Lessons in Dying

I volunteer with a hospice in NYC. If you're not familiar with what hospice is, the simplest way to explain it is to say that it is the practical application of the preservation of one's dignity at the end of life. The point of hospice is to help people die better. What a great idea.

I've been visiting a really, really cool woman for a little over a year. We spend an hour each week together, in her home, where she has 24/7 hospice care, and I read her memoirs to her while she eats her dinner. She's 101 years old, and some days are better than others.

Because some days are better than others, we don't always have conversations. Instead, a lot of our time is filled with her words read aloud in my voice. What's amazing is that even though this woman, at 101, was a stranger until a year ago, many of her experiences, convictions, values, opinions and struggles are almost interchangeable with mine. She's given me a new perspective on things I already felt and she's validated many of the things I've thought but doubted. That's not what I was expecting when I signed up to volunteer. I'm not sure what I was expecting, actually, but this has been a very meaningful year.

Often, we read parts of her memoirs that match up with the current state of affairs in the world, or NYC, or my life personally. It feels very foretelling sometimes. Other times, we read parts over and over and over and over again, because she likes them and they're happy memories. She stopped writing her memoirs a few years after her husband died, and for the most part, she writes about herself as a strong, fiercely impassioned and intelligent woman who really liked to eat and be in nature and laugh. She often writes about her identity as a mother before anything else (although she was a published writer, teacher, and political activist)

She's in pretty serious decline now, and has been for about two or three weeks. She probably won't be able to bounce back and rally the way she has before, and that's really a bummer. The last time we hung out, we read an excerpt from a published story she wrote about the difficulties of caring for aging parents. She wrote it from the perspective of a sandwiched adult child--someone who had kids of her own but ailing parents as well--and it was poignant and funny. But what struck me was how she portrayed the thoughts of those aging parents, whose independence and memories of themselves were constantly being challenged. At the same time that she described how frustrating it was to have the burden of aging parents, what with failing faculties and physical problems, she was able to capture what those aging parents must have felt: how frustrated they were with the truth of their decline and with the changes they had to accept, while being painfully aware of the burdens they were to their families. I wonder how she views herself now. Does she still see herself as that woman she wrote about in her memoirs, or has that person faded away in her memory as a result of her physical decline? I probably won't be able to ask her, and that's also a bummer.

At the end of the story, I found a lone piece of her memoir clinging to the last page. It was dated from 1981 (she was 69) and it had one short type-written sentence on it: 

"I do not fear my own death. I fear some aspects of life and hope I can escape them. To die all at once (not too soon) would be a blessing." 

Agreed.

Experience, Abbreviated

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” 

― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Not-So Dickensian Hard Times

In hard times, people often look for support in dusty places. Some people go to church, or the library, or the bar.

Sometimes, hard times become difficult times. Sometimes, difficult times turn into terrible times. But almost always, terribly difficult hard times wear themselves out.

You know why?

Homeostasis.

You know why else?

The Law of Conservation and Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion.

Look: Everything always wants to get somewhere else. Everything can't stop moving and shifting and being--AND--Nothing can ever be destroyed. So: Things scientifically and empirically have to get better. Plants and animals and people and weather and sewage and everything all want to go somewhere else. Hard times are a chance to see homeostasis up close and personal.

Ugh. Science is so emotional sometimes.

Ways to Learn About People

1. By how they load the dishwasher

2. By how well they can walk down 7th Avenue with an umbrella

3. By their toilet paper roll replacement speed




More to come.

"Everybody is a Genius,

But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,

It will live its whole life believing it is stupid."


-Albert Einstein