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When I said that dying is another of the jobs that we do as social people, I was of course only talking about certain aspects of it. In a real, objective, physical, medical sense, when you die, there's no job about it: systems fail, in one order or another, and the living person becomes a corpse. If you're religious, you think the soul has left the body. If you're not, like me, there's no soul to consider: the biological processes that engendered the marvel of consciousness have simply stopped, and so has that consciousness.
But. We are conscious, and of that consciousness and our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions we create this world around ourselves. A large -- and I think the largest -- part of that world is the social matrix. I say this even if you are a hermit, like me, even if, like me, you eventually withdraw from nearly every relationship for no more reason than that it takes energy to keep them up. You're still who you are and what you are in relation to the people you've interacted with in your life, and in relation to the stuff that happens among all the people in the world. And this still has a piece of you when you're dying.
I started to except the cases of sudden death but there's no reason to. When you die suddenly, even if you die in some circumstance where you are not known to anyone -- one of many killed in a massacre, where all the people you have meant something to have been killed as well -- you're still part of the history, the experience of the rest of the human world, in some way or another. You might be mostly part of it by your absence. Or you might be the mysterious skeleton in the walls of the abbey. -- of course, that's not you, but a reverberation of you: but I think reverberations is what I'm getting at mostly.
But especially in the case of natural death, where a person of some age shuts down and dies, there's a tremendous amount going on besides the organs detriorating and stopping. There comes a point when to the dying person, dying is all there is -- everything else recedes. This is the point which is strangest for the survivors. My mother-in-law, who died of throat cancer and could not eat solid food for a couple of months before she really died, knew the contents of her refrigerator and what shopping needed to be done up till the beginning of the last week of her life. She was managing her household from her deathbed. And after she no longer wanted to eat at all, she told her son to make her eat the yogurt and applesauce she could get down. Until a certain point. When Winnie refused to eat any more and had nothing more to say about the running of the household, my brother-in-law freaked out. He felt it was still his responsibility to keep her fed and "well," even though he knewhe couldn't keep her alive for long. It was hard for him to accept that Winnie had entered a new stage, the stage of imminent death. That lasted for maybe a day or two.
Here comes the comparison to childbirth. There was a point in oncoming labor when I knew that it was really happening right this minute and there was no way it would stop until it was finished. Not in the first one: that was all induced and heavily medicated and while it actually had the palpable danger of death right on it, it didn't have the shape of dying that the other birth, the "normal," "uneventful" birth had. I think the similarity is that in both cases there is that point where what is going on is that the social person is defined by its physiology. And at other times, that's not true, even if people think it is.
This is rambling and disorganized but I think I'll get it right in another try or two.
But. We are conscious, and of that consciousness and our perceptions and our interpretation of those perceptions we create this world around ourselves. A large -- and I think the largest -- part of that world is the social matrix. I say this even if you are a hermit, like me, even if, like me, you eventually withdraw from nearly every relationship for no more reason than that it takes energy to keep them up. You're still who you are and what you are in relation to the people you've interacted with in your life, and in relation to the stuff that happens among all the people in the world. And this still has a piece of you when you're dying.
I started to except the cases of sudden death but there's no reason to. When you die suddenly, even if you die in some circumstance where you are not known to anyone -- one of many killed in a massacre, where all the people you have meant something to have been killed as well -- you're still part of the history, the experience of the rest of the human world, in some way or another. You might be mostly part of it by your absence. Or you might be the mysterious skeleton in the walls of the abbey. -- of course, that's not you, but a reverberation of you: but I think reverberations is what I'm getting at mostly.
But especially in the case of natural death, where a person of some age shuts down and dies, there's a tremendous amount going on besides the organs detriorating and stopping. There comes a point when to the dying person, dying is all there is -- everything else recedes. This is the point which is strangest for the survivors. My mother-in-law, who died of throat cancer and could not eat solid food for a couple of months before she really died, knew the contents of her refrigerator and what shopping needed to be done up till the beginning of the last week of her life. She was managing her household from her deathbed. And after she no longer wanted to eat at all, she told her son to make her eat the yogurt and applesauce she could get down. Until a certain point. When Winnie refused to eat any more and had nothing more to say about the running of the household, my brother-in-law freaked out. He felt it was still his responsibility to keep her fed and "well," even though he knewhe couldn't keep her alive for long. It was hard for him to accept that Winnie had entered a new stage, the stage of imminent death. That lasted for maybe a day or two.
Here comes the comparison to childbirth. There was a point in oncoming labor when I knew that it was really happening right this minute and there was no way it would stop until it was finished. Not in the first one: that was all induced and heavily medicated and while it actually had the palpable danger of death right on it, it didn't have the shape of dying that the other birth, the "normal," "uneventful" birth had. I think the similarity is that in both cases there is that point where what is going on is that the social person is defined by its physiology. And at other times, that's not true, even if people think it is.
This is rambling and disorganized but I think I'll get it right in another try or two.
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When I was in the last stages of pregnancy, waiting without any specific date to count to, for a biological inevitability, I compared it to waiting for a death, and found the comparison absolutely scandalised people.
I've seen the change you talk about, with dying people. My grandmother refused to disengage with life and engage with dying, but even so there was that change. Incidentally, it seems to me that cancer is our literary death-narrative, the pattern we know and expect and see in literature, the struggle, the remission, the recurrence, death, in the same way consumption was the Victorian literary death-narrative. My grandfather, dying in fact of gangrene in a post-stroke leg, convinced himself he had cancer, he was afraid of it, he had heard the word spoken in the ward, he repeated it to us in a whisper, They wouldn't tell him where it was, he said, but he knew it had him, though it didn't, and not all the reassurance in the world would persuade him. I should have admitted that he was dying, though it wasn't cancer, that he was right that we were lying to him but that wasn't what we were keeping from him. Too late now.