death
You are viewing stuff tagged with death.
You are viewing stuff tagged with death.
Ira Glass’s Favorite Part of David Rakoff’s Last Writings - The Atlantic:
It was sadness that gripped him, far more than the fear
That, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year.
When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last”
Become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast.
A new, fierce attachment to all of this world
Now pierced him, it stabbed like a deity-hurled
Lightning bolt lancing him, sent from above,
Left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love.
He’d thought of himself as uniquely proficient
At seeing, but now that sense felt insufficient.
He wanted to grab, to possess, to devour
To eat with his eyes, how he needed that power.
Just finished giving Ess a bath and putting her to bed. Her adorable, beautiful pink cheeks were sweating a bit at the playground this evening, as it is in the 80s and quite humid. Not much wind. She ran and ran and we walked behind her, steering her out of harms way and keeping her from the things for which she wasn’t yet ready. Now, the sun is setting on this summer evening, one of the longest of the year, and I sit out on the patio, watching the sun set, next to our tomato plants, herbs, and kale. Everything around me is growing and alive and I love moments like this because I can actually convince myself that all the trouble of maintaining all of our stuff and our finances, all that stuff I trouble myself with isn’t what is important. This perspective above the forest doesn’t last long until I fall back to be blinded by the trees. Weekdays seem to be more foresty, weekends more elevated.
I’ve had this file, 20111229_fa_02.mp3 sitting on my desktop for a while. It’s Terry Gross’s final interview with Maurice Sendak, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bumble-Ardy. I knew that, in 2011, it made me think when I heard it, but I had forgotten what it was: a creative human, successful in his time, looking back with his hand lightly brushing old scars and lamenting the accretion of new cuts as he watches, unable to affect the marching-on of time:
I took a picture a little over ten years ago and I want you to take a look not at the foreground (hi, Steve and John!), but rather at the background. See that maple tree back there? That’s in my parent’s neighbor’s yard. The Nelson family: Ken, Reenie, and Ken Jr. (‘Kenny’ to me and Katy). Kenny and I grew up next-door neighbors, and his parents lived there next to mine since 1991. Almost a quarter of a century, now.
Today, I was sitting in the corner of our kitchen on top of the countertops, nestled into the area where the toaster oven is, while Mykala made apple-and-cheese sandwiches at the stove. I looked at the results of painting and decorating this home over the past six months, the way the early fall light warmed the walls, and the breeze of a perfectly clear 61° day cooled off the space. Esmé slept peacefully in her carrier, tired after a three mile walk with her mom and dad. There were no television or radio noises, just the gentle rush of breezes through screens and the staccato sounds of kids playing down the street. It was a perfect moment, the closeness of family, the esthetics of the surroundings, and the peace of a respite from the exigencies of daily, young-professional, indebted life.
I’ve largely discontinued my previous practice of linking to every little thing that I see on the internet that is interesting. I’ve done this because I find the most satisfying posts that I go back and read are the ones where I talk about how I feel and what’s going on, not the posts where I link to the latest article I’ve read. After all, one would rather know the person that all that reading and thinking produced, and not necessarily all the reading and thinking that person did.
There is a strong tendency, and I think it is a universal one, to want to say the right thing so that we may give solace in the form of a wise statement to a fellow suffering human. I find this compulsion to be particularly strong when confronting death; I always assumed that this was because death was this common endpoint we all share. This is of course true, but I don’t think that’s why we try for these wise phrases. I think, instead, it is the unknowable nature of death that makes us attempt to say something profound. You want to be that person who sighs, swirls their drink, and says the perfect thing. You want to be that for the sufferer, for yourself, but most importantly, for this reason: to be capable of making a wise statement about death would mean you have somehow put a logic fence around it. That you have it surrounded, reined-in, controlled. That you have somehow made the unknowable into something manageable. That the scintillating spotlight of your human brilliance illuminated the blackness, however briefly.
With my head in the sand of school, the world turned around me, and I kept my horizons narrow and focus tight. What I failed to realize was, well, mortality. You’re young and learning and the last thing you think of is your body—it does what you ask it to do, and it doesn’t sideline your plans with pain, inflexibility, or hospital stays.
I capital-h hate killing things. I hate killing small things, hate killing big things, hate killing things that are nuisances. I can sometimes make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes, but not always. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only refrain I can come up with if I have to get rid of a spider from our bedroom. And right there, I wrote ‘get rid of’, preferring the euphemism to the reality—I killed a little piece of life that never did anything to me.
I am worried and frustrated that all I do is write in platitudes, and that the quality of my prose has stagnated at “barely mediocre” for the past 5 years. When ideas are flowing from my brain to the keyboard most naturally, I still seem to lose their essence and elegance during editing. (Or, I lose them completely when the browser crashes. I’ve got to stop composing in the browser.) Although I have done nothing to fight against these concerns, I continue to write here, hoping that I can break through to the next level of writing quality. Focused practice seems to be the only way to advance, and the stagnation in my writing quality has correlated directly with what can only be described as years of literary dilettantism. I will keep practicing, starting here:
“I’m not doing so well.”
My 84-year-old patient was nearing the end of another denture fitting appointment, and he had just accidentally spilled all of his water on the operatory floor. “No no,” I said, “you’re doing just fine.” Trying to reassure him, I couldn’t think of anything better to say.
I last wrote about Derek Miller almost 4 years ago, remarking on his engaging writing and courageousness in facing stage 4 cancer. Yesterday, he died. Suddenly, that is his last post, put online by his family, in stark black and white.
The “Regrets of the Dying” have quite a bit of overlap. Let us learn from them now, early, in this lovely piece by Bronnie Ware:
The closest I ever came to dying was over two years ago. Like many teenage near-death experiences, this one was entirely unexpected and so quickly recovered from that it barely registered as a blip on my adolescent radar screen. And yet, looking back now, I can frame the event in my mind: an inch or two one way, a half second more slowly or quickly, and I would exist either in a vegetative state or as a memory of existence, whose tenure on earth would be marked in cold marble on a sunny hill near a church in Woodbury.
Cleaning out the email.
Alex,
I was dead but then I got better. Dying kind of sucked. It hurt a little and then it was just dark. You would think dark would be cool, but this dark just stayed and stayed and didn’t go away. I am really glad I got better, because being dead was really lame. I will be alive and in Amsterdam from tomorrow until mid-next week. When I get back, I will pack up and move back to Madison, so we NEED TO HANG OUT VERY VERY VERY VERY SOON, or else it won’t happen. I was hanging out with Yalda yesterday, and she mentioned that there was planning for a sort of end-of-the-summer type thing. She said I would need to come back on a weekend for this before classes start. Plan away, if you indeed are planning at all, and keep me informed. Talk to you later, have a good one.
Nils “Alive and Well” Espe
——- Original Message ——-
From: “Micek, Alexander J.” <*******@stthomas.edu>
Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 4:49 pm
Subject: RE: HEYYYYYNILS HAVE YOU DIED PLEASE WRITE BACK IF DEATH HAS NOT VISITED YOU.
SINCERELY,
CONCERNED IN WOODBURY——-Original Message——-
From: NILS ESPE [mailto:******@wisc.edu]
Sent: Sun 8/7/2005 8:35 PM
To: Micek, Alexander J.
Subject: HEYYYYY