On dying

I’m on speaker phone right now with my father’s hospital room. I am his health proxy. My mother is there, a palliative care nurse practitioner and my dad, paralyzed and broken. I have just had to deliver the news that despite the fact he was supposed to be discharged today to an acute rehabilitation centre he’d already been to, he will actually not get discharged, likely not get better. He is decompensating, shutting down, dying, I had to tell him. Ten years ago he would’ve already been dead but medicine has advanced. It has advanced for the sake of advancement in many areas, not for the sake of the patient. My father entered the “healthcare” system in September and he hasn’t been home since. While there were major mistakes made in his care at multiple points, this isn’t even a post complaining about the trauma he’s suffered because of malpractice. Instead it’s a post to question whether our desire for more, for progress, for longevity, is serving us at all as a species. 

This is not an agist post suggesting people of a certain age are no longer worth maintaining. In many ways, my father has only recently become my father and I am not in a rush to lose him. But, I am a person who looks at big picture things with a clarity that is often clouded by personal emotions for others. I will make an identity change based on logic without it being hard. I gave up drinking because it became clear to me that was the only sure way to avoid a fate like my father’s at the time the decision was made. I have not for one second been tempted to drink because that logic has not for one second lessened its hold on me or ceased to be true. My decision making process is mostly unemotional and based on observed evidence, not perceived assumptions. Except when I am losing my shit over the smallest change in expectations. Of course I see the irony of being both a highly controlled inner person when it comes to things within my power to change, and a frequent volatility shitshow when external situations are out of my hands. It is a spiky skillset that has always made me hard for others to understand and tolerate. It also apparently means I am the best person for the job of breaking bad news you’re dying when people need it delivered with logic and not emotion. The doctor on my last trip told me he’d hire me in a second for a this position I never wanted. 

What the last seven months have taught my logical brain is that our bodies will betray us eventually because they were never meant to last as long as we are making them last these days. We exist in contorted positions of labor until we will die in contorted positions of care, incapable of imagining an existence that is more about gaining acceptance of our limitations, not pushing past them. Seeing my father in various hospital and rehab settings over the last 2 seasons, we are now approaching our third, has made me long to see him outside these settings. But I have gained the knowledge that once you opt to enter the “healthcare” system at a certain age, there’s a good chance you won’t come out. My father’s initial procedure was an elective spinal implant to help with spinal stenosis pain. It has cost him almost everything.

There have been silver linings that I have needed to unearth, rinse, polish and shine so others could see them and bask in their light during this dark time. Relationships have been mende , truths revealed, and we have had time to think about what this has meant. That is a gift I know not all receive. This has not been sudden except in the fact his life was suddenly on hold, as has been mine in tandem, for months. My father beat cancer in 2020 so we have already almost lost him and kept him. We have grieved in advance before, hedging and weighing. I know the weight of not knowing what to hope for because everything is bad. And I know the relief of coming out the other side. I know doctors can do a lot. And I know they can ultimately do nothing. 

Dying is the last letting go. It is the ultimate test of our willingness to face fear and doubt because in death we cease, we cannot know. Instead, everyone else will continue to be in the know and we will just…not be. Actually thinking about this at great lengths is very difficult for many people, I understand. Some cannot even conceive it. But I can and I would never want to go through what my father has for the last 7 months. I would’ve wanted an out long ago. I have no capacity to have tubes and stillness and to eat things that taste like nothing or worse. I would only tolerate that for my children if they desired. I do not believe in heaven or hell or any form of afterlife beyond the energy we leave behind. Right now, I’m busy putting my energy into thousands of horacruxes I call art. It’s so far the only plan for dealing with death that has ever made any sense to me and ultimately the one I think is most human. I will live on in my objects the way people have for centuries before we gained the ability to extend our bodies. I will focus on my time here, not my time after, because I have seen that those who focus on the afterlife have a real knack for ignoring the horrors they are complicit in during this life. 

Image of his hospital bedding and me sitting in his usual spot at home, where I wish he could be again.