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From here on in we are trading comfort for shelter. Deep news tends to arrive with dismay. The price of breaking a trance is high.
This is the one initiation that we will all face, regardless of gobbling ayahuasca in the amazon, regardless of whether we grow green-tongued and sweat-browed from wheat grass smoothies and palates. It’s coming.
You need witnesses for wonder. Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself because they take up the whole sky, or because they happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because you thought you knew them already. Wonder takes a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown.
Seeing the end of your life is the birth of your ability to love being alive. It is the cradle of your love of life.
Even if your experience in these matters is not mine, and you know people who have exercised their right to vote on this counterintuitive thing, and have made it known to you that, yes, it’s true, they want some kind of good death, the hard and fast supplementary question is still there, looming, waiting: How can you get the good death that you want for yourself?
“Quick” is the midwife of “good” when it comes to dying in the staggering first years of our twenty-first century in dominant culture North America. The best death is not the one that hurts the least, but the one that has the least time to torment, to pain, to hurt, to last.
One of the things you’ll see, with respect, is that those eyes have seen the collapse, the withering, the end of a lot of things. They’ve seen the end of their old idea of a good time, the end of their spunk and their give-a-shit, and the end of their plans for what they would do with it if they had it, and the end of their vitality and of most of what they thought was vital. They’ve seen a lot of death of all kinds. They’ve seen the entire generation of their grandparents long ago go to ground, all of their parents, aunts, and uncles, all the people they were born to who welcomed them into
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What most people are bargaining for will not come to pass, and though it was never possible and so will never be one of their many losses, still it will seem like the end of their dignity, the final unkindness, the least of their entitlements or pleas come to naught.
The Uncertainty Principle shows us that “the thing itself” isn’t out there waiting to be found. It is changed by our search for it. It is changed by our desire to find it. It is changed by us being there at all.
Objectivity is the Enlightenment’s way of trying to contend with this uncertainty principle. The idea is that the true nature of a thing is very available to you, provided that you obviate yourself to the point when you are purely receptive, when you are a nonevent in the process of observing: You get out of the way, and now you are capable of objectivity.
In the helping professions this is called Therapeutic Neutrality, where you as the counselor manage and minimize your own feelings to the point where they are no longer a part of the process, or at best a parallel process.
What you get for your trouble, though, is your own life turning into an unworthy or troublesome opponent of your work as a helping person, and that’s what you see when you go looking objectively. In less-than-elaborately-skilled hands this continually turns into a therapeutic mandate or mantra or command...
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If you were born after the Victorian science/religion schism that bedeviled Western thought, worship, and jurisprudence well into the twentieth century, and your way of seeing the natural world has a “survival of the fittest” hue to it, then it will probably happen that every time you are in the bush you will feel a little bit at risk, as if the bush is somehow hankering after your blood, as if the only way you will survive that kind of exposure is to exert your muscle power and your connivance over the rocks, trees, insects, and animals you might come across. You’ll feel unfit, in other
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The story about the wild being red in tooth and claw is a story we bring to the bush, not one we find there. “Survival of the fittest” characterizes us, not the bush. It is a story that lives unvanquished in our eye, so much so that we have no capacity to see anything that we haven’t brought with us. That is all that we will see.
In other words, the wild hides from people who bring their fear to it. There is the Uncertainty Principle at work. We see mostly what we have done to the bush, because we have changed it by going there in the way that we do. We have changed it by seeing it in the way that we do.
that an indigenous understanding has the capacity to see every important thing in the world, and the world itself, much differently than we do.
Quality of Life is the pitch of pitches that has your well-being as its only concern. In a land where lifestyle is lord of the manor, Quality of Life is where you go to pray. It’s the stone you kiss, the pocketed coin you rub, the chant you chant, the rosary you finger, the selfless self of your self-interest, and the least on a long list of your entitlements.
He had become a North American in this, where the make or break point for Quality of Life is so often found in the bathroom.
Before anyone dismisses this as ludicrous, small-minded, or Victorian, consider: Our culture places enormous emphasis on success in toilet training in our early years. There are many cultures in the world where children have little or no experience with the trauma of the porcelain throne, but here the toilet is ubiquitous, and so for us the symbolic project that carries so much the nuance of autonomy, control, and mastery is absorbed into how we manage the vision of the void beneath us.
When our last weeks are lived partly according to the dilemma of who wipes whom, the sense of regression, the loss of basic dignity, and a feeling a being utterly without ...
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The belief that somehow we are in control of our lives as long we agree with how they are going along is the profoundest of illusions, just as is the belief that things go haywire because we are no longer controlling our lives. We are addicted to the illusion that our particular way of being a culture is the natural victory of history, to the illusion that our material sophistication lends us a psychological, even spiritual, sophistication not enjoyed by less innovative cultures, and to the idea that we do and can and must be in control of this thing we call “our life.”
If the raft of your dignity is bound together by the frayed rope of things going as you believe they should, what of this kind of dignity is there left to conserve as the raft of your life plans begins to take on water?
As long as our shared understanding of Quality of Life is driven by unmodified demands for competence and mastery, and as long as our shared understanding of what dying does to us is a pageant of diminishment, dependency, and loss of dignity, then our work at the end of a person’s life will continue to be trying to forestall the end of that life.
We must know how it is for that man or woman to sit in the chair in the office that countless other people have sat in and have someone take away whatever is left of their frail feeling of well-being with the news that this is not curable, and how it is for them to be rushed then into a technical and encouraging discussion of how it might be operable and treatable, before the news that it is not curable has even cooled enough to take some kind of shape inside them, before it has turned from news into knowledge and from test results into the rest of their life.
But who among us believes with the same certainty and conviction that a dead person needs to be loved by living people in order to be a healthy, vital dead person? Who among us believes that the well-being of the dead, whatever that might be or whatever form that might take, requires the active participation of the living to initiate or maintain it?
There is an eerie resemblance between our way of knowing the Divine and our way of knowing the dead.
Most people who acknowledge a belief in God would not likely make a case that God’s well-being depends on their belief or obedience. It just doesn’t sound Godly.
And this is equally true of our Dead: They need nothing from us to be themselves—if there are such things as the Dead. Who are the Dead to us? The Dead are gone. That is what they are. What really binds them in the horizontal imagination of contemporary people is that both of them, God and the dead, are gone. They meet Somewhere Else, not here, not now, not among us.
Dying people often said to me, mournfully, about nothing in particular: “I don’t know what to do.” But a better way of saying what they meant with this lament is: “Something is mostly coming, and it is mostly here too, elbowing everything else out of the way. I don’t know which way to face.”
In the early days of diagnosis a dying person has as his or her new purpose in life to be “anywhere but here,” to know “anything but this,” to go after that fugitive running down the street called My Normal Life. But in the last days there is more often a feeling of “this, and this only.”
We would use our bowel control, the earliest deliberate exercise of dominion over some discreet aspect of our inner selves, as the place where we would plant the flag of our dignity. And we do. We would swear off dying for as long as humanly possible, and a little longer, and employ every drug and medical procedure in the name of “less death for the dying.” And we do.
This is what would happen to dying people in a place addicted to competence, that dying would be another exercise in not letting them see you sweat. And, mostly, it is. They have a drug for that too.
