You Are Going to Die

I'm finishing up the course in Lifespan Development I'm taking at City College of San Francisco. A study of the human lifespan, it chronicles the physical, social and psychological changes we go through at particular stages in life, beginning at birth and ending, inevitably, at death.

In reading the last chapter in the prescribed textbook Understanding Human Development, a rarely-thought of memory was triggered by the following lines:

"Care of the terminally ill has generally become more humane... Those who are terminally ill often are given some measure of autonomy. Having a say in how much pain medication or sedatives they receive, for example, can give patients who are dying a sense that they still control some aspect of their lives."

That a dying person might feel some comfort in still 'being in control' made me think of my grandmother, who died in 1993 (even my typing that year feels foreign and far away) when I was ten. She seemed to surrender herself to my mum and aunt, and she surrendered within herself. I recall reading a diary of hers after she passed. The entry, composed the year before her death, when she was losing weight and lucidity thanks to the morphine was dated '1943'. She had lost herself to memories past. In 1943, she would have been twenty years old.

She lived out her final days during the Australian bushfire season of 1993, when blazing hot fires burned down homes along the eastern seaboard, and you felt their searing heat carried in the midday breeze. It was during those days when it wasn't uncommon for the mercury to hit 110 degrees that we would walk along the main road to her hospice, air-conditioned cars whizzing by on the hot, black asphalt, the sun reminding us it was a distant cousin of the earthly fires that raged near us. During one of those visits, I affectionately patted her on her back causing her to to double over in pain and then vomit. I was confounded and devastated.

While most people in Western nations today die in hospitals, surrounded by medical staff and clear tubes and beeping machines, our matriarch was brought home in the days leading up to her death. We lived in an apartment complex made of cream-colored bricks, the facade filled with brown metal balcony railings. If I picture it now, I can see its position on a main road in suburban Sydney. Mainly occupied by retirees, I lived with my two brothers, mother and her partner Alfred, in a two-bedroom apartment. It's hard to imagine that it still exists, it's such a world away from my current being. 

When she died, I was in my apartment with my brother and Alfred. Though child, basic human conditioning told me she was about to die. My aunt Sue and mum were at her apartment, whose balcony I could see if I went onto ours. The phone rang, and I answered it. Sue told me gently "Your granny's gone." Jai or Alfred asked me who it was, and I told them "It was Aunty Sue, calling to say that Grandma's dead", and I ran into my room feeling the tears come from my stomach up to my chest and about to explode. It was December 31st, 1993.

In mine and my brother Jai's shared room, we had two wardrobes, painted black and made of cheap, compressed sawdust. We didn't have much money, but perhaps black looked sleek and expensive to a little kid. The wardrobes gradually fell apart: First the door hinge came loose, then the front of the drawers came unstuck, and they couldn't be put back onto their railings. I went to a small space between my cheap black wardrobe and the wall, and cried. Even though I wanted to hide my tears, I remember thinking how odd it was that it came easily, because before then I had never thought about death and sadness and grieving. Alfred took me and Jai to her flat, and I remember crying openly and freely, while the hospice-provided nurse made sympathetic faces at me. I don't know what they did with her body then. I vaguely remember the funeral; I wore a handkerchief in my front pocket because "granny would have liked it", I remember telling my mum.  In his essay for the New York Times (in honor of which I have entitled my own blog post), Tim Kreider writes that beneath all his anxiety around his mother's death he harbored an irrational, kid-like fear, centering around the question who's going to take care of me now? Now, as I think about my mother's mother dying, I wonder if she felt like a grown-up? My partner Topher has said that when his parents are dead, he'll have the stark realization that he's an adult, with all the worldly responsibilities you must shoulder alone. 

So as I read on about death and dying, I've been compelled to email my own mother, and ask her about how she dealt with the death of hers. Life has kept my direct experience with death quite low; the next one might appear in painful, protracted stages, giving me time to "prepare"; or suddenly and unexpectedly, its aftermath reeking of life's whimsical chance. Indeed, it may be my own, whereby I shall have at least had the foresight to understand that it's going to happen to me. 

Maine

Maine, to me, had always been a far-flung eastern state, part of that patchwork of rural North America that included the vast and frigid Quebec, wooded and rural New Hampshire, and liberal and lesbian Vermont.

Therefore, when I had the opportunity to not only spend a week there, but spend it in a beautiful home, set on a hundred fairly undeveloped acres on the Atlantic Coast, I needed no convincing. (Bearing in mind that at the time, I was still on vacation in Caribbean Mexico. Planning a vacation while on a current one: Priceless).

After a red eyes and red-eyed, we arrived at the Portland, Maine, international airport, and were subsequently picked up by Jo, his girlfriend Anne, and a car full of organic food from their farm on the outskirts of Providence, for the two-hour drive north to Penobscot County.

The estate was under the cover of darkness, which can add to the excitement of waking up- what would my surroundings look like in the morning? I remember the first time this occurred, with one of the world's natural wonders, the (Canadian) Rockies. Arriving by shuttle bus into the small town of Banff, Alberta, the naive 19-year-old that I was wondered what the white solid puffs were in the sky. Passing them off as low clouds (perhaps adding to my wonderment and awe of the following morning), I let my curiosity be for the night. Rising in the morning, I was naively surprised and floored by the distant yet intricate, towering but inviting range of mountains that encircled what was my home for the next three months. These morning revelations can only be afforded in nature; the city's omnipresent luminescence illuminates everything to such an extent that we immediately and gradually know what surrounds us.

Opening my eyes the following morning, I was confronted with the sight of the calm Atlantic- protected by Penobscott Bay, and all its little and large islands; deciduous trees, some bare, some red, some yellow, some still clinging to their leaves, in the last hopes of holding onto their heyday, like the party animal who won't accept that the night's over. On top of that, there was a palpable sense of ease, of relaxation, of the need to do ...nothing. There were no usual social or routine cues to get up and start the day- no bus route starting, no commuters walking by, no one else doing anything else. In short, no FOMO- "fear of missing out". The sense that whatever happened would be something you created, and no one was really doing anything else gave me the emancipation I needed to relax and not push myself to be anywhere else. Was this not the true meaning of a vacation? Moving, entirely and wholly, on one's own schedule? I think Maine helped me truly achieve that, if just for a week: living on our body clocks, rising when we wanted to open our eyes and sleeping when the ether of a full belly and contented heart overcame us, and we walked up the wooden staircase, to the landing with the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and went into one of the doors to pull the quilt over us and sleep until we wanted to, our alarm the lapping of the glassy ocean against the dock.