I garden, hike, talk to myself a lot, hide moderately well, and make excellent soup. I love people but am a little scared of them. I'm very, very happily married.
Favorite music: Most of it.
Books on my nightstand: A Victorian romance, a kayaking survival tale, an exploration of linguistics theory, a collection of short stories, a manual on killing for new military recruits, and a book on the mystics my mom gave me.
Hobbies: Research and laughing.
I learned that a big, flatulent, snore-prone, asthmatic bulldog died suddenly of a heart attack over in Wales a few days ago. Her name was Constance and her bereft humans are John and Chris. The news made me sad. They’d only had her for about ten months…she was a kinda, sorta rescue dog…but in that short time they fell for her pretty hard.
(Which was something of a puzzle to me, as it often is to non-bulldog people. Bulldogs are not the most attractive of animals and she could be quite a bitch besides. But I think that’s part of the reason WHY John and Chris loved her so much, because she was always so fearlessly and unapologetically herself, warts and all, and really, when I think about it, I kind of love that, too. You go, girl.)
Today’s post was going to be about the dying music that’s come down to us through time, the valuable information embedded in that music regarding how to die, and how in the hell we’re supposed to extract said information all these years later, across changing attitudes, languages, and cultures.
But it doesn’t seem right. Not today. Instead, I’d rather play one of the songs I had in mind and dedicate it to Constance and the other beloved, joy-bringing, innocent, vulnerable, and deeply missed pets we’ve all lost over the years. They’ve mostly died quiet and unnoticed by the wider world. For some strange reason, we’re not usually given much room to grieve our animals when they die, in spite of the fact that their loss can be as painful and devastating as that of any other family member. So today, I thought I’d make a little more room.
Goodbye Constance, and all you other beauties who graced our lives for a little while. We love you. We miss you. We thank you.
Lyrics:
Oh all the money that e’er I spent I spent it in good company And all the harm that e’er I’ve done Alas, it was to none but me And all I’ve done for want of wit To memory now I can’t recall So fill to me the parting glass Good night and joy be with you all
Oh all the comrades that e’er I’ve had Are sorry for my going away And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve had Would wish me one more day to stay But since it falls unto my lot That I should rise and you should not I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call Good night and joy be with you all
I try not to read my writing at night because I discovered years ago that if I do, I’ll hate it. Always. When I’m tired, every word I’ve ever written sounds like shit, and if I make the mistake of reading it too late, I’ll go to sleep feeling like a fraud.
At the other end of the spectrum, in the morning I usually like what I’ve written. And if I’m drinking coffee, I love it. Caffeine does for my writing what pot used to do for my philosophical discussions in adolescence–it lifts it to a level of brilliant insight (which, sadly, rarely survives the chemical letdown afterwards.)
This daily vacillation, while painful, is at least familiar. I know it, I deal with it. I’ve learned how to milk the creative juices that come in the morning and sidestep the mental desert of night.
But I experienced a different kind of downswing this week that caught me unprepared. The Idaho Writer’s Guild here in town sponsored a talk by Lori Wasulchek, an award winning, documentary photographer who just published a moving, exquisite book about the hospice program in Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, called Grace Before Dying. (I won’t review it here because the self-critic in my head has informed me I’m not good enough. Just use the link. Pete Brook does it justice.)
She was inspiring. Dedicated. Brilliant and unbelievably hard working. She walked through fire to bring her book to print because she believes in the value of Angola’s hospice program and what it’s doing for the countless men who are living and dying in there. She not only created an uplifting work of art that reaffirmed everything best in us, she touched a lot of lives and helped a lot of people along the way. I left the meeting with her book cradled in my arms, my faith in humanity renewed. I was high as a kite, energized. Hopeful for a better future for us all.
And then, about three hours later (as evening rolled around) my trusty, fragile, writer’s ego collapsed and I crashed. Hard. The inevitable comparisons began and I spent the next twelve, sleepless hours questioning every word I’ve ever written, everything I’ve ever done, and (while I was at it) my entire reason for being. I took the earlier post I’d written about Grace Before Dying down off the blog before anyone besides the spammers who never read anything anyway could find it, and then seriously questioned about whether to just take the whole blog down, too.
God. What a horrible night. My emotions were painfully, ridiculously extreme. The good news is they were so extreme I knew I should wait until morning before doing anything I might regret.
Sure enough, dawn eventually came and, with the help of a little sunlight and caffeine, I regained a more moderate perspective. (Although even coffee couldn’t completely dispel the angst.) After a rational look at my reaction I learned a couple of important things about myself that I need to keep in mind going forward:
1) I’ve secretly wanted to single handedly save the world from its fear of dying.
2) I need to come up with a more realistic goal. (And admit it to myself this time.)
3) I’m not a journalist and it’s counter-productive to compare myself to one, especially one that’s award-winning. I’m a creative writer, and I need to embrace that aptitude and craft my ideas accordingly.
4) I need to stop being such a hermit and spend more time around other writers for the inspiration, insights, and ego-workout I so clearly need.
I think the last one is probably the most important. Writers have to spend so much time alone anyway, and when you couple that with my natural tendency to hole up and hide from the world, I can wind up being pretty isolated. It’s not good for me and it’s certainly not good for my writing. One of the hardest things for me to do…every single time…is accept a good critique and apply its lessons, even though doing so has always done more to improve the quality of my work than anything but the simple discipline of writing every day.
Spending more time with writers (especially those writing on my topic) would also provide excellent practice for dealing with the I Love It/I Hate It pendulum swings created by comparing my work to that of others. I really don’t want to be taken off guard again the way I was this week. I can’t afford it. It’s painful, it’s hazardous to the work I’ve already written, and in all honesty it’s just not the kind of person I want to be. The number of talented, hard working, dedicated writers out there is huge, and I’d really rather learn to harness their achievements as a source of inspiration than seeing them as a reason to quit.
CBC News posted a brief but interesting article titled Aggressive end-of-life care more common among faithful: study. I found the results intriguing because I’d noticed the trend myself while working with hospice. Unfortunately, the study didn’t really address the reasons why people of faith are more likely to utilize aggressive treatment.
(Which of course unleashed some rabid exchanges in the comment section. Religion and politics…sigh. Everyone has an opinion.)
Contrary to the usual religious/anti-religious stereotypes, what I saw taking place in my work was always far more complex. There were as many different, unique reasons for seeking (or not seeking) aggressive treatment as there were people making the choices.
Having said that, there was one thing I observed consistently:
Those who saw themselves as a part of something bigger…whether spiritually or community based…seemed to be able to cope more successfully with the hardships of dying. The larger this framework was, the more value these people seemed to still find in what was left of their lives. (They were frequently, but not always, people of religious faith. Some of the non-religious people I worked with had a spiritual, philosophical, or artistic dimension to their lives that provided them with the same kind of anchor that religion offered to others.)
On the other hand, those who identified most heavily with their individual choices and rights–their ability to control their situation, think clearly, and remain ambulatory and independent–seemed far more vulnerable to the ravages of anger and despair. Their ability to cope with the changes and losses was reduced, as was their ability to still find value in the time they had left.
I learned a lot from this, about how important it is for me to stay connected to a more expansive perspective in my own life. To make sure I walk up in the mountains, under the stars, and out in the storms as much as possible. To immerse in great music and art and literature, to constantly nourish my imagination and sense of wonder. To resurrect my trust (over and over again) by reaching out to touch others in pain. And to fight against the overpowering impulse to hide by sitting up anyway, and bravely asking my questions of the night. Because those are the kinds of things that remind me that I really do belong here and I’m not alone.
We each have to find our own bigger picture, and part of that involves choosing what meaning we’ll weave out of the darker threads of our lives. A lot of people turn to the traditional religions of the world for help because these institutions are old hands at confronting the overwhelming suffering of humanity. Over the ages they’ve developed an extraordinary array of tools for extracting the beauty and value embedded in the horrors.
But there are a lot of other people for whom established religions no longer work. And for them, the task of weaving an effective, helpful meaning for suffering can be a real challenge. I have a growing suspicion that that’s actually one of our next, great tasks as human beings–to extend the weave of the old meanings in order to incorporate all the new, great stuff we’ve developed and learned along the way.
As regards the study, I suspect that just like everyone else in the world, some of the faithful involved sought aggressive treatment at the end because they were afraid to die, while others utilized it because they still longed for and valued their lives. (In fact, they were all probably a blend of both.) And if there were more faithful than non-faithful who still found enough value in their lives to keep fighting to live it, I suspect it’s because of the larger framework their religion offered them.
Here’s a poetic example of one person’s effort to expand that meaning beyond the realm of traditional religious understanding that I found curious and beautiful. (And if you haven’t seen it, this blog is pretty amazing anyway. It’s called I Wrote This For You, and from what I’ve been able to figure out it’s the partnership of a photographer in Japan and a poet somewhere in Scandinavia. The short poetry reminds me of Rumi and Rabindranath Tagore, and can be heart wrenching, inspiring, and thought provoking all at the same time. The photography is breathtaking.)
People who work in end-of-life care feel pretty strongly about telling people the truth. If someone is dying and they want to know, then they damn well deserve to be told.
Why? Because wrapping up a life requires time to tie up the practical details, deliver final messages, bid farewells, and savor all the myriad “last times:”
Last birthday or bike ride, vacation or dance.
Last scent of fresh rain.
Last kiss of a beloved.
Last pang.
Last breath.
These moments are essential. Validating. Sacred. They’re like rare, sparkling jewels scattered through a gathering dusk, and their aching sweetness is life multiplying itself a thousandfold as it picks up speed.
Yes, definitely–receiving the news that we’re going to die is a blow like no other, and trust me, delivering the message sucks, too. But the alternative…to strip a person of their opportunity to gaze around in final wonder, to direct them instead to keep their head down and keep running, running, running on some exhausting, futile wheel of cure-seeking or worse, allowing them to die bewildered, panicked, or lost…is to strip them of life’s final and greatest miracle.
It’s selfish.
Now. Having said all that, there’s one situation where it’s advisable not to inform someone they’re dying, even if they say they want to know. It’s when they’re suffering from short term memory loss. Whether the damage sources from dementia, brain injury, alcoholism, or pharmaceutical side-effect doesn’t really matter. The effect is still the same. Each time they hear it, it’s like hearing it for the first time all over again.
Personally, I think people in this situation should still be told initially, even though they’ll probably forget. But telling them repeatedly would be kind of cruel.
Nobody needs that.
copyright Dia Osborn 2011
(The graphic above is by scottchan and, like many of the photos I use here, I found it on the terrific open source website: FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)
With the vandalism and violence of so many (primarily) young men in London, I’ve naturally been thinking about our youth in general; how we’re supposed to teach them to behave in a civilized way, and what it looks like when we fail.
It made me think of a small incident I overheard last week. There are three small children who live next door and, since they’re home-schooled, I often hear them playing in their backyard during “recess” while I’m working in the garden. The youngest is three years old (with the shriek of a banshee) and, listening to an exchange she had with an older sister, it forcibly struck me,
1) just how not-civilized we are to start with, and
2) how grueling it is to train us to try and cooperate and respect the rules instead.
Only not in the way you’d first expect.
Third Child has reached the stage where she understands the basic rules of cooperation: Thou shalt not hit or call names or take anything by force, Thou shalt talk instead of scream, and Thou shalt use your words to try and work it out with your sisters before tattle-taling to mommy. So when her older sister tried to pull a fast one and tell her that, no, no, no, youpick up the dog poop, Third Child understood that she had to raise her verbal fists and talk about it before resorting to other options.
Noooooo!! We have to take turns! We’re supposed to take turns!
I know…and it’s your turn. (With age comes cunning.)
No it’s not! It’s your turn! (Youth was not gullible.) We have to take turns! You have to take turns!!
Okay. I’ll do it later. (Age doubled back to try and throw her off the scent.)
No! Nooooo!! It’s your turn!! You have to do it now!! We have to take turns!!We have to take TURNS!!!
By this time, Third Child had reached the limits of a three-year old’s self-control and her volume was climbing accordingly. Older sister, realizing that mommy was likely to hear, finally capitulated and went off grumbling to pick up the poop while Third Child breathed raggedly for a minute or so, trying to de-escalate her emotions.
By this time I’d stopped what I was doing on the other side of the fence and was just standing there, fascinated and floored. Third Child’s performance was absolutely amazing to me. The discipline and effort she displayed in her attempt to deal with the problem in a civilized fashion (the above version is actually abbreviated–in reality she must have repeated We have to take turns! twenty or thirty times before she finally started to lose it) was really, truly impressive.
And, not to take away from Third Child’s achievement in any way, but I also instantly recognized the amount of mind-numbing, soul-sucking time, patience, and repetition required on her parents’ part, to get her to the point where she finally internalized the rule she kept repeating. Children don’t learn something as complex as what it means to be civilized from just telling them to do it once. Either do adolescents or adults for that matter. It’s the kind of thing we all need to hear over and over again, to observe by example in the behavior of others around us over and over again, to practice for ourselves–making lots of initial mistakes while being patiently corrected–over and over again, before it can finally be internalized as a first response.
And even after all that, it still needs to be continually reinforced or we’ll eventually slide back into the powerful impulses of our more primitive selves.
I look at the lawless, uncontrolled, destruction and violence of the last few days and can’t help but wonder how this happened? Clearly, the young men participating aren’t behaving in a civilized way, but why not? Where did the grueling training required for them to learn how to do so not materialize? Didn’t they have someone to teach them when they were small? Or didn’t they have enough role models showing them what it looks like along the way? Or didn’t they have anyone who cared enough to patiently correct them, over and over again, when they inevitably made mistakes along the way?
In other words, in a civilized society, how in the world did so many of our young citizens reach manhood without learning the fundamental tenets of what it means to be civilized?
I firmly believe that those who have done harm should be held accountable for what they’ve done. Justice and fairness are essential components of successful cooperation. But I also think that, as a society, it’s possible we’ve all been negligent, and we should also hold ourselves accountable for that. It looks like the majority of the damage has been done by disadvantaged young men, with few or no opportunities available to better their condition, and I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone when I mention that the hopelessness and anger of grinding poverty has always had a de-civilizing, de-stabilizing effect.
I also can’t help but notice that, worldwide, it’s been the most vulnerable populations bearing the vastly disproportionate burden of the downturn. Which begs the question; are the rest of us playing the role of the older sister here? Are we shirking our duties and trying to make the least powerful among us pick up all the poop?
I don’t know what the answers are to these questions…they’re far too many and too complex for simple explanations. But I do know this: Each of us can, ourselves, strive to behave in a more civilized manner towards others. Even if they’re not. Those of us who did learn the rules of civilized behavior can stand in as the desperately needed role models for others who didn’t, or for those who have just temporarily forgotten and need a reminder.
Third Child actually stood in as a role model for her older sister, with great success. Maybe we can all try to be more like her in our thoughts, words, and deeds. We can refrain from hitting, calling names, or using force, we can try talking instead of yelling and, if there’s a problem, we can try to communicate directly instead of just blaming, belittling, or otherwise lashing out.
Violence has a capacity to spread, but then so does respect. Acting with discipline and emotional restraint in the face of injustice is always hard, but if a three-year old can do it, surely…surely…the rest of us can at least try.
Planking, otherwise known as “The lying down game”, has evidently been around for a while but I just learned about it. It’s totally absurd (a guaranteed hit with me) and involves lying down on one’s face in random, incongruous, often public places, and then holding a prescribed, rigid position with arms pressed against one’s sides, legs and torso stiff and straight, and fingers and toes pointed.
All very crisp and gymnastic, with just a hint of narcolepsy.
Eventually, players started taking pictures and posting them on Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and blogs, after which the game evolved into an internet fad. A competitive element crept in…participants attempting to one-up each other with increasingly creative choices in locale, composition, theme, and scale of danger…which inevitably led to a couple of arrests and at least one tragic death.
Overall though, it’s another splendid example of the new, broad-based, spontaneous organizational power of the internet, a phenomenon that fascinates me. (Think Arab Spring and flash mobs.) There’s something about the way this group-mind communication spreads that vaguely reminds me of those huge flocks of birds all flying in unison, or the big schools of fish which turn and flash simultaneously. I wonder if we humans are wired with a latent gene, too, directing us to coordinate and move together across vast numbers, but it wasn’t until the internet came along that this gene could finally “turn on.”
In any case, the comedy in play with this game is a mix of farce, slapstick, and nonsensism. (Yes, there really is such a thing. Look it up.) And me? I just call it delightful.
Here are a few of my favorite examples set to “One potato, Two potato…” Enjoy.
One plank:
Two plank:
Three plank:
Four:
Beer plank:
Wedding plank:
Fast food:
More:
Pole plank:
Fridge plank:
Chopper plank:
Nude:
Sand plank:
Water plank:
Air plank:
Food:
Still haven’t had enough? Well, just a few more then. (But after this you’ll have to go to bestplanking.com for satisfaction.)
Here’s the “For godsakes let’s keep a sense of humor men…” plank:
A couple of dead-pan bactrian comedians getting in on the game:
My arch enemy (oh if only…):
And an imaginative, not to mention bath-averse, dog:
Last but not least, here’s something from the country that came up with the fabulous name, Planking. It’s a newscast from Australia with a report on the phenomenon. Those Aussies…I tell ya. I really, really love their sense of humor.
Something happened yesterday around sunset that I hadn’t seen before. For about one minute:thirty-five, the last rays of the sun peeked out from under tumultuous, massed storm clouds and found a sliver of pathway between the branches of three big trees, around the patio roof, and through a major tangle of wisteria to actually make it in our kitchen window. The light was golden, dramatic, and lit up two vases sitting in the window like luminaries. And…in a complete fluke…I had my camera to hand. I took a dozen shots or so and this was at the peak of the light:
Hardly prize winning but it caught the effect so I was happy. It also, funnily enough, turned out be another accidental photo. I was only aiming for the vases but wound up capturing an entire series of worlds that I hadn’t seen when I first snapped the shot. I mean, look at them all. There’s…
1) the outside, distant garden,
2) the illuminated, inner world of the vases,
3) the invisible realm of glass separating the two (you can only see it by the ghostly reflections it casts),
4) the world of shadows at the bottom right, where the silhouette person lives, and then
5) the dark abyss just under the shelf.
There are more than five of course, (like the neighbor’s world through those darkened windows in the upper, right hand corner) but you get the gist. Without the camera I only perceived a single world with the vases as its dominant focal point. All the other unique, fascinating worlds present were reduced to background noise, like visual mall music. It took the camera to give me the time and mental shift necessary to see the rest.
I realize our brains are designed to take the overwhelming barrage of sensory detail that batters us at every moment, and filter it down to just one or two things that we can actually focus on. And this ability is a good thing. I understand that. Without it we’d all have Asperger’s.
But it also means that this seemingly solid, worthy, dependable world we put so much stock in is actually made up of layers upon layers of different realities, entire alternate worlds in fact, most of which we completely miss, all the time. Our perception of everything around us isn’t even real.
Or no…it’s real enough taken by itself I guess, but it’s only a teeny tiny sliver of what’s really real.
It’s like what the poor sun had to do to itself to make it all the way inside our kitchen window: Reduce an entire star’s massive energy field–immense enough to warm and light an entire solar system–into a low spectrum sunbeam, roughly 2 foot by 3 foot, that only lasted for a minute and a half. Talk about partial.
Having said all that though, still. The illuminated vases were very…very…cool, and I guess that’s enough. Sometimes, the slivers alone will knock your socks off.
(Sorry for the blur but this is the only picture anyone thought to take.)
A couple weekends ago we drove down to the little town in Nevada from whence my people come and buried a small box in the cemetery there. It contained a variety of things; a seashell, photos, an old, scribbled note in a silver-plated box with blue velvet lining, a thank you card, a George Washington $1 coin from the U.S. mint presidential series, a Chinese coin, pictures of two Hindu saints, downy feathers, a secret bundle, and a handful of ashes from my mother who died over two years ago.
Some of these things belonged to her and others were things we thought she should have. The seashell and feathers–because she adored the ocean and migrating birds. The Hindu saints–because they guided her in life, so how much more important that they be there with her afterward? The secret bundle–from a secret person for secret reasons known only to them. And the ashes because they were a last, little part of her that we could come and visit whenever we felt the need.
The old note, I found a couple months after she died. It was a short list of prayers folded up inside the silver box and stashed with her jewelry, dating from about a year before she died. The prayers were written in this order:
1) For an improvement in her health (which clearly didn’t work out so well).
2) For ten million dollars invested in a trust yielding 8% a year (also a no-go).
3) For greater clarity (yes!…she was having amazing breakthroughs and insights during her last months). And,
4) A last, loving wish for enlightenment and peace for the whole world. This was the one that made me cry. It was so like her, my mother, forever toting the world around with her in her bottomless basket of good wishes.
I spent days before leaving for Nevada sifting through the mementos of her life again–through all the deep, swirling emotions they resurrected–looking for the right pieces to place inside the box. Because my mother believed in reincarnation I carefully tucked in the list…just in case prayers carry over from one life to the next. The coins went in for murkier reasons even I don’t entirely understand; maybe as a token for the wealth she craved, or as an irrational but oh-so-necessary payment to the Boatman for safe passage, or perhaps just because they were made out of metal and would still be there long after the box itself decomposed.
Six of us came to sit around that small, square hole in the ground, drinking water and wine, soaking up the sun and wind, toasting her memory and telling her stories. We had a folding chair for each of us and an extra one where we set the box. We occasionally grew raucous, sprinkling wine over it after a toast, because sometimes remembering in the midst of great loss can just do that to you.
Before we placed the box down in the hole, I opened it one last time so we could have a look inside. The wind rustled the downy feathers and then blew one out, whisking it over the hillside below us. It floated above the headstones…more like a butterfly really, than the bird it came from…before finally rising higher, then higher, then higher into the sky. We all stood transfixed and staring, following its lovely escape in surprised silence, but the same thought was in each of our minds.
Look! Look! There she goes!
Afterwards we took handfuls of dirt, one by one, and threw them into the hole to cover the box, and with each handful we cried or laughed or were momentarily still…throwing our prayers down for her, too, along with the love of others who couldn’t be there. With the first handful, grief overwhelmed me and I sobbed on my knees, unconsciously dragging my dirty hand across my forehead and cheeks. I had no idea why I was doing it except that the grit across my skin felt welcome and good; raw and sharp enough to match the scraping of the wound inside me.
It was the leading edge of a brief but wild storm, and once it passed I felt calmer and lighter for it. Cleansed and good. Eventually we finished and, after replacing the small square of turf over the loose dirt, we packed up our things and traipsed off to the city park to eat a small picnic and finish the wine.
I like to think of that small box now, pressed down by the weight of dark, moist earth and already starting to decay, its cache of love and prayer, life and joy, seeping out into the ground like something with a half-life of ten thousand years. It never ceases to amaze me, how relentless this great current of Life is that flows through us, spilling down from one generation to the next like a perpetual champagne fountain, as if we were ever-widening tiers of crystal flutes constantly filling and spilling simultaneously.
My mother is gone but the huge gifts of her life are still washing down through the bewildering number of other lives she altered just by existing here for a while. They’re inside all of us who loved her and passing on into all those we love in our turn–inside everything she touched and every place she passed through.
And as of a couple weekends ago those gifts are now inside that tiny box, too, buried up in the high desert mountains where they will be leaking their grace for generations to come.
Sadly, he only came back up to the surface once before being dragged under again and disappearing for good. At the time the article was written, his body had still not been found.
It’s an odd way to go, death by blowhole, but that’s not what grabbed me. My eldest brother was also sucked down a blowhole, decades ago now, also in Hawaii only on Oahu, not Maui. It was during a high surf alert generated by an earthquake on the Asian side of the Pacific rim and, as soon as they heard about it, Bro (an occasionally professional surfer), his girlfriend, and another surfer friend drove up to Waimea Bay to check out the waves.
They weren’t going there to surf. The waves were coming in around thirty feet and big wave surfing wasn’t yet as popular as it is today. No. They were just heading up to watch, because waves that big are a rare phenomenon and, like solar eclipses, tornadoes, and eagles mating, sightings are a privilege and opportunities shouldn’t be wasted.
The three were standing up on the cliffs overlooking the bay, admiring the monster surf, when they first noticed it. Huge spray coming out of a blowhole none of them had ever seen before. It clearly had a long tunnel, starting down in the bay and running all the way up through the rock to its exit farther out on the point, and no one had noticed it before because it was inactive in smaller water. It took seismically generated waves to finally send water all the way up and out the top, and Bro and company were understandably excited by the discovery. They wandered out to take a closer look.
Now understand, these were experienced island people. They knew about blowholes. They understood how strong and deadly water that only reaches up to your ankles can be. But somehow, in spite of keeping what they thought was a safe distance, the wash coming out of the hole suddenly snaked across the cliff, wrapped around Bro’s feet, whipped them out from under him, and sucked him struggling and clawing back to the mouth of the hole, over the edge, and down inside it. Just like that. Blink of an eye.
He had just enough time before going under to grab a lungful of air and, because he was a surfer and accustomed to spending long periods of time held under by powerful waves, his lungs could hold a lot. He began the descent and traveled deeper and deeper down the wormhole, with no idea where it would come out or even if it would remain large enough to allow his passage all the way through. What he did know was a long, narrow, hurtling slide down through water, rock, and darkness, with a steadily growing pressure in his chest as his air started to run out.
Finally, as he was beginning to think he might not make it, he felt himself whoosh out the bottom of the tunnel into open water. He immediately struck for the surface and when he broke into open air, found he was so far out in the bay he was actually past the surf line.
Needless to say, Bro’s girlfriend and friend were freaking out back on the cliff, and they failed to spot him where he came up because they were looking closer to shore. But eventually someone sighted him and called the Coast Guard who quickly launched a rescue. I’m delighted to tell you that my brother survived to tell the tale. Because he was a strong swimmer, and because he didn’t lose his head, and because our Aumakua were protecting him, and because…well…it just wasn’t his day to die.
Working with hospice is about working with those who die slowly, navigating the process as it gradually unfolds, step by step, over a period of time. Sudden death is different. When a person dies abruptly the laws that govern the dying process are moving so fast that it becomes impossible to see the underlying physiological sequence in action. It’s still taking place mind you. Every physical body has to go through a shutting down process on it’s way to death. But while a wasting disease takes us through those stages one at a time, sudden death strikes every point along the sequence simultaneously.
Why is this important? Because even though these stages of the dying process are the only part we have any control over, we leverage this control into an illusion that we actually have some power over death itself. (We can save lives! We can!!) But when a sudden death comes along and collapses the various stages into a singular, catastrophic event which is beyond our ability to influence, then our illusion of control over death is instantly vaporized.
Poof.
The shock of this is absolutely terrifying. As a people we are very, very, committed to both our denial of death and our illusion of power over it. Pretending like we can somehow conquer it by throwing billions and trillions of dollars into ever-escalating research, treatment, surgeries, medical insurance, regulations, legislation, screenings, hospitals, and drugs has become one of…if not the…central tenet of our modern society. The pursuit of this illusion has actually now taken over the bulk of our economy. It’s consuming more and more of the healthy parts of our individual lives. It’s really, truly massive.
Which is, of course, what makes those moments when the illusion shatters so horrifying.
While medical/technological advances are granting us a greater level of confidence and control than we’ve ever known before, that control is not…and never has been…over death. It’s over time. Yet we constantly forget this.
What I’m trying to say here is that dying is negotiable, but death is destiny. When it’s time to die, it’s just time, whether it’s at the end of a long illness or on the lip of a blowhole. I realize that saying something like this sounds superstitious in a society that prizes rational thinking, analysis, and control as much as ours does, but only as long as we’re speaking in today’s relatively young scientific language. In other, older languages this understanding of death as destiny is common.
Try talking to soldiers who’ve seen active duty on the battlefield, or emergency room personnel working long shifts in busy, urban hospitals, or 8,000 meter mountain climbers who’ve seen a lot of companions die climbing, or morticians, or clergy who work with the bereaved, or anyone else who’s been around it a lot and gained an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of sudden death. They’ll say pretty much the same thing I am; while devastating to watch, the experience also grants one an expanded perspective of reality, an aching grasp of the limits of life, and a deeper understanding of mystery, than all the long, hallowed hallways of science strung together will ever be able to deliver.
To close, here’s an outrageous video from Neptune Surfing. It was evidently taken at Waimea Bay in 2009 during a storm surge that was creating more monster waves. Yeah, baby.
It talks about a disturbing possibility of abuse by some for-profit national hospice chains in their attempts to maximize profits at the expense of dying patients. I don’t have time to comment on this right now (since I just finished my last post) but suffice it to say I’m glad this is being investigated. Big Money realized there was a profit bonanza coming in end-of-life care back in the early 2000’s and positioned themselves by snapping up all the small hospices they could buy. I felt deeply uneasy at the time because I worried they might start “streamlining” in order to maximize profits.
While things are never as simple as they appear, this seems to bear out at least some of my fears. I hope this doesn’t turn anyone away from seeking hospice care.
One possible answer to the problem is a move to “concurrent care” where a person can receive both curative treatment and end-of-life care simultaneously. I realize that might seem contradictory, but in two studies done by Aetna insurance where terminally ill patients were allowed both ongoing treatment and palliative and hospice care, it turned out access to both programs actually cut emergency room visits by half, and hospital and ICU visits by two thirds. Overall costs dropped by almost 25%. And most importantly, the people in the studies reported much higher levels of satisfaction with their care.
Photo from the award-winning photographic documentary Grace Before Dying
What transformed the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the most violent prisons in the South, into “…one of the least violent maximum security institutions in the United States”?
A hospice program.
If you get a chance, check out this website that Linda over at What Comes Next? turned me onto. It’s called Grace Before Dying and is inspiring (which is saying a lot with all the turbulence in the world right now) and is about the photographic documentary by Lori Waselchuk that chronicles the prisoner-run hospice program at Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana’s maximum-security prison. Evidently, a life sentence in Angola means both life and death. 85% of the roughly 5100 inmates die there and, up until the hospice program was started in 1998, that meant dying alone in the prison hospital. But now they have a hospice ward where the terminally ill inmates are transferred, and once there the dying are tended almost entirely by inmate volunteers who are serving life sentences themselves.
It seems to be this most basic act of simple humanity that’s transforming the prison population…which comes as no surprise to me. Tending the dying in hospice transformed me, too. It transforms everyone who does it. From the website:
“The hospice volunteers’ efforts to create a tone of reverence for the dying and the dead have touched the entire prison population.”
Frankly, the prison system we’ve set up in this country has always puzzled me. I’ve never been able to figure out just what, exactly, we’re trying to accomplish. The focus on isolation and torture (because really, I don’t think you can call what happens in these hell-holes simple punishment) and then release for godsakes, strikes me as short-sighted. It’s like capturing a dog doing damage near a downtown cafe, locking it up in a small cage, systematically brutalizing it for five years, then taking it back to the same sidewalk cafe, telling it to behave, and turning it loose again.
What do we expect? Lassie?
In this country, we’ve coupled justice with revenge and their offspring have been multiplying for years now. Our prison populations have swelled to the point where they’re wreaking havoc with both our public safety and economic stability, (look at what California’s currently dealing with.) Doesn’t it seem like now might be a good time to consider trying something different?
Well, some prisons are. There’s a growing trend to team with animal shelters, allowing inmates to help care for and train abandoned and/or abused dogs. Another program in Mississippi called PACT partners inmates with abused horses. Like hospices in Angola and other prisons, these programs structure relationships for the inmates that cultivate bonding, vulnerability, kindness, responsibility, and empathy, all qualities that naturally deepen our innate humanity.
Like tends to beget like. Cruelty begets cruelty and inhumanity begets inhumanity. If we really want to create a better, safer, kinder world, then we should probably be trying to foster everyone’s humanity, not destroy it. By instituting a hospice program, the prisoners at Angola have been given the opportunity to foster theirs.
Dying is generally regarded as the ultimate destructive force…and it is. I would never argue with that. But what most people don’t understand (yet) is that it also has a profound ability to heal. Everyone acknowledges that a “good death” is important for the person who’s actually dying but it goes much farther than that; a good death is also critical for the well-being of those left behind. A bad death creates scars, the tentacles of which usually spread far and deep through the lives of survivors, and it embeds a terror of the future that eventually infects everything. Everything.
A good death, on the other hand, tends to nourish our compassion, deepen our humanity, expand our understanding of life, and lift us out of that underlying sense of loneliness and individual isolation that defines so much of modern life; all things that ultimately serve to ease this fear of the future rather than aggravate it.
To close I’d like to leave you with this last quote from the website:
“The hospice volunteers must go through a difficult process to bury their own regrets and fears, and unearth their capacity to love. Grace Before Dying looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish.”
Okay. As a wild thing myself, I’m an unreserved, unabashed lover of the natural world. Always have been. Since my earliest memories (and even before that according to my mother) I’ve gone to the trees, the rocks, and the waters…the storms and the stars…whenever I was confused or unraveling. I’m not sure why exactly. It’s just where I felt better.
My relationship with the human world, however, has been more complicated. Initially, I was pretty enthusiastic about us. But then hard things happened and I went through a middle phase, struggling with some disillusionment and bitterness before finally, during the hospice years, finding my way back to a vision of people that’s good.
Again…I have so much to be grateful for, to the dying who let me be with them.
Then this morning, I watched a trailer for BBC One Human Planet(I know, it’s been out forever and you’ve probably seen it already but still, wow. I mean really, wow…) and visually it seemed to pull together the love I now hold for both worlds in one beautiful, jaw-dropping, mosaic of cinematography.
Which is a powerful…not to mention valuable…thing to do. I don’t think I’m the only one that views the human and natural worlds as distinct. First, the industrial age and next, the technological/information one have been terrific for shielding us from the cosmic brunt of natural forces, but in the process they’ve separated us from them, too.
Modern homes are now designed to cut us off as much as possible from fluctuations in just about everything–temperature, wind, light, smells, noise, wildlife, microbes, radiation, crime, neighbors–while our cars strive to prevent us from feeling like we’re even touching the ground. Somewhere along the line we all agreed on what was the safest, most comfortable environment, and then we built it into everywhere we were likely to spend time; homes, office buildings, vehicles, planes, ships, hotels, malls, banks, airports, restaurants so that, if we wanted to, we could now live sans contact with most of the natural world, most of the time. And some people do. Did you know that roughly 80% of people in the U.S. have never seen the Milky Way?
We’ve come so far and so much of its good. But even so, sometimes I feel like I’m living in a pillow. It’s wonderful and amazing and safe, for sure, but it also feels like I can’t get quite enough air.
This trailer captures glimpses of some of the non-pillow people all over the world–wild people still living in wild places. The ones who haven’t been separated into our modern, second world yet. They’re still creating a lot of their miracles without technology…and I forgot how inspiring and amazing those kinds of miracles are, too. With as hard as their lives must be in some ways, I’ll bet at least they have plenty of air to breathe, every day. I wish there was some way to weave these two worlds together again. It’s hard always feeling like I have to make a choice.
The video is 3:20 minutes long but you’d never know it. And please…you have to watch it full screen. (In the name of all that’s good and right, you have to.) For those who don’t know what that means, look down in the bottom right hand corner of the video box below and click the four arrows pointing in different directions. The video box will expand to fill your entire computer screen. Then just buckle your seat belt, click play, and you’re good to go. Oh…and if you want to see the actual series, I found the DVDs on Netflix. I imagine they might be available other places as well.
And finally…on this blog devoted to talking about dying…here’s a story of something that didn’t die. This big, beautiful girl came very close but was ultimately saved from drowning by a handful of people (who took a huge risk in doing so I might add.)
On Valentine’s Day earlier this year in the Sea of Cortes down in Mexico, Michael Fishbach was in a small boat with his family and a couple of friends when they came upon a young, humpback whale severely entangled in fisherman’s netting. At first she appeared to be dead. But then they saw her exhale and realized she was exhausted and frightened but still alive. Her tail was weighted down about fifteen feet by all the fishing gear, both pectoral fins were pinned to her sides, and the net went up over her back forward of the dorsal fin. I can only imagine the thrashing and rolling she must have initially executed in her attempts to get clear of the net that led to so severe an entanglement, or the terror she must have experienced as it tightened around her.
At this point they had to decide whether they were going to watch helplessly as she slowly drowned or try and help her. Amazingly, as you’ll see in the video, Michael slipped on his snorkel, grabbed the one small knife they had in the boat, and swam slowly over to where she was floating to assess the situation.
At this point in the video I heard a weighty, entangling, and suffocating voice in my own head begin it’s droning about how stupid and dangerous it was for him to even try, but then the girl with wild hair inside me who adores the sea slipped past and ran to the edge of the boat, pumping her hand in the air and cheering Michael on.
Because sometimes safety just isn’t the most important thing.
What follows over the next few hours is a series of courageous attempts and lucky accidents that lead to the saving of a gigantic, and unspeakably precious, young life. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, things that would have made the situation far more tragic than it already was. But surprisingly, none of those things happened which confirms yet again what my grey and grizzled father–career warrior, survivor of three major wars, and witness to countless weird and miraculous events on the battlefield–has always told me:
Dia, if it’s your time to die then it’s your time to die, and nothing can save you. But if it’s not your time to die then it’s just not, and nothing…nothing…can kill you.
Clearly, it wasn’t anybody’s time to die in the Sea of Cortez last Valentine’s Day.
Here’s the video, Saving Valentina, if you get the chance.
John Grey, a thoughtful and entertaining blogger/smallholder over at Going Gently, mentioned in a recent post that “going light” is a Welsh phrase for the accelerated wasting process that happens during the last days and hours of dying. During this time it often looks like they’re starting to disappear right before your eyes.
The phrase really struck me, not just because it’s the loveliest way of describing this transition I’ve ever heard, but because it’s also the most accurate. That’s exactly what the rapid changes look and feel like with both the body and spirit of someone who’s dying.
The New York Times ran a great opinion article by Dudley Clendinen last Sunday called The Good Short Life. Great title. It’s about just what it sounds like.
Mr. Clendinen has A.L.S., the best known of the motor neuron diseases which are generally held to be one of the most difficult ways to die. It involves a gradual shutting down of the involuntary nervous system which, when left to its own devices, leads to a very, very slow suffocation. The disease takes years to play out and is beyond horrible.
In the article he talks freely, openly, and gracefully about the good and bad involved with dying…and I love him for it. He’s refusing to disappear into that cloud of gray mist where we so often relegate our dying–that place where we don’t have to see them or deal with them or think about what they’re going through. Instead he’s speaking up (or writing up in this case), doing his part to maintain a normal, ongoing, comfortable chat about the whole thing. About dying, that one other universal reality besides being born and drawing breath that we all have in common.
The article is two pages and worth a read.
He broaches a number of controversial topics including the overwhelming costs involved with long term medical care for a condition such as his and the moral question of who’s going to pay for those costs (…the respirator and the staff and support system necessary to maintain me will easily cost half a million dollars a year. Whose half a million, I don’t know…) He also talks about the choice he’ll have to make about when he’ll die because that’s something those with a motor neuron disease always face; when to fight it, when to manage it, and finally how to either surrender or escape it, whether through the blessing of pneumonia or other infectious disease or a method more proactive.
Of course these are extremely loaded subjects to address, ones which tend to invoke some very strong emotions in people, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still need to talk about them. Our medical system has advanced to the point where most of us are eventually going to have to face the same kind of choice as Mr. Clendinen. A lot of people don’t understand this yet but most of us won’t just die anymore. Medical advances have made it possible to sustain the barest physical functioning for indefinite lengths of time, usually far, far longer than anyone desires. This means that sooner or later someone has to actively, consciously decide that we’re going to die. Either we decide to forgo further treatments, our loved ones decide to withdraw life sustaining measures, or somebody else decides they’re not going to pay for it or provide us care anymore.
This is the darker underbelly–the turbulent, terrifying, whitewater rapids–we’ve created with our brilliant, modern, technological capabilities. For better or worse, these are the kinds of choices that now go with the territory and we are all going to have to learn how to navigate them. There’s no such thing as a gift–however miraculous, however blessed–that isn’t also accompanied by a burden of responsibility. In this case we now need to learn how to bear the burden of miraculous choices.
Not everyone will agree with the particular choices Mr. Clarinden eventually makes–which is fine, everyone doesn’t have to–but we can all benefit from studying the way he’s willing to talk about them. Each of us, when faced with the unique circumstances of our own dying time, is going to have equally difficult choices to make, and simply knowing how to talk about them with our doctors and loved ones will make them far easier for everyone to navigate.
The Odd and Unmentionable 
