Fall is cold in Portland. Cold in a sorrowful, penetrating way. And my decision to spend three days in the close company of a dying woman is made to seem all the bleaker what with the powdery gun metal gray of midmorning downtown. I am standing naked in my brightly painted and meticulously organized apartment, indecisively staring into the gaping mouth of my open closet. How does one dress to meet with death? Commencing with the dispassionate announcement of my morning alarm, I contemplate one question: why did I agree to do this?
Marco’s mother is dying. And as a friend of both Marco and his waning parent, I am obliged to assist her in a sort of last wish: transcribe her handwritten book into type.
I leave my home with little more than my journal and a blank expression. I feel in all ways unremarkable. This service to Marco’s mother will give me a sense of temporary purpose, I hear my own voice trudging through my mind with pallid encouragements. Driving out of the city I do not turn on the stereo. I cannot be interrupted. I am pondering.
Pondering car accidents, knifings, floods, poisonings, and suffocation at 35,000 feet. I do not want any of those things to happen to me. I seize a bit at the thought of bearing some sort of hurting until I finally passed away and what that change would be like. Perhaps all of the discomfort would just stop abruptly and I would be left floating without a body in the middle of inky, intangible blackness.
I arrive at Marco’s mother’s apartment several miles outside of downtown. Her name is Megan. She is dying. Megan is dying. From cancer. It’s so typical. So anticipated. The common nature of the ailment almost makes it harder not to fear. It seems so well known and yet indomitable.
I lightly knock on the door. Megan’s in-home caretaker lets me in, ushering me to her bedside. I say hello in a staid, almost silent manner, like an actor waiting for direction.
I have never contemplated just how I might feel when I get close enough to touch someone who’s dying. Will they be cold? Will they be angry? Will I get some kind of infection? The truth I realize more and more every day is that for as much as I live in a time that pretends to know death, I really only ever hear or discuss the events that lead to and/or cause death, as opposed to the morbid concept of a body losing life. Becoming exanimate. Like toothpaste being squeezed from all sides at once. Or a sponge being wrung out.
Megan is calm. Meditative and determined she speaks softly and makes no effort at disguising her weakness. Albeit she still wears her dentures. I feel permeable sitting next to her frailty. The awareness of my own life’s imminent expiration fills me.
It’s the second day. Megan seems to be quite empty. But it appears as if all she’s really lost is some of the water that makes up her physical body. Her ruminations and intimations seem to come out of her mouth like majestic lions and cunning tigers slinking out of a dark stone cave. Her cold, unresponsive exterior belies a strong, radiant product. Her eyes are all stone and lassitude. And yet she’s not miserable. She’s irreversibly moving towards death and she is the essence of peace. I glance at her from my vantage point at the desk next to her pillow-garnished hospital bed. She looks so tiny amidst the plush mounds of cotton and down. But she feels so large, so complete. Her handwritten pages lay in front of me on the desktop. This, her final work, is a collection of learnings, teachings, and inspirations; her legend; her immortality. As I type page after page of tidy scrawl I am again pondering.
Pondering where Megan’s consciousness will go after she dies, whether or not there will be consciousness after death, and why I am so terrified of not knowing.
Many depictions of death feature the notion as some sort of pain, or at least painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. Adding to that fear is the ambiguity surrounding not just the cause of death but also its effect. What does death do? Where does it put the person who dies? When considering such questions I often feel the impulse to put them out of my head, to let them remain unanswered. Further still I must ask myself what I would do with the answers if I happened upon them? It stands to reason that I would let myself be consumed by hubris. Just look at the Greek gods. Life becomes a thing of sport. A bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager. Perhaps death’s doom and mystery are their own koans ensuring the fidelity of my humility.
Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp about my wary review of death. Still no definitive conclusions. Only more questions. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Is she relieved? Is she happy? Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see the that the enemy is not the question of death, rather it is the demand for an answer; the sense of entitlement to controlling the ephemeral.
With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television” I see that we’ve been given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and bedside heartbreak provide the communal imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamor, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. And with a dark rain cloud on the horizon of a shallow paradise, it’s anyone’s guess how much rain it will take to drown us all.
Instead we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. Religions and philosophies produce plenty of theories (guesses) concerning where the door of death may lead but at the end of the day we’re left only with the question: what happens when we die? And I ask in return: who can know? The beauty of this mystery is that it is universal. Everyone and everything will eventually die. It is entropy at its best. And in the same way that scarcity breeds value, we may all gain an increased level of worth in our finiteness, in our mortality, in our beautiful walk toward the end.
It is nearly two weeks since my first visit. Megan slips into a coma in the early winds of a Saturday morning. The book is finished. I am at home. And death is still an absolute. By the next day Megan will alight from her perch in the body I recognize and I will be left to envy her having learned the answer to the question of death; left to walk my own path toward that door; left to ponder.
