The Good Death

My friend, the unreliable narrator, wrote today about wishing that human beings came with simple power off buttons for the end of life, that we might, “experience a painless natural uneventful cessation of function, dying without shame or stigma or elaborate mechnical/chemical ruses.” And of course I don’t know what was in her head, but I took it in the context of these portraits and stories in the Guardian’s website of people before and after their deaths, and her own experiences with someone she loved dying. And still the idea of the button made me want to shout “No, no, no! Of course not!”

And then I had to examine why I thought the idea of the cessation of life being so simple and clean bothers me. It’s not just that I fear it would be abused by people I deem obligated to continue living for whatever selfish reasons I have, or even that I fear death made easy would not leave room for second thoughts and doubts. Further down, I think I like the messiness, the way I liked it with my sons’ births. I think there’s some big psychic principle about us valuing things as we pay for them, and the fact that pregnancy and birth, dying and death are weighty and not to be done thoughtlessly, gives our lives these anchoring points. I like thinking about how the most annoying person out there still represents this act of love and sacrifice on the part of the mother who went through the indignities and discomforts of pregnancy and birth, and I can summon respect for that even when I am driven insane by a behavior. I like that we keep brushing up against reminders of how we are conceived, how we are born, how we must die, that, if we are paying any attention at all, can serve to render life sacred, even outside of the formal religious assertions of this.

Another thing. I believe birth and death are messy for a reason. That there can be a dignity, a grace, that slips into the space opened up by pain, by dependence, an awareness that one goes through these perhaps ultimately alone, but also supported to exactly the point where the aloneness must start. I believe in support. I believe in the comfort of the right hand rubbing your lower back, I believe in a friend who holds your hand and cries because you are crying, who doesn’t try to get rid of her own discomfort by lying, “it’s all going to be ok,” or by minimizing, “it isn’t that bad,” but who rocks with you, “I know, I know, I know.” And these can be the most vivid and intimate of moments, the moments of deepest connection, and I am glad we don’t have, in our fear, easy ways to circumvent them all. I believe in learning to tenderly hold someone who is hurting, open to their pain, with faith, without even thinking how someday when you need that hand it will be there for you.

I was impressed enough with the little snippet from Wiener’s Geography of Bliss that happiness comes from thinking about death five minutes a day that I put myself on the waiting list for it at the library and am now halfway through it — or course it’s much more about happiness than about dying, but I do give the good death a lot of thought (and am I happy?). My fascination with hospice and home-deaths flowing naturally out of joy in discovering midwifery and home-births. Getting to be present at a friend’s birth was such a gift, but I don’t know what it will be like when I inevitably am with someone I love at their dying. My parent’s experience of my mother’s parents’ deaths gives me great hope that the experience will be more than the gaping void that is opened up I imagine life on this planet without any of the people I love most. I suspect that there are also parallels between the sort cultural images we have of birth — medicalized, anaesthetized, something best gotten out of the way quickly and painlessly with professional intervention, that only crazy crunchy granola types would embrace the idea of a ‘natural birth’ — and the taboos and fears that we surround death with, that if we just are healthy/virtuous enough death can be forestalled, hopefully indefinitely, but please let’s not TALK about it. So I am not into respecting taboos, at least not the ones that try to plaster over an irrepressible reality, and I want to talk about dying.