[TITLE CARD HERE] is a bi-weekly newsletter about thoughts, mostly mine.
We’re finally on the road. So far I’ve learned that the sunrises in Arizona are absurd and the moon is huge no matter what phase its in. I can’t drive and I get carsick if I read, so I spend a lot of time staring out the window. I don’t know if the term “God’s country” is about the West (and I won’t look it up for fear of what I’ll find) but it should be. I like to think I’m a solid driving companion; I have good playlists and I won’t freak out if you miss the turn I just told you about. Somewhere in Nevada, my friend who was driving started showing signs of an existential freakout. The mountains, the sky, the bigness of the West started to press in on her. I joked that I would play Wide Open Spaces and she threatened to crash the van. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it and she said no. I understand that. Before I ghosted my therapist, I told him there were two things that were absolutely off limits: God and space.
I used to have three off-limits topics, death being the big nono. My mom likes to tell this story of when I was a junior in high school and she tried to talk to me about the inevitability of my dog’s death. We were in the living room/home office, I remember because she was kind of wheeling about on the rolly-chair which seemed inappropriate for the situation. I was on the couch—a reupholstered tan suede joint from the seventies that crossed state lines with us and lasted three Philadelphia apartments until it was finally put to pasture on Facebook marketplace—I don’t remember how the conversation started, but I do remember panicking. I wouldn’t class it as fear so much as a shutdown. It just felt like everything in me was like, no. No, this is not a conversation. No, we aren’t talking about it, we aren’t even thinking about it. She was insistent. So, I threatened to pee on the couch. I even did a count down and I really think I would have followed through. Apparently so did she because she dropped the subject.
Often I am more capable of approaching difficult things academically. I was a religious studies major, I like the planetarium, and in 2019 I took a class called “Saying Goodbye.” It was definitely the turning point in my death aversion. I even wrote my final paper about my grandpa’s violent sneezes and my irrational fear that one day he’ll die of a sneeze-induced heart attack. All this to say, I have made progress and am currently reading a book called On Death and Dying. It’s giving me big thoughts about a lot of different taboos.
On Death and Dying details the beginning years of a seminar conducted from the 1960s-80s by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist who, somewhat inadvertently, developed the five stages of grief. In this first iteration of the course, Kübler-Ross and a few seminary and medical students conduct interviews with dying patients at her hospital. The interviews are held in front of a two-way mirror so the students can observe without bombarding the patient, who is stationed in an intimate room with only Kübler-Ross and the hospital chaplain. The point of the interview is to better understand and communicate the needs of dying patients to hospital staff. Kübler-Ross postulates that this “near-death” work becomes more necessary as medicine advances. We are better at keeping the body alive, but in return dying has become sanitized and isolated. In the first chapter, she describes the modern patient and our avoidance of them:
“He may want one single person to stop for one single minute so that he can ask one single question—but he will get a dozen people around the clock, all busily preoccupied with his heart rate, pulse, electrocardiogram or pulmonary functions, his secretions or excretions but not with him as a human being…Is the reason for this increasingly mechanical, depersonalized approach our own defensiveness? Is this approach our own way to cope with and repress the anxieties that a terminally or critically ill patient evokes in us? Is our concentration on equipment, on blood pressure, our desperate attempt to deny the impending death which is so frightening and discomforting to us that we displace all our knowledge into machines, since they are less close to us than the suffering face of another human being which would remind us once more of our lack of omnipotence, our own limits and failures, and last but not least perhaps our own mortality.”
There are lots of gems in the book, I truly recommend, but what catches me is her focus on aloneness. Each chapter outlines a stage that the dying patient experiences: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Weirdly, these got lost in translation and turned into the five stages of grief that we all know and love, but in their original form they refer to the person leaving, not the ones left behind. In any case, each interview illuminates over and over again that dying patients feel alone. Often, they are literally left alone because their behavior confounds the nurses, doctors, or family members responsible for their care. The remedy in every situation has been to alleviate that anxiety. For Kübler-Ross and her students that has meant allowing a patient their delusions of health, affirming their anger, or just sitting in the room in silence, maybe holding hands.
In my death class, I looked at a lot of different creation stories in the Judeo-Christian milieu. They all boiled down to the same thesis statement: “it is not good that man should be alone…” (Gen. 2:18). Famously, I am the only black person on this tour. I would not be so unhinged as to compare blackness with terminal illness, but I do think the book is hitting me as I face this particular type of isolation. For the most part, things have been normal. But recently there was a situation where I desperately wished there was another black person I could look to. Someone who could physically hold my hand and tell me that I wasn’t crazy. Or laugh with me or cry with me or just shake their head and say, “damn, in black history month too.” I don’t even mean that to be as much of a bummer as it sounds. If anything it has made me deeply grateful for the people in my life. As a teen who had to be a little more self-sufficient than average, I spent a lot of time thinking of myself as an island. Not so. I need hugs. I need to be understood, legible to someone other than myself. I need community. We all do, at every stage of life. And when that primary need is seen to, we live well and as Kübler-Ross demonstrates, we die well.
I so very much look forward to reading all that is written.
This was a great post. If you ever decide to hold writing lessons, I will be your first paying customer. Great work, as usual.