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- Author: Stephen Jenkinson
- Full Title: Die Wise
- Category: #books
- The night of wonder must be a long one, and sometime before dawn it will come to this: When I die, am I past? Am I gone? Lost? This is when the midnight sky, riven by all the light givers that have been, starts whispering. You can see something that isn’t there anymore, and you have more proof than you need that the past is not quite passed.
- You’re even willing to include yourself and your days going by in the roiling mystery of it all, not as alone as you once were. And this willingness is a gift for those who see you trying to pull it off and for those who are coming after you who might hear of your one bewildered human example. It’s all they’ll need, a sign of how a human can live his or her days.
- “What is gone is still with you, still here. As you will be.”
- What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequence fan out from every innocently intended thing we did? A taste for the consequence, for what endures: Maybe then there’d be a chance for things to be different.
- Everything we do and don’t do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don’t learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive—that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn’t over—then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count on our best intent winning the day or getting us off the hook of personal or ecological consequence. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
- When was the last time you stood anywhere for a moment and saw that what you meant and felt and how you loved and lost and what you said and held off saying might already have become waves lapping somewhere else, washing upon a shore you’ve already passed by, where someone else is standing, where an old white pine used to be … proof that you’ve been, sign of how you’ve been? It could turn into your prized possession, having learned the endurance of what you did, the willingness to know how it is, and the skills of living accordingly. The whole thing needs witnesses, though, people who will testify. That’s how it lasts.
- I discovered that few wanted to die well, fewer still, wisely. Most didn’t want to die at all, and they spent their dying time refusing to do so.
- And then I started asking dying people to die well. Not encouraging them or inviting them or offering them the option or waiting until they were ready, but imploring them to do it, often obliging them to do it.
- Dying well is not the end of parenting, but the fullness of parenting, not the end of a marriage, but the last great act of a married life.
- Dying well is the way you could be known by those you won’t live long enough to meet, the way by which they might feel loved by you after you die.
- Dying is not what happens to you. Dying is what you do.
- No, the reason is that for almost anyone with an opinion on the subject, More Time is its own reward. When you get your heart’s desire, when the prayer is answered, surely you won’t have to ask, “What now?” Isn’t that in the nature of a prayer answered, that you’ll know what to do with it when it happens? How could that ever be a problem?
- More Time bears no resemblance to anything most people have lived. More Time is a fantasy of the resumption of a life interrupted. But More Time, when it finally kicks in, is the rest of a dying person’s life, and the rest of that life will be lived in the never-before-known shadow of the inevitability of their dying. For the first time in their lives they will live knowing that they will die from what afflicts them.
- Their real difficulty was in adjusting to the consequences of having had their days extended. Their real affliction was almost always More Time. More Time means more time to live their dying. It means more symptoms, more drugs for the symptoms, more drugs for the side effects of the first drugs, more weakness and diminishment and dependence to go along with more time with the kids or the grandkids, or walks in the park with the dog. That’s not all it means, not necessarily, but More Time almost always means more dying.
- The Dying have discovered without wanting to that pain does not equal suffering. They have lived long enough to realize that they were utterly wrong about what they once feared most, without any sense of how to live with the error, without any skill in how to wrestle their deeper, enduring terror. It isn’t pain, after all, that is unendurable. It isn’t living that is undoable. It is dying in a death-phobic time and place. The Dying are obliged to live in a way they have never done before, and no life skill or old competence can be brought to bear. They are asked to live dying, when nothing about how they’ve lived looks as it once did.
- Our man’s problem was that he was still alive. Because of the treatment he’d received his life had been extended far beyond what the disease dictated, but he gained that additional life knowing that he would die in the foreseeable future of the disease he was being treated for anyway. His suffering was not in the time to come. He was suffering now, not from what was going to happen but from what had already happened and was still happening, and from what had not happened.
- He already knew that in some fashion he was dying, and still it wasn’t happening. That was the nightmare he’d been delivered to by his medical treatment: It would take longer to die, so long that it never seemed to be happening. His every waking minute—and, judging by his dreams and insomnia, every half-sleeping minute too—was lived knowing he was dying. He had bargained for months of illness and an hour of death, but instead got an eternity of wakeful agitated, motionless, unremarkable, endless, symptom-riddled, ordinary dying.
- Despite repeated assurances that we would not let him suffer the intractable pain and terrifying shortness of breath he feared, he drew no consolation or comfort from it. From his point of view, with no real changes in either, he was already in the “when the time comes” time because he had decided so. Fearing it was the same as it being true. It no longer mattered when we came to his house, when we titrated the pain medication, when we sedated him. It would always be too late. When he did die in the middle of the night, one of his wife’s first acts was to leave us a voice message saying that we had failed him and balked at the moment of truth—a moment that had come and gone months before.
- Instead of the old nightmare of uncontrolled pain and unexpected death, we have a new nightmare of controlled pain and an unexpected wish to die, a wish that can’t be accounted for by worsening symptoms and can’t be soothed by reassurances that no one will be allowed to suffer.
- Dying people are suffering a torment we once thought would only come to those in the hour of their death. Now the hour of death is months long, sometimes longer. Now, in the middle of the More Time that they prayed for, dying people more often than not cannot bear the answered prayer.
- is a privilege to be told a story that is not yours to tell. Our culture, where stories are often told for amusement or distraction from pain or boredom and belong to no one, still has the hardest time distinguishing privilege from right, and not just in storytelling.
- have seen “waking up expecting to live” every day on the job, and I’ve seen what it does for us. I have seen that there is a diminished ability to suffer. There is little instinct or capacity for grieving. There is a headlong flight away from discomfort, hardship, dying. There is a degree and kind of depression here that would be declared some kind of emergency if it were known for the widespread thing it is. Waking up as we do is job security for all the mental health professionals in your yellow pages.
- Everything costs though, friends. Our creaturely comforts have cost the world considerably, as we are finally, unwillingly learning. Our lowest infant mortality rate is bought in part by obliging infants with considerable birth abnormalities who would otherwise have died from them to live with them instead, often well into their childhoods and beyond, and by asking their families to learn how to do that. Our superb life span is purchased in part by extending old people’s lives far beyond what their illness or their disease would have allowed, while still not entirely ridding them of that illness or disease.
- Etymologically, obedience has nothing to do with being some kind of slave. It means instead a willingness and an ability to listen to what is, to attend to it. Obedience is following the grain of things. With that skill of obedience, every natural thing knows above all how to be itself, come what may.
- Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop. But med-tech, not in any sense a natural thing, knows how to subvert the way disease and symptoms have of keeping and marking time, and in doing so it subverts the body’s knowledge of how to stop.
- It isn’t likely that they wake up every day expecting to die. They likely want to live at least as much as we do, and they want this for each other too. Experience has taught them not that life is cruel, random, arbitrary, unjust. Experience has taught them that life is unlikely, everything considered.
- For all that, waking up each day is a gift. It is a gift that is not reward for playing by the rules. It is a gift from the Gods, giving each living person the capacity not just to go on, but to go on as if he or she has been gifted, to go on in gratitude and wonder that all the things of the world that keep them alive have continued while they slept. Wonder, awe, and a feeling of being on the receiving end for now of something mysteriously good: These are antidotes to depression. Please consider that our way of caring for dying people, and our ways of dying, would not be what they are if we would awaken somehow that way.
- Dying in the English speaking world is usually an affliction, a malfeasance, an arbitration, certainly something coming from somewhere beyond your plans and abilities to steal your plans and abilities from you. It is an intrusion, a violation, a visitation of Nothingness, a grim reaping. It is almost never spoken of as something you do, or could do, or ought to do, and this is where our confusion spirals into the great fear and loathing of the contemporary death experience. The “disease trajectory,” as it is called in the trade, is somewhat predictable, fairly trustworthy in its unfortunate way, with a ring of the inevitable about it. But what you do in the face of that inevitability—there is nothing inevitable about that. What you do while the disease goes as it goes is entirely up for grabs, just as our grammar says it is. And almost nobody knows this.
- The actual, observable truth of it, if you go by people’s behavior when the time comes, is that everyone knows that everyone else is going to die. Generally, in my experience of the thing, the dismay of learning that your best friend or your beloved partner will die is dwarfed severely by the bolt from the blue shock of learning that you too will die. There is nothing in what I have seen working in the death trade for years that persuades me for five minutes that everyone knows they are going to die. You simply cannot tell that we know we’re going to die from how we live.
- For most of us, our death is not a known thing. It is a rumored, suspected, and feared thing. That is why it is news. Fear is not knowledge, not even remotely. It has tremendous consequence and power, but it is not knowledge.
- Most people’s reaction to the news of their death shows clearly that they did not know that this would come to them one day. You can see in many that they feared that this is what was happening to them, but there is nothing in their reaction or in their premorbid way of living that bears the mark of having known this all along.
- Because people do not know that they are going to die, because dying is what you do and not what happens to you—and only because of that—it is possible for people not to die. And many, many do not die.
- Her ability to pray for health, he’d decided, depended on her being healthy and knowing herself as such. Her capacity for prayer of any kind would be compromised by the medical truth that gave rise to her prayers in the first place, he decided. The pastor, well intentioned, had the woman praying for something that with our medicine and experience we knew would almost certainly not come to pass.
- The pastor was certain that God’s hand would be in her miraculous delivery from cancer, but he couldn’t find that hand in the cancer, not anywhere in the illness or the dying.
- For a culture that doesn’t believe in death, that believes that everyone will die but shouldn’t have to, being killed is the solution to the problem of dying.
- What have you bought from me now with your willingness to think a few of these unauthorized thoughts? You come, however uncertainly, to the counterintuitive fact that for us it is possible not to die. Being killed is one way not to die. Not knowing you are dying—or will die—is another. Hating death or refusing to die are others.
- The reverend was speaking in one-breath sentences, which means that he had enough breath for maybe ten words at a time. They seemed to be reasonable people. She must have meant—I hoped this is what she meant—that he was attending the odd committee meeting at the church or taking phone calls from concerned parishioners. When I asked about it, he said, “Oh, no. Preach every Sunday.” There was a long pause. “Haven’t missed one yet.” And a longer pause. “Gotta keep going.” I was thinking about the parishioners in the pews on all those Sundays that he hadn’t missed, how they’d been watching him get weaker and more winded in the last month or two while he had to keep going. I thought of the great opportunity that lay before him and them to keep the truth of dying in front of them, right there in their church services. I thought of how their Communion and their fellowship could be unforgotten for the rest of their lives at least, how they would tell the story of the minister’s dying before their eyes, and how those who didn’t see it happen but heard about it would be able to imagine that this was a human thing, not a heroic thing, a possible thing. Even the people who were put out by it or found it altogether too much, even they would be able to see something they’d never seen before. Maybe a few of them would be able to live a little differently on the other side of the minister’s death. Maybe a few of them would be able to die differently. So I asked, “Are you talking about your illness in your sermons?” “Oh no,” he said again, “Too depressing. All week, hard lives. On Sunday, need a break. Too hard.”
- I don’t know that hearing that old familiar story in that kind of way did much in the way of helping the minister. But I don’t know that it didn’t, either. I wasn’t asked back, I remember that. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t asked back. What I am fairly sure of is that him dying in front of his parishioners without him saying a word about it had probably gone a long way toward making him look heroic, stoic, admirable. It would easily be recalled in the years to come as “a long and courageous battle.” That’s what dying, not dying looks like, though: enviable, singular, sane. I still feel badly for him when I remember that meeting, how narrow his choices really were. All those people gathered every Sunday for the great transubstantiation, trying to make do on the dry wafer and watery wine of a long and courageous battle.
- someone is dying in a time and place that has banished any opportunity long ago they might have had to learn how to die and now asks of them that they do so hopefully, positively, and not very obviously. So they are dying without map or guide, without any widely shared sense of what will be after, with nary a soul close by who knows how it is.
- And they sure as hell don’t need permission to die from someone who’s never done so, who has no plans to do so, who is no more inclined to do so than they are. They don’t need someone showing up who, mostly unawares, will take some of what is left of their energy, their lucidity, their capacity to give a shit or to sit up. They don’t need someone who will steal their time by colluding with the general refusal to know that dying is in the room, and should be, in the name of helping them.
- It will take the rest of this book to get us there, by coming back to three essential questions: Why is it so hard to die? Why do we have to learn how to do it? Why, if dying is so common, is it so much a mysterious, troubling thing among us?
- Being with dying people can teach you with certainty that there won’t be another time like this: You ought not to plan as if you’ll have a chance to do something, anything, again. It won’t make you desperate, likely, to learn this lesson, and if you and they are lucky it won’t make you cling all the more tightly to your job or your own loved ones, blessed as you’d be to have them for a while longer. Instead, learning it will drop you solidly into the only time you know with some certainty, now, together with the only people you know are there with you. And then you can look upon your time with dying people, and then with everyone, as something never before seen and never to be seen again, as something to be honored and cherished as the singular sort of miraculous thing that it is.
- You are willing to see your dying, and as soon as you do it can change how you understand your life. Your dying changes your eye, it changes what you see, and in that way your dying begins first in your seeing. Your dying changes what your life means.
- However it is that you approach the thing you seek, that thing responds to your approach and your way of seeking, so much so that what you end up finding is the sum of the reactions of the sought-after thing to your way of trying to find it. You find your looking, in other words, and you will see your eyes. What you will find is a faithful rendering of your own consequences.
- The Uncertainty Principle shows us that “the thing itself” isn’t out there waiting to be found. It is changed by our search for it. It is changed by our desire to find it. It is changed by us being there at all.
- Whether or not objectivity is possible, it has never struck me as a worthy, laudable achievement. It is to me better understood not as the quieting of the self, but as the View from Nowhere—probably not helpful in working with people and not a lot to write home about.
- The foundational religions of contemporary North America, biblically rooted, teach that humans are (or were) the “crown of creation,” the center of the divine architecture and purpose. The made world was given to humans to take what is needed and wanted. Humans in that sense are owners of the world. With the fall from grace humans ushered the dark side of that proprietary relationship into the world and ever since have been chained to the world as caretakers (tillers of the soil, herders of the animals) and subjected to the world’s rhythm by having a limited life span. Our creation legends say it plainly: Life means what it does because human beings are its proper heirs and managers, a standard agriculturalist’s vision. Life means what it means because of how human beings live. We impose meaning upon an otherwise meaningless tangle of life.
- There is a saying I mentioned earlier: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve learned in the last two decades that this is many times more brilliant a thing than I had thought it was, and it is worth some wonder. It’s a saying about anticipation and prejudice, about poverty of options, and it has a lot to tell us about what dying in our time and place means to us. “To a man with a hammer”: This means that, though you may know your one tool well, you likely will ask it to do what it wasn’t designed to do and perhaps cannot do. This isn’t really a recommendation to go out and get a lot of things. It means that it is a good idea to have a variety of ways and means available to you, to do justice to the vast diversity that the world is. “Everything looks like a nail”: a much more volatile proposition. It means that your meager tool kit, your poverty of options, changes two things fundamentally. It changes your eyes, and it changes the thing your eyes are looking at. The poverty is contagious, in other words, and the world itself is susceptible to it.
- But here is one possibility, as a way of getting the thing into some kind of motion: Don’t wait. Imagine that everything is up for grabs, whether you’ve got the news or not. Imagine that everything that your life and your death mean is decided by how you live and die, while you live and die. Here’s a hint about how to get started: If the meaning of life isn’t necessarily anything at all, then try to imagine that you have to make meaning instead. Imagine that the meaning of things, especially of human things, is itself a made thing, and imagine that you can make meaning every day.
- If you haven’t been deliberately making meaning in your life by the ways you’ve lived it, then your time of dying is going to be a hard, hard proving ground, a tough, under-the-gun place to do so. You don’t make meaning from the ether, or hocus-pocus it into view by the force of your will or by getting to all the weekend workshops in your area that you can afford. Meaning is made while you live, in all the small true moments that become your life, and it is all but inevitable that your way of living will become a part of the meaning of life that others—your grandchildren, say, or someone else’s grandchildren—will with some cobbled-together version of willingness and capacity live or not. The crucible for meaning in your life is how you wrestle with the way things are.
- Many families are now being asked to unplug the machine giving nourishment or breath to someone they love in the name of loving them. This is the same machine whose use they were asked to consent to some time before that moment, in the name of loving them.
- It takes some real living to learn the difference between courtship and seduction. This culture swims in one, struggling in its undertow toward the mirage of the other. Seduction is finding the ten thousand ways of stealing something from someone for yourself without them knowing that you have done so. Seduction needs coercion, sleight of hand, distraction, and a keen nose for weakness. Courtship is finding the ten thousand ways of giving something to someone that they need for their lives, without recourse to asking them what it is they might need. Courtship needs slowness, elegance, discernment, some cunning in the name of life, and a well-cooked heart. Both are skills of a sort, but one leaves rupture and vacancy as evidence and the other gives with a deep respect for the need or the struggle of the recipient.
- Life is by every measure a bigger thing, a more devout and devotion-inspiring thing, a truer thing, than the human life span. Life is that of which the human life span, for a while, partakes. Our secular humanist religions will not tolerate it, but let us be humble on this point: Life is not a human thing. It is what gives us the opportunity to be human. It is not the stage upon which we play out our humanity or our lack of it, though merely players we surely are. It is the play. And the play’s the thing.
- When our education is a good one, mystery sits on the throne of our well-crafted intelligence, and it is the proper limit of our intelligence. Mystery is the place where we can finger the ragged edges of what we know and begin to make peace with what we will not know.
- But anyone who has worked in the death trade for any length of time knows that there are dying people who do not fear death, thoughtful people not prone to the rampant death phobia that passes for prescience among us, who at the news and the immanence of their death are curious and sad and reluctant and disappointed and mystified, but not drawn and held in the undertow of a low-grade, grinding, unarticulated, and dusky terror that is the death phobia of our culture and one of the certain ways by which our culture can be recognized by outsiders.
- It is truer to say that death phobia happens when something happens to the culture. Death phobia happens when culture doesn’t happen, or when it is imperiled in a fundamental way. Death phobia, I am asking you to consider, is not culture. It is anti-culture. It multiplies wherever culture is under attack, especially when it is failing from within. Death phobia is a syndrome at war with culture, and where I work and live it is prevailing. Death phobia begins to metastasize whenever our ability to make culture, to be deeply at home in our skin and in the world, has gone missing.
- That is where I first saw something that became the overture to my working life and is a theme for the rest of this book: Whenever you go looking for home, you will find death on the welcome mat.
- But early on I saw that they had opted for anger or austerity because they didn’t want to be sad and didn’t know how to be sad and didn’t trust sadness. So it became a place where men learned sadness, and heartbrokenness turned it into a skill instead of an endurance. Sad school was scheduled to go about eight weeks, but at their urging it lasted eighteen months.
- So many people have seen talk show therapy sessions now, and their expectations come from the “fix it fast” school of public suffering. Most people in most audiences I’ve been with believe without saying or being aware of it that being upset is a kind of noble labor and that it should be rewarded. For most of us in the West, a public expression of pain or confusion is a problem for the listeners or the experts to solve, as if the hurt has an automatic request in it to have the hurting end.
- Why does your father become “how you feel about your father” after he dies? Why does his death extinguish the obligation you have to him so that the whole thing shifts over to the obligation you have to yourself? Why does his death convert “what he needs from me” into “what I need to do for myself”? Why do you give up on him so easily? Why, when he died, did you lose him? And this is the standard way we have of grieving in the West, a psychological way, as if grief were a tidal pool of inner events, the lost one a pebble dropped in that pool, the ripples another occasion for working out our feelings. For most of us grief is entirely an interior event, exclusively emotional, cathartic in purpose and resolving in outcome, the dead a prop in the pageant of our recovery.
- This sense I had in Europe that you cannot find anything that isn’t “of humans,” anything that hasn’t been trodden, heaved, ploughed, cut down, squeezed, burnt, and taken by humans for longer than anyone can bear the memory of, is everywhere you go. There is almost nothing that I know as wild there. It is as if people over the centuries have left no place for the world in their world, no room for it in their millennial struggles to eat and feed their children and live. It feels like there is only a human world there.
- No matter how many they were, they were too many. The whole place had been made in a human image. The spirit of the place had long ago been swarmed and ploughed under. The land had been turned into a setting for human life, with no life of its own. The tragically false idea that there was land for the taking across the waves that was free of people and free of history, a place where you could reinvent your identity and craft a nobler history for yourself and your kin, must have been intoxicating to the European of the time to a staggering degree that we now are heirs to but cannot imagine.
- The neglected and abandoned and forgotten dead of that place, who have kin scattered all across the Americas and in every land with a recent history of empire and conquest, in a language the living of that place do not seem to know, were pleading for presence, for some kind of standing among the living, to be remembered beyond the living memory of the kind grieving daughters have of their fathers. The dead there, as the dead do everywhere they are left behind, longed to be claimed by their heirs, by the people hurrying to work and looking to forgive themselves, to be carried for a while by the living, not to be gone, not to be lost. They were whispering something of why it is that we fear dying as we do.
- So, there are worlds of difference between wandering and fleeing. The difference doesn’t hover around preference, not at all. Wandering is a way of being at home in the world that doesn’t require forty acres and a mule, and fleeing is a way of losing your home, your forty acres and your mule, and being driven across the face of the world.
- Though the larger Persian army occupied vast stretches of the Scythian lands, Darius’s only satisfaction lay in conflict, victory, and enslavement, and so he pursued them. The Scythians, for their part, seemed generally unconcerned with the Persian occupation and continued to wander across their plains not as an army but as a people, in felt-covered wagons, apparently living with the faith that, as long as people moved, there was enough land for everyone. It is a story familiar to the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
- About the religion and the culture that had given her life she admitted: They just don’t belong here. It doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be here, not necessarily, but it does mean that they aren’t from here, and never will be.
- Their culture was gathered around the first gifts of their God: dominion over the plants and animals of the world. There is nothing in the story that remembers a hunting, gathering era that predates cultivation. It says that the world given to them was neither semiarid desert nor savannah, but a garden. And there was no one there before them. The Edenic life is not wandering in obedience to the winds and waters. According to this story it is living an agriculturalist’s life. The mythic home of this culture is the garden. The mythic origin of the culture is in husbandry, and it came from the power to name the animals and the plants they fed upon.
- Cultivating cultures through close observation and trial have achieved a considerable capacity to manipulate pollination, germination, fertilization, growing season, and, probably most significantly, plant genetics. It is not a culture that takes the natural world as a given. Acting on the founding principle that the garden is given to humans, it grapples with what it finds to get more from the natural world. Cultivating cultures are not as a rule “at one” with their environment, but more often contend with the field and the weather as adversaries, just as the story foretells.
- the story of the origins of humans in Genesis is a story of homelessness. Homelessness is the origin of human life in the world and it is the origin of culture. It is the beginning of physical frailty and the origin of the mayhem that humans have visited upon each other ever since. This is the story’s whispered refrain: The world as it is is not your home. Your home is Somewhere Else. You are at your best when you are in the world but not of it.
- The human experience of having a lot to lose and then losing it turned into a story of the cosmic drama of trespass and punishment. This is the story that was so recognizable and so readily taken up by homeless black slaves stolen from West Africa to work and die in the Americas, which for the sake of survival became the gospel music that is now so beloved from a distance and so poorly understood by the ancestors of their slavers.
- As our history has gone along you can find this trauma wherever you can find monotheism. I am not saying that abandoning the dead to their fate is a tenet of monotheistic religions. I am not saying it isn’t, either. I am saying that the belief in a single omnipotent deity seems to have translated for most believers into an unspoken certainty that the deity’s relationship with the dead eclipses and obviates the living’s relationship with the dead. When that happens, “let the dead bury the dead” is not far behind.
- From homelessness comes heaven. Wherever you find people advocating for heaven and trying to get you ready for it, you find people who have given up on the world, and particularly those who have given up being at home here in the world. All that heaven is has gone from the world. Heaven means that this is not your real home. Heaven is anywhere but here. Since the world’s domain is the present and the past, heaven is always something the living must prepare for in the time to come, not a life they can live now.
- You have to sell the idea of homelessness first in order that the need for heaven has some place to roost, in order that it can make a home inside someone. You have to make people homeless in order for a homeless religion to be able to make a claim upon them.
- Europeans didn’t migrate or wander or sojourn or gather here. They fled here. They didn’t come to the Americas; they ran from Europe, from the thousand landless, homeless, feudal miseries that together were their days. They ran not so much to give to their children what they never had as to not have to inherit what their parents and grandparents bequeathed to them. This fantasy of energetic, optimistic people seeking the freedom to be their own true selves, freed from the old feudal constraints to prosper and multiply in natural contentment—this is retroactive PR, selling to us a history that never was. Homeless people fleeing slavery, with little or no capacity for Home, with a homeless story of homelessness at the center of their religion—they made America. And from them and from this most of us, and certainly most of our institutions, are descended.
- In the early days of diagnosis a dying person has as his or her new purpose in life to be “anywhere but here,” to know “anything but this,” to go after that fugitive running down the street called My Normal Life. But in the last days there is more often a feeling of “this, and this only.” When older dying parents in their last days or hours mysteriously stop wanting to see or talk to their adult children this makes for a lot of heartache, but what is really happening is that the dying person is distracted by the sorrows and grief and familiarity of the living from the epic project of setting his or her face in some other direction, in a way that finally obeys what is happening.
- Dying people are very often entirely mistaken about what they fear most. It is not the pain. It never was the pain. The more energetic and resilient fear by far that I have seen is the fear that the rest of us, the living, will after some time and adjustment be able to live our lives, that the end of the dying person’s life doesn’t end much else after all, that the living will continue to be the living and be able to proceed as if the dying person is past, done, over, in some way as if that person had never really, enduringly been.
- We are sometimes able to realize late in life, often only then, that the real substance of our lives is contained in its witnesses, that our life is tangible in how it is to others, in the relationships we were part of. We are real, in other words, to the extent that those around us grant us our reality and we theirs.
- When a person dies in our culture, they take on the same status as the unborn: hypothetical.
- Learning doesn’t go about its business the same way. Learning wonders rather than accumulates. Learning wonders about the things we claim to know and about knowing at all. It wonders if knowing is all it is cracked up to be. Learning is subversive. What it asks you to pay in tuition is most of what you had thought was true, and what was necessary, and what was enduringly so.
- Instead of being bloated with acquisition and padded certainties, people who learn have parted with much that was important to them, still more of what they thought they needed, and their penchant for wonder keeps them trim.
- Learning isn’t a product. It is measured not in what you drag home, but in how you walk. Learning is a skill.
- So please consider this: We don’t say that all of us will inevitably live just because we are born. Whether we live or not depends on all kinds of things, including our stamina, curiosity, willingness to know difficult things, and courage. Whether or not we will die doesn’t depend on our diagnosis or prognosis. It depends on stamina, curiosity, willingness to know difficult things, and courage.
- It is hard as hell, it is counterintuitive, and it is mandatory that when the time of dying is upon us we have to find a way to stop trying not to die.
- But eating binds us to life, and each meal nails us to the wheel of the world, and dying people need more than anything else to be able to dissolve a little at a time what binds them to life, especially to the metabolic and physical life. When dying people stop eating they are voting “no” to keeping on. Often it is not even a decision. It is more as though the body’s own wisdom, its understanding of how to stop continuing, is announcing itself. It is a wisdom that is absolutely faithful and quietly resolute at the end of a person’s life. Dying is groping in a dark room for the door that will let you out, and stopping eating is like turning a knob to see if that’s the door.
- The dying person doesn’t need any strength to die. Physical strength makes dying harder, enormously more difficult than it would otherwise be. With dying, as with living, there is such a thing as “enough already.” There comes a time when the future has nothing worth wanting or hoping for, and dying people can no longer vote for any future. When they stop eating, they are voting “no.”
- So, she gathered all of those concerns for etiquette and ancestor into this answer. She said, “Well, when they brought the TV here. That might be the worst.” “Television?” said the reporter, “Worse than losing your family from starvation or losing your traditional way of life?” The old lady nodded toward her grandson who was playing on the road outside her government house. “Since TV, we can’t speak together. I can’t speak TV. He can’t speak Inuktituk.”
- Another way of saying this with less heartache and more wonder could be this: If you can’t say something, you can’t see it either.
- recall sometime after his father died the filmmaker Tim Wilson describing his own grief to me in this way: “When my father died it was like the library burned to the ground.”
- What I think he missed most about his father was not what his father knew, but his way of telling what he knew, the sound of his voice and his way with words.
- When I teach people working in palliative care I ask them about the tool, the skill most vital to them on the job. Most people point to their training or the experience on the job, or their motivation or their compassion. Almost no one points to their tongue. Think about how we give so little consideration to the language we use on the job, how we are taught almost nothing about what language to use or why when we are trained for the job: It is the principal delivery mechanism for all the kinds of care unique to working with dying people.
- There isn’t a drug, a surgical procedure, a medical appliance, a profession, or a conceptual counseling language used to deliver palliative care these days that derives from the physical, social, intellectual, or spiritual realities of dying. All of them are conceived, developed, taught, and perfected elsewhere, in labs and factories and classrooms and boardrooms, and imported to the deathbed. They are carried to peoples’ homes and deathbeds and families in the name of caring for them.
- Remember the grown son of the dying woman in the Maritimes, how he asked her to tell him what he didn’t know and what he needed to know? That’s what he was doing, trying to find a language. He was saying to his mother, “Tell me how to say it,” and she was saying to him, “I don’t have any way of saying it.” Without such a language there is no way of turning the corner from “if” to “when,” from “very sick” to “not going to get better,” from “going to die” to “dying.” Without such a language there is no way to have a shared understanding between dying people and those they love. There is no way to be sad together.
- This is the basic entitlement of all dying people, that they speak and be spoken to faithfully as dying people. They are not people living with a life-threatening illness who, depending on their readiness to hear the bad news and their ability to understand, may or may not be dying. They are not people whose health is failing. What is their health failing to do? Whom is it failing?
- On the basis of reasoning and probability alone, her having had a decade of remission could just as likely—more likely, in fact—oblige them both to conclude that she had received her share of what everyone in that position hopes and prays for, More Time, and that the recurrence was the sign that this more time was now at its fullness.
- The language of “breaking bad news” is what makes it bad news. It is a language its users count on to be kind, gradual, hopeful but realistic, problem solving, comforting, looking with some pliable solace toward the future. But you will never get such a language from the “breaking bad news” training ground. The bad news language is a language that comes from exhaustion. It is used when the worst outcome is suspected, when hope looks ludicrous or feels like it begins to border on malpractice.
- Dying is not getting the news that you are dying. It isn’t “getting the information.” Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, like most people, “in the depth of his heart knew that he was dying but not only was he unaccustomed to such an idea, he simply could not grasp it, could not grasp it at all. And it simply was not possible that he should have to die. That would be too terrible. And so his feelings went” (Tolstoy, pg. 93). This is a very honest way of saying it: He knows that he is dying, and he doesn’t understand it.
- This “live like you were dying” stuff is shite, forgive me for saying so. This how people who will die but are not dying talk.
- The only qualification for adulthood in this culture seems to be living long enough to get there. The things we think of as “rites of passage” are mostly empty, sentimental, and nostalgic gestures, because no one believes that they make anything of the young person. They are rubber stamps, not alchemy. The teenagers don’t ask for the rites of passage and don’t seem to need them any more than the culture seems to need the teenagers. The events of excess are a reward for getting there, nothing more.
- Indigenous parenting, to make a debatable generalization, has the responsibility of elegantly, deeply, and with love getting out of the way of the child’s turning into himself or herself, and it is the community’s job to make that happen. Our parenting has the responsibility of writing some identity on the child before anyone else gets a chance to. That’s why there’s so much focus on the first five years of life in our world: You still have a chance to compensate for what the crazy world will do to them, proactively.
- But if I take your Jesus, you say I won’t die. And if I don’t die there’ll be no feast. And without the feast, all these people won’t eat what I have learned. And they’ll starve a little. So I’ve thought about it, and I’m not going to starve them. Life here is hard enough, without having not to die.” The old man turned to the villagers and said, “Me, I’m going to get ready to die. You people can do what you want with what our friend here is telling you.” The old man dusted himself off, gave a good nod to everyone, and headed back to his house for supper.
- If heroism it is, then his heroism is the kind that has no enemy and no fight. Instead, his way of loving his culture was to hold himself out to it in service by loving his life and by insisting that his way of dying serves life too. He wasn’t fighting with the missionary or with monotheism or with Jesus, I don’t think. He was wrestling the angel of what all of our lives are made of, endings of all kinds, and insisting on making there justice and mercy and meaning, without demonizing anything of what brings us there.
- My experience tells me that most people fear disappearing, fear what their families and friends and rest of us are going to do with them after they die, fear our well-known ability to get on with our lives. They are afraid of the surface of life closing over their heads, slipping beneath the waves and disappearing from view and from mind and from life itself. That is the death they fear, in my experience.
- Now they’ve begun to see how easy it is in our way of life to let the dead slip from view and from memory, how easy it is to disappear. They’ve seen that the only presence you can have after death is that which the living grant to you. So somewhere deep inside them, dying people making home movies have realized that asking the rest of us to remember them well, and to see to it that a place at the table in the banquet hall of life is made for them when the times come, might be asking too much. So they ask us to press “Play” instead.
- The truth is that we cannot, nor should we be able to, choreograph the way in which we will be remembered, if we will be remembered at all. We can try, and we do, but we cannot die getting remembered. The consequence of doing so is to bequeath to those after us a legacy of fear, faceless anonymity, and terminal futility that will hatch out into another generation of dying miserably when the time comes for them. Where do you think we got our fear of disappearing from? We got it from those who feared disappearing as they died. Mostly, their fears have proven warranted. Mostly, if we don’t begin doing all of this much differently, our fears will prove out in the same way.
- People die the way they live, mostly. That could be grim, or it could be, in a quiet and unexpected way, great news. It means that you can begin to learn how to die well long before your turn comes. It means that you can practice it in all the mundane corners of daily life. It means there’s nothing to wait for. There’s no one to give you the news. Getting up again the next morning, until you can’t: That’s pretty much all the news you’re going to get to keep you in the know. Being able to eat again, until you can’t: That’s the news. Everyone else’s dying and death before yours is the news washing up on your shore. That’s your chance to get it figured, to get it in view. Nothing morbid about it, nothing at all. How you die has enormous consequence that ripples out from your dying time, that doesn’t end when your life ends. How you die is the next generation’s teacher.
- When your focus is on how you feel about things in the world, then the things of the world slip from view, your little boat of learning things for what they are swamped by the swells of how you feel about them. With hard work and with learning, the things of the world are still somehow out there, waiting for you to know about them, no matter how you feel. They survive how you feel about them, and they are there before and after the storms of your feelings roar through and abate. Feelings aren’t much of a compass to go by.
- Though it isn’t inevitable, it happens sometime around the halfway point in our lives, maybe a little after, that many of us begin to see that our way of life has mostly been spent on the receiving end, trying to get our needs met, trying to get happy, looking for love in all kinds of places. Maybe because of a massive calamity, maybe because of the umpteenth time that things didn’t go the way we wanted, we are more or less dragged to the reluctant understanding that things not “working out” doesn’t come from how life is, but from what we keep asking from life and from our little corner of it. It comes from realizing that relationships aren’t need-gratification machines, plugged into the power grid, humming along, waiting for us to slip our money into the slot and pull the lever. They are living things that need care and feeding, that need us.
- Maybe you awaken to the fact that the world isn’t there for your extractive pleasure, or mine. Maybe we’ve taken too much. Maybe the whole matrix is suffering and coming loose at the seams because we’ve been taking too much, going along for years as if we’re needy, giving job security to therapists and the wholesalers, instead of risking being accused of arrogance or inflation and going along as if we’re needed.
- It is in the flower’s nature to give itself away unto its death in the act of being itself. Until we learn how to see the flower’s end, until we are willing to see it, how much of the flower do we see? Only the part that makes us feel the feeling we’re looking for. Grief is that learning and that ability of seeing the story of the thing, the whole story.
- I find a potted plant somewhere in the place. I hold it up and say, “Okay. This is the easy part. Tell me what you see.” Almost everybody gets ethereal right away. They see the Life Force, they see nature, or the eternal purpose or green energy or Gaia. You see how the plant instantly disappears, as soon as you ask people to see it? It’s amazing. Many people seem to have an unkillable instinct for making metaphors of ordinary things so the ordinariness doesn’t show through.
- That’s how long it usually takes to get to the point where I can hold up a potted plant and a room full of people who work in the death trade see death in my hand. We can see plants and insects in the potting soil, but we can’t see Uncle Frank. And we can’t see ourselves, not until we are pretty much dragged there.
- What the potted plant is willing to teach us is that every living thing needs something to die in order to live. In the case of humans, and hugely in the case of urban North Americans, we need scores of things to die every minute in order for us and our way of life to keep on going. It’s the same for vegans and vegetarians, pretty much. Life doesn’t feed on life. Life doesn’t nourish life. Death feeds life. Every rooted thing knows that and proceeds accordingly. Death is the life-giving thing.
- Everything dear to you will perish so that life might continue. Our deaths can, in every sense the word can be meant, feed life—unless we refuse to die, or fight dying, or curse dying, or spend all our dying time not dying. When we do that we exempt ourselves from the biodynamic imperative and the great caravan of how it is. When we exercise our right to not die until we are ready, when we employ enormously expensive drugs and technology, expensive both spiritually and materially, to stand in the way of life being itself and us joining the parade, something begins to starve. Every person exposed to that refusal begins to feel the pangs of not being nourished, which turn into fear or entitlement. Every person who hears another story of deathbed misery and torment begins to starve a little. Every child who is kept from the graveside is starving for a story of how life is, and why, and whether that is just. Instead they get the saccharine drip of blanket reassurance or the empty calories of platitude and metaphor.
- She had exercised her right still vigorously defended in our culture to a private disappearance. What the young man lost by that exercise—and he knew it now—was the chance to be a grandson to a dying old woman, which is a different kind of relationship, one that is forged in the shared knowledge that one of them is dying.