s fully terrifying to think what will happen to you at 30 percent or below. An easier option would be to just keep your head in the sand and not think about death at all. And this is exactly what a majority of Americans are doing.

The health crisis we are living through has exposed many uncomfortable truths about our collective state of denial. Most people have reacted to the threat of Covid-19 as if this were the only possible cause of death, as if they’d never before fully considered their mortality. Tallying the pandemic’s daily fatalities with fanatical persistence, these individuals and public health officials are ignoring all the other deaths, praying for a vaccine that will allow them to finally relax, as if the prevention of one specific disease could render one immortal.

And even before Covid-19, our medical and cultural institutions would put so much effort into “defeating” death, which actually means prolonging life by just weeks or days at the cost of horrible suffering. Meanwhile, so little effort is put into helping patients accept their eventual death, effectively encouraging them to ignore mortality.

Waclawiak’s “Life Events” provides a powerful argument against that attitude. The novel offers you a hand, gently helping you pull your head out of the sand to accept the inevitable.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

July 30, 2020July 29, 2020

She watched her mother die.

It inspired her most hopeful novel yet

By Stuart Miller

In the quietly simmering drama of Karolina Waclawiak’s new novel “Life Events,” Evelyn has lost her job, her marriage is flatlining, and she frequently frets about death, especially the eventual passing of her parents. Only when this Silver Lake drifter trains to become a death doula — to have the uncomfortable conversations that help the terminally ill come to terms with the life they lived — does she begin to shift from dreading the future to living in the present.

Evelyn is in a near constant state of “pre-grieving,” or what others call “anticipatory grief,” Waclawiak said during a phone interview last spring. “But we have no control over grief. That’s not how it works at all.”

The author of two previous novels began writing “Life Events” six years ago. “It’s unfortunately very timely,” says Waclawiak. “We’re all in this collective grief now. Our loved ones are dying alone, and I can’t think of anything worse. We’re all going to be collectively traumatized, and that’s something we’re going to have to deal with.”

Waclawiak’s initial inspiration was an episode of the podcast Criminal about an “exit guide,” a companion for terminally ill people ending their lives. Fascinated by new approaches to end-of-life issues, she watched videos of people working in the death-with-dignity movement; soon, she took a death doula course herself.

While her research explored the broader societal changes behind the movement, the novel’s themes are intimately personal and somewhat autobiographical. Waclawiak helped care for her grandfather when he was dying 13 years ago. Her mother, who was sick off and on since Waclawiak was 12, was diagnosed with cancer in 2015, soon after Waclawiak started writing “Life Events.” She died last September.

“Obviously this was a big part of why I wrote this,” she says, adding that she writes to understand her pain. “I start with a larger question that I’m trying to face, not necessarily answer.”

In her first novel, “How To Get Into the Twin Palms,” also set in L.A. and featuring a Polish immigrant who passes herself off as Russian, the big question was, “Who are you if you take away your ethnic identity?” Her follow-up, “The Invaders,” grappled with the “limitations and stresses” of living among people of a higher socioeconomic class than you are.

Those questions too arose from Waclawiak’s life. Her parents fled Communist Poland when she was two, eventually setting in suburban Connecticut. “I’m extremely Americanized, but I always felt like an outsider,” says Waclawiak, who studied screenwriting at USC and then worked as an assistant on “The Simpsons.” After getting an MFA at Columbia University, she began writing screenplays in New York — the well-received “AWOL” and a second film that was in preproduction when the pandemic hit. Now she’s back in the city where “Life Events” is set. (“Set” is an understatement: Each of her books is suffused with a deep sense of place, owing to Waclawiak’s road trips through the regions she’s writing about.)

Waclawiak believes her background has better prepared her for facing death than most Americans. On return trips to Poland, her family would join others who spend Saturdays at the cemetery, visiting dead relatives and cleaning their gravestones. “There’s a sense of ritual there,” says Waclawiak, “while Americans approach death with a sense of fear and denial.”

Despite its morbid subject matter, “Life Events” is more optimistic than her previous work, in which the protagonists sometimes seemed hellbent on self-sabotage or even self-destruction. In contrast, Evelyn’s work with her dying clients helps her reassess everything, from her marriage to her long-term future, with newfound clarity.

“I felt a book about death was going to be tough to read, and I was thinking about the reader’s experience,’” Waclawiak says. “I really wanted Evelyn to use her proximity to death to be a catalyst to push herself out of this stagnation and to feel a sense of hope, because you have to. This life is so hard.”

Struggling to give Evelyn more control over her messy life, Waclawiak wrote an entire first draft in the third person, then threw almost all of it away. “Evelyn had to have a sense of agency,” she says. “That awareness that you have choices is a really huge shift in the storytelling.”

Call it a midlife awakening: Since writing her last novel, Waclawiak turned 40 and watched her mother get sicker. “You can’t help but take a microscope to the way you are living,” she says. Her mother, approaching her life’s end, pushed Waclawiak to think about her own future — about “seeing what I can do differently now and how I can change my perspective.”

What colleagues notice most about Waclawiak’s work is that fine balance between fatalism and optimism. She is not a “cheerful writer, but she’s not reflexively cynical,” says Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist and former editor in chief of Buzzfeed, where Waclawiak works as an editor. “She captures the desperation Americans feel in leading superficially ordinary lives.”

Emily Bell, who edited “Life Events” at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, praises the author’s “ability to balance an understated tone with high emotional stakes” as she explores “what it means if you don’t fulfill the expectations of society.”

As for Waclawiak’s expectations, she has always held a day job while writing. “I never had illusions that my creative work would pay the bills,” she says, “and that gives me the freedom to write weird stuff.”

She knows some readers “have an issue with complicated women who don’t always make the best choices for themselves,” but she refuses to tidy up her fiction. “There’s an expectation of how women should behave; they shouldn’t be messy or be complicated in a way that seems vulnerable or gross. But there are countless male narrators in fiction and all over television who are highly self-destructive.”

Waclawiak became so frustrated by aspersions on her “unlikable female narrators” that she designed a course at Columbia around such characters. “Let me put a woman up against the wall and see how she squirms out of whatever situation I put her in, not in a way that feels exploitative,” she says. “It’s about realizing there’s something to learn in the suffering and the pain.”

In “Life Events,” it’s about Evelyn learning not just that she has choices but that she has the chance to create new ones — a wisdom that emerges, ironically, from coping with the one thing no one can opt out of. “When the people you love are dying, it changes you, and you really start to question what you thought was important,” Waclawiak says. “I wanted the reader to think about how consciously they were living their own lives.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

May 2, 2019October 4, 2019

Review: The Art of Dying Well – A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life

By Trish Rodriguez*

I have to confess that I am a Katy Butler fan. When I started the journey to become an End of Life Doula, her Knocking on Heaven’s Door was one of the first books that I read. I didn’t so much read the book as devoured it, often catching a sob in my throat as I read her deeply personal account of the horror show that became her fathers final years. I admired the courage and honesty of the parts of the book that were memoir, and the research on the current culture of American healthcare with respect to death. I agreed that our way of dying in the good ol’ USA has come to leave something to be desired.

In her newest work The Art of Dying Well – A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life, Katy picks up the narrative in a new and accessible way. She divides the process of moving toward the end into seven unique segments defined not so much by age but by ability and functionality. At the beginning of each of these chapters she has a list of statements and suggests that if many of these apply to you now, this might be where you find yourself. I found this approach fresh and, best of all, non-threatening. This might be just the way to start a conversation with a unwilling family member.

In the first segment, aptly titled Resilience, we learn that in this stage of well being we can still dramatically impact our health, longevity, and ultimately the quality of our death. By building reserves (aka altering what we eat and whether we’re active enough), finding allies in preventative medicine, and increasing our circle of friends and acquaintances, we are still in the drivers seat with regard to how things will go for us as our situation changes. This perspective gives lots of practical advice for those who may think there is plenty of time.

With each ongoing chapter comes an inevitable decline – not according to any decade of life or disease process – but according to naturally decreasing functionality. I like that she is careful to follow this definition, as people age as they darn well please, and I personally know 90 year olds who are still more capable than I am. This lets you find your home page, so to speak, without feeling like a failure or self fulfilling a prophecy to act your age. Every chapter offers practical advice; about healthcare, money, housing, and all those pesky details like advanced directives and wills. In nearly every chapter there are personal accounts of folks who managed things well, or not so well, and lots of food for thought.

There was a great deal of material that wasn’t new to me, but I work with dying people. In my every day life, I am always shocked at how hard working, responsible people don’t bother with a will or advanced directive… because? They aren’t going to die? Or they’re not going to die tomorrow? This book may be just the ticket to get you going, or to give to that parent who is dragging their feet about preparing for anything. With a helpful glossary and pages and pages of useful references included, this will certainly be a ‘go to’ book in my personal library and in my practice.

* Special correspondent, Trish Rodriguez, is an End of Life Doula and hospice vigil volunteer in Anacortes, WA.

April 3, 2019April 3, 2019

Mother grapples with grief in ‘Where Reasons End’

By Michael Magras

It’s not surprising that someone whose whole life revolves around words would turn to literature in a time of tragedy to make sense of her suffering. The paradox is that the person most likely to seek solace from words is also the most likely to realize their insufficiency.

One such person is the unnamed narrator of “Where Reasons End,” Yiyun Li’s new novel. The 44-year-old narrator is a writer of stories and a grieving mother. For reasons that are never explained, her 16-year-old son, whom she calls Nikolai, “a name he had given himself,” killed himself only a few months earlier — a painful parallel to real life, as Li’s own 16-year-old son committed suicide in 2017

The novel is a series of imagined conversations between mother and son. From the start, we learn that the mother is agonizingly self-aware, both of herself and of the possible futility of these conversations.

That and the parallel to Li’s life are what make the experience of reading this work so powerful: the knowledge that the narrator needs the comfort of words yet senses their limitations. “I was a generic parent grieving a generic child lost to an inexplicable tragedy,” she says in the opening chapter. She seeks specificity, the need to “meet in a world unspecified in time and space … a world made up by words, and words only.”

One of the most arresting aspects of this novel is the way in which Li subverts expectations. One might expect Nikolai to be a sweet boy offering relentless comfort to his grieving mother. He’s a charmer, all right, a precocious son who painted whimsical landscapes, played the oboe and liked classical music and showtunes. And he was a bad speller who labeled a folder of songs “Edith Pilaf.”

But he has a sardonic edge that keeps him from seeming too precious. When his writer mother tells him that so many people miss him, Nikolai says she’s succumbing to the lure of clichés and admonishes her with, “You promised that you would understand.” When he accuses her of wanting him to feel sad for himself, he adds, chillingly, “I’m not as sad as you think. Not anymore.”

The dialogues in “Where Reasons End” cover a wide range of topics. Mother and son discuss love and memory and whether those capacities really do keep people alive forever. They discuss the capriciousness of time. Nikolai chides her for her dislike of adjectives, which she defends by saying that nouns, not adjectives, preserve memories. Besides, “I oppose anything judgmental,” she says, “and adjectives are opinionated words.”

Much of this book is devoted to words, which is not surprising given that its narrator lives by them: “Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.” When one is in search of helpful words, poets are a good place to start, as their facility often crystallizes hard-to-express truths. Indeed, the narrator references many poets, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop — the novel’s title comes from Bishop’s poem “Argument” — and Wallace Stevens.

Even poets, however, provide limited comfort, and the mother depicted here knows it. This realization compounds her grief as much as it ameliorates. “Words provided to me — loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma — never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me,” she says. “One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement.”

Later, she adds, “We feel at a loss for words when they can’t do fully what we want them to.” To which Nikolai offers as wise a defense of words as one is likely to find. “They never can,” he says, but, “Why not make do with the percentage they can achieve?”

The book gets repetitive after a while — much is made of the Latin derivations of words, and some of Nikolai’s dialogue is too stilted even for a sophisticated teen — yet its message is nonetheless a sobering one. Nothing can ever fill the hollows formed by tragedy, yet the desire to fill them is every bit as keen as the loss. If even a fraction of the emptiness is replaced, then the quest is worth the effort.

Late in the novel, the narrator quotes Stevens’s poem “This Solitude of Cataracts”: “He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way, To keep on flowing.” Anyone who has ever lost a loved one — that would be all of us — will relate. If only they were still here to keep the river of our lives flowing as it once had.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

July 28, 2017July 28, 2017

How to write about death

By Michael Upchurch

[I]n a beautiful passage, early on in her new book, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat explains, “We write about the dead to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language.”

Danticat’s own masterpieces — her memoir of her father’s and uncle’s deaths, “Brother, I’m Dying”; her novel-in-stories about a Haitian torturer, “The Dew Breaker”; and her early collection of tales, “Krik? Krak!” — have done exactly that. Her prose is often cool and taut on the surface, yet also rife with hidden currents and flashes of warmth. At her best, Danticat taps into such tough subject matter as political exile, mob violence, and refugee desperation with a trickless, spellbinding clarity.

The strongest thread in “The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story” (one in a series of Graywolf Press titles addressing specific aspects of the craft of writing) is her account of her mother’s reaction to being diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer.

“In the car on the way home,” Danticat remembers, “we were both lost in a terrible silence that should have been filled with tears. At a red light, where I stopped for too long, my mother spoke up for the first time since we’d heard the news and warned, ‘Don’t suddenly become a zombie.’ She was telling me not to lose my good sense, to keep my head on my shoulders.”

Her mother brought humor even to the most humiliating hospital situations. To a nurse who had trouble drawing blood from her, she wisecracked, “It’s too bad you’re not like those vampires on TV who just put their teeth on someone’s neck.” When, toward the end, she opted out of repeated rounds of chemotherapy, she couldn’t have been more straightforward about it. “I’m not necessarily dying either today or tomorrow,” she said. “But we all must die someday.”

Danticat’s portrait of her is kind and loving. It also is, inevitably, anguished in its sense of loss. “I was shocked,” she says, “by how quickly many others expected me to bounce back and rejoin the world.”

But “The Art of Death” isn’t simply a memoir. It looks at how other authors have dealt with death in their writing. Danticat’s focus is on Tolstoy, Camus, Chekhov, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and more than three dozen others. She touches on her own work as well.

It’s an impossible task, and Danticat’s attempts to order her thoughts on suicide, bereavement, and death-row prisoners’ experience can be unwieldy. She’s less assured when analyzing someone else’s text than she is when evoking her own experience. Her extensive commentary on Morrison’s novels, for instance, can’t compete with Danticat’s direct dealings with death.

Danticat is a straight shooter as a writer, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that she gives no nod to the thumb-nosing irreverence toward death you find in Laurence Sterne’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” (or, more recently, Monty Python). Some readers may also feel it odd that she omits such obvious candidates as Virginia Woolf and — ahem — Shakespeare from this discussion.

But a full study of how authors address death in their work would run to multiple volumes, and the format of Graywolf’s “The Art of” series puts firm constraints of length on its authors.

Danticat does make many essayistic observations that serve the book well — conclusions that she, looking inward, came to on her own. She notes the way we sometimes find ourselves “rehearsing” our future bereavements. She questions how one can “prepare to meet death elegantly.”

“We are all bodies,” she writes, “but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to ourselves.”

For authors, the elusive nature of death never stops posing a challenge.

“Having been exposed to death does help when writing about it,” Danticat notes, “but how can we write plausibly from the point of view of the dying when we have not died ourselves, and have no one around to ask what it is like to die?”

Far from being morbid, this small book is a bracingly clear-eyed take on its subject.

Complete Article HERE!

October 3, 2015October 3, 2015

Longfellow And The Deep Hidden Woods Review

To celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the publication of Longfellow And The Deep Hidden Woods I thought I’d share with you a touching review just published on Amazon.

Myste Lyn from Bittersweet Blessing shares her thoughts after reading the Longfellow book

Much more than a book on loss…

A sweet, simple and soft book… more than a book on loss, it’s a book that reminds us of what is important in life.

I was surprised by the quiet beauty that gently touched my heartstrings singing songs reminiscent of old times on my grampa’s farm…

The illustrations are equally touching and I’ve included a screenshot of one of my favorites.This one’s a keeper.

Thank you, Myste!

For those of you unfamiliar with Longfellow, allow me to introduce you.

Longfellow, the bravest and noblest weiner dog in the world… As our story begins, Longfellow is a puppy learning how to be a good friend to his human companions, Old Henry and Henry’s nurse Miss O’weeza Tuffy. By the end, he has grown old himself, but is still ready for one final adventure. What happens in between is an unforgettable and heartwarming tale that throws a tender light on the difficult truths of loss and longing as well as on our greatest hopes.