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.