More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 18 - July 9, 2019
None of us seems psychologically able to cope with the thought of our own state of death, with the idea of a permanent unconsciousness in which there is neither void nor vacuum—in which there is simply nothing. It seems so different from the nothing that preceded life.
But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms.
Not death but disease is the real enemy, disease the malign force that requires confrontation.
And yet she had no disease. I’m sure some eager physician might have pointed out her chronic cardiac failure and added to it the probability that there was an element of atherosclerosis, and perhaps he would have prescribed some digitalis. To me, that would have been like dignifying the degeneration of her joints by calling it osteoarthritis. Of course it was arthritis, and of course she was in chronic failure, but only because her pinions and springs were giving way under the weight of the years. She had never been sick a day in her life.
The maximal rate attainable by a perfectly healthy heart falls by one beat every year, a figure so reliable that it can be determined by subtracting age from 220.
Her face was turned straight ahead. She seemed to be looking at something outside the window behind my chair instead of at the table in front of her. Her unseeing eyes had the dullness of oblivion; her face was expressionless. Even the most impassive of faces betrays something, but I knew at that instant of absolute blankness that I had lost my grandmother.
That day would surely have been a lot easier for me, and its memory less painful, had I but known that not only my own grandmother but indeed everyone becomes littler with death—when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life.
“Death may be due to a wide variety of diseases and disorders, but in every case the underlying physiological cause is a breakdown in the body’s oxygen cycle.”
There is no way to deter old age from its grim duty, but a life of accomplishment makes up in quality for what it cannot add in quantity.
Before the Preacher, Homer had written, “The race of men is like the race of leaves. As one generation flourishes, another decays.”
Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.
The fact that there is a limited right time to do the rewarding things in our lives is what creates the urgency to do them.
“The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.”
primitive unconscious, raging against the too-hasty departure of the spirit; no matter its preparation by even months of antecedent illness, the body often seems reluctant to agree to the divorce.
The appearance of a newly lifeless face cannot be mistaken for unconsciousness. Within a minute after the heart stops beating, the face begins to take on the unmistakable gray-white pallor of death; in an uncanny way, the features very soon appear corpselike, even to those who have never before seen a dead body. A man’s corpse looks as though his essence has left him, and it has. He is flat and toneless, no longer inflated by the vital spirit the Greeks called pneuma. The vibrant fullness is gone; he is “stripped for the last voyage.”
No matter the degree to which a man thinks he has convinced himself that the process of dying is not to be dreaded, he will yet approach his final illness with dread.
I will depart, not through fear of the pain itself, but because it prevents all for which I would live.
Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it. At such an instant, it seems as though no other day will ever attain the impossible splendor of this one. Already, I feel a nostalgia for today even as I live it.
Those of us left behind search for dignity in order not to think ill of ourselves. We try to atone for our dying friend’s inability to achieve a measure of dignity, perhaps by forcing it on him. It’s our one possible victory over the awful process of this kind of death.
What you’re left with at the end is a situation that makes no one happy. The fact is that you’ve lost someone. There’s no way to feel good about it.
To this day, she remembers his exact words: “Perhaps one of the best Christmases I ever had.” And then he added, “You know, Carolyn, you have to live before you die.”
The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
When my time comes, I will seek hope in the knowledge that insofar as possible I will not be allowed to suffer or be subjected to needless attempts to maintain life; I will seek it in the certainty that I will not be abandoned to die alone; I am seeking it now, in the way I try to live my life, so that those who value what I am will have profited by my time on earth and be left with comforting recollections of what we have meant to one another.
Sometimes I think I have had far more than my share of both, but that impression probably stems from the inclination we all share, which makes each of us see our own existence as a heightened example of universal experience—a life that is somehow larger than life, and felt more deeply.
Ars moriendi is ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living.
The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them.
