mortality

All Sorts of New Problems.

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Taken by Mark Lyndersay some time ago.

People are strange. It’s hardly a sentence worth writing but it’s a sentence more people need to read because they are people. Therefore, they are strange.

I am strange, too. I accept that. I try not to inflict it on anyone I don’t like, with the exception of writing. With writing, people who don’t like your strange can just not read it. Or they can get on social networks and fight about it, making billionaires richer.

I was in the garage when I encountered a friend and his Mom. The last time they’d seen me was on Christmas Day, where they’d invited me over and I enjoyed their food, view, and most importantly their company.

I’d shaven since. I sort of look like that guy over at the top of this post.

His mother looks me over, my friend and I exchange the normal things friends do. We paused. His mother jumps in.

“What happened to your beard?”, she asks.

“I fell on a razor. It took the beard, and all sorts of other hair.”, I respond.

This was an attempt to be funny. My friend got it. His mother did not.

“You should take care of yourself!”, she exclaimed, then after a pause said, “…. and find yourself a girl!”

Oh boy.

“If I did that I might get one, and that would cause me all sorts of new problems.”

Fortunately, the conversation ended there with my friend pulling his mother into his car.

There are people who think being single is terrible. They want the best for me because I seem to be considered a pretty nice guy.

I’m going to let you in on a secret, since my past is not well documented on the Internet. I’m content being alone. I get to wake up whenever I want in the early hours and tap away at a keyboard. I get to read books undisturbed. I’m capable of doing my own laundry, cooking my own meals, cleaning my place, etc. I get to do things when I want, and while that is a tyranny unto itself, it’s my tyranny.

I prefer my self-inflicted tyranny over all the nonsense that comes with relationships. For a woman to gain romantic interest from me, she would have to provide value well beyond what I can already do and have done for decades. I’ve lived a lot in my life, more so than many my age, enough so that people frequently ask me if there’s something I haven’t done.

And yet, people constantly remind me to take care of myself. Since there are no parts hanging off of me that aren’t supposed to be hanging off of me, this may be about age. The woman who cuts my hair and her boss are always trying to get me to dye my hair.

Dying hair is hardly taking care of myself. It’s just covering up the silver hairs as if they were blemishes instead of trophies.

When I indulge people who tell me to take care of myself, they talk about things like alkaline water (your body handles your pH, not the water you drink), health supplements that they’re selling or their friend is selling, etc.

They also seem intent on thinking that I would want to live longer. In fact, entire industries are built up on living just a bit longer. I’m not sure what there is to sell in that regard. We are supposed to die. If you live longer, you have to take care of yourself longer and those industries just sell you stuff longer so that they can impress their shareholders with their profits. I’m of value to them alive.

This is not to say I’m suicidal. I’m not. It’s just that no one has made a plausible argument as to why people need to live longer. Time magazine actually has a story questioning why people want to live longer, referring to the essay, “Why I hope to die at 75“.

75 is roughly half of my life away from me. 75, for me, would be 2044 for me. Yikes. And for that time I’ll need shelter, food, clothing, etc. Prices aren’t going down.

And you want me to have someone in my life to stress me out? Yikes. To what end?

I don’t get it. We live, we love, we die. I’m not so egotistical to think the world will not go on without me – it will. This is a pretty old planet by human standards, and there are plenty of people to carry on. When I was young I was to live forever, and despite my best efforts not to, I seem to have surpassed that forever.

There is dignity in a life well lived, and death is simply the necessary way to make space for newcomers.

Living longer, to me, just creates all sorts of new problems. The world hasn’t been that improved in my lifetime, in fact, in my perspective, it’s pretty much gone downhill.

Romance. Live longer. Blah blah blah.

Now, tell me that there will be value in those years for me, and hey, maybe I’ll worry about it.

Live your lives as you please. You might die tomorrow of the regular stupidity of humans. Palestinians and Ukrainians have been demonstrating mortality by the thousands and no one is trying to sell them health supplements.

I don’t want someone standing over me doing an eulogy and saying, “Up until he died, he was healthy and nagged.”

No. Thank. You.

I want that person to say, “He was useful, helpful, and strange. Now he isn’t. Let’s move on.”

Death, you see, is normal.

Last Moments

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Reading Last Days by ThatNursePatty reminded me of something. My medical experience as a Hospital Corpsman was largely emergency medicine, and I rarely got to follow up on patients we admitted. I tried because it’s good to get feedback from the wards, such as why they hated our antecubital IVs.

It was an overcast day as I pulled into the apartment complex in New Smyrna Beach when in the middle of the roadway a woman flagged me down, a phone in one hand, tears streaming down her face. I pulled over and got out.

She was someone I had not seen before, and she was screaming at a million miles an hour. Following the general direction where she was waving I found an elderly man laying on the ground, and remembering my old days as a Navy Corpsman, I did a quick assessment. He was unresponsive.

There was a pool of blood on the ground below his head and I could not get an answer from the screaming woman how he had gotten on the ground. I told her in the calmest voice I could she needed to call 911 and get an ambulance there, but she was… not listening, screaming instead, and finally I projected my voice and got her attention.

She called, and promptly started screaming into the phone at the poor 911 person, and I could hear it going nowhere.

My assessment of what I now knew was her father was a possible C-Spine injury, eyes not equal or reacting to light, and a really thready pulse with low respirations and decreasing. I was holding a rag I had grabbed from my car against the back of his head, where the wound was. The blood on the ground wasn’t clotting, he’d lost at least a pint on the asphalt before I got there and it wasn’t coagulating. I suspected he was on blood thinners. CPR wasn’t called for at this time, so I just maintained his C-spine while keeping my fingers on his carotid so I could keep track of his pulse.

I got her to come over and place the phone on my shoulder so I could talk to the 911 operator. I fell back easily into ER talk, giving the operator a rundown which she couldn’t understand. She couldn’t connect me to the ambulance. She couldn’t connect me to an ER to talk to a doctor. I knew this old man didn’t have the 15 minutes she said it would take for the ambulance to get there.

She was back in the middle of the road screaming her dismay at the Universe, and her father was not likely to last that long. His pulse became increasingly thready, his respirations became slower and more relaxed, and I called her over to hold his hand and talk to him. She was, unfortunately, not done with the Universe, and still had much to say to the Universe. He was slipping away.

I spoke to him quietly,focused on him, and I waited while counting his respirations, feeling his pulse slip away, managing his head wound as best I could while keeping his neck in line.

The ambulance eventually arrived, and I did my handoff to the paramedics. He was pretty much gone, his pulse still faintly there, shallow respirations down to about 4 a minute. I gave one paramedic the look, he nodded curtly and quietly, and I got up and walked to my car and drove off to my parking spot for my apartment.

I would find out that he didn’t make it, as I expected. Too much time had been lost. His daughter would end up finding me the next day and thanking me for helping, breaking down into tears. She had been so wrapped up in herself she had not spent the time with him when she could have, but that was not for me to tell her. It wasn’t even necessarily right for me to tell her.

In the moment, people react to emergencies in different ways. Not everyone is trained for them. Not everyone is good at them. And when it’s a person we care about we become compromised, some more than others, but we all become compromised in one way or the other.

I don’t know what happened to her. I saw her off and on over the course of a few months. She kept to herself, possibly reliving that time herself in dark moments. Did she have regrets? Would she have them? I do not know.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a thing, and it wouldn’t be the last. People thought highly of me in that complex afterward.

I hadn’t saved his life. I hadn’t even made it better for the short time we were in contact. Hopefully he was a little more comfortable. In the end, that’s what we can do on the worst day:

Make someone a little more comfortable.

The Umbilical Cords.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

unlikely parentsEarlier this week, a friend of mine and I were talking on the phone and somehow we got to what happens after our parents die – when we come into our own, able to identify biases our parents instilled in us without the constant reminder. When my father died, there was much to unravel and I had to do it quickly because of the way my father handled some things that I inherited – and when it came to my mother, because of the way I grew up, there seemed less to unravel because of the way I grew up, and yet to this day, I’m still working on that.

We realize at times that the parents we had were basically children when they had us as we grow older than them. For some people, the parents did the best that they could with the tools that they had with the experience they had at the time – and if we were fortunate, they grew because of it.

Two days ago, I saw one of my neighbors that I had not seen in a while. She had been skinny, to the point where I wondered if I should take her food now and then, but now she was rounded out, her cheeks filled out pleasantly. We exchanged pleasantries, and it came to mind that I had helped her father, a few years my senior, with changing a tire on her car. The reality is that I simply did it because, as I found out in the conversation during, he had focused on his guitar while I was being indoctrinated into pragmatism and self sufficiency. I inquired about him, because he was a fun person, and she told me he had died last year.

I was shocked, conveying condolences and at the same time wondering how. He had seemed in good health. The local medical examiner, after an autopsy, said it was cancer in his lungs, while she was describing a sudden onset. Her mother, who I had also met, is presently fighting cancer with mixed success. I couldn’t help recall that earlier conversation I had with that other friend. This explained her weight gain, which I did not find bad or unhealthy yet, and I mentioned it and told her to take care of herself.

We have this tendency to forget about ourselves when we’re worried about people we love and in doing so, we sometimes lose our own centers. I speak from experience.

Yet another friend, whose wife just beat breast cancer, is now dealing with her mother and the ovarian cancer that is inoperative. There’s just a lot of cancer around me right now, for some reason. Maybe it’s my age group, and as I like to point out, modern medicine has allowed people enough longevity to get cancer in the first place where they may have died of other things before – which makes sense in the elderly, but not in the young.

We gain from our parents, even if we gain the wrong things. No parent is perfect, no relationship ideal, even in retrospect. It’s a part of life, and though we don’t want to hear it when the sting of loss is fresh, it allows us to find our own potentials and to grow beyond our parents. This is a deeply personal part of us, an intimacy that few share. It’s when we stop comparing ourselves to our parents and begin disregarding those that continue to compare us to our parents that we truly grow beyond.

We don’t talk about it, perhaps because of some taboo, but I had one cousin when my father died who told me that now that my father had died, I would grow in ways that I would not yet understand. I did not understand at the time, and even now, almost 17 years after his death, am I truly beginning to appreciate it.

This is a part of being human. A horse, in contrast, becomes a horse within moments of birth in almost everything but size, walking and finding it’s footing. We humans take longer, and we are born into a world of artificial constructs, fictions, about who we are, what nation we belong to, etc, which requires a lot more time to grasp and work within. Horses and chickens don’t need to worry about credit ratings or paying the rent, or which football team to support no matter how bad they are.

Unraveling ourselves, we either find our way or choke on the umbilical cords of our world.

The Serious Cardiologist

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TheTruthHasNoConscienceSo, the cardiologist and I are having a conversation. He’s brisk, all business in a busy clinic. I get it. There’s a mood.

I’m light with everyone there, from the waiting room right in, and notice a sense of professional dread in the staff. An East Indian woman had accused the office of letting an elderly white woman in front of them because she was white – not, of course, because she was much more old, and and the red on her nose hinted at other issues that would have her with appointments in other offices.

Factor in that this all happened in front of predominantly East Indian people who exchanged looks, embarrassed for the poor elderly lady and the staff, but also for the behavior of the much younger lady. And that my name, at least in Trinidad, is considered East Indian, and there I am making light of things I see other than what everyone’s ignoring. Sleight of mind.

So anyway, I get in and I’m still in that light mood – which, I had forgotten, cardiologists generally hate. Cardiologists are meticulous folk. It’s rare to find the ones that smile or laugh. So this guy – because underneath all of it, he’s a guy – is getting upset with me and I don’t know why. I’m answering questions, giving him what I know on my health history, he’s stressing out, and I can’t see why.

He leans in, I lean in, masked but following his body language. And then it struck me. He’s quite serious about my health – I mean, he’s supposed to be – and he thinks I’m not taking mine seriously.

I start laughing. He’s continuing, and it’s making it worse for me because I know what’s going on, I want to tell him, but I’m laughing and can’t stop long enough to tell him.

Finally, he pauses. I stop laughing. I tell him, “I get that you are very serious about my health, and I also get that you want me to be as serious as you, and because I am not you think I do not understand my condition. Am I correct?”

He looks at me, “Well, Mr. Rampersad, you know… ”

I interrupt, “Am I correct?”

He takes a breath, “Yes, you are correct. With the medical history you have you should be serious.”

“Yes, yes, I understand it completely. But have you considered I live with that knowledge and have grown accustomed to it enough so where it’s simply part of me, who I am, but not what I think defines me?”, I say with a smile.

“I’m still not certain you understand…”

“OK, let me show you. You’re changing my meds because my bp is high, and because of kidney issues it’s an increased dosage. Once we get that under control you’re probably going to want a stress test with ECG and maybe an echocardiogram to line up. Toss in the standard stuff about losing weight, diet, etc. From there you’ll advise the general surgeon that you have cleared me for the other surgery. That’s the plan, right?”

He sits back, visibly relaxing.

I’m not terrified. I’m not screaming and holding onto life like a stolen kiss. I know what’s going on, sometimes better than the medical people around me. The difference is that they are visitors here. Tourists with umbrellas in their drinks.

I live here.

And more sage doctors know that.

Memento Mori. 

Granted

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A Parting in the SeamI know we all die.

That jarring reality came early in life. The world, the cultures, everything is designed so that you aren’t supposed to think about it, but if you manage to fit into one of those cracks – the widening cracks – you realize the finality of mortality. Poets, authors… have written so much about it. Religions offer sanctuary from it. Maybe you’ll come back, maybe you’ll go to a better place.

But isn’t there always a better place? Someone always trying to sell you real estate of some form or another? Cash is easy, tears are real.

I’m intelligent. I’m not supposed to be confused. I’m the one people come to when they are confused. I have no faith that reaches further than the tips of my fingers, my toes, and where my mind can go.

I’m confused. The anger has come and went, as it’s supposed to. But it’s not so much ‘went’. There’s a surprising amount of anger there below acceptance.

One woman loved me more than I was comfortable with, and she’s gone. Another woman fought with me because… she loved me more than I was comfortable with. And she, too, is gone.

There is a rhythm there. A pulse, a silent rage that thwacks at reality now and then despite my best efforts. It’s cynical. It’s sarcastic. It seems to feel no pain, and yet it cannot exist without it.

I know we all die.

I plan for it – the unmentionables that people do not discuss. I planned for it years ago, and I may end up planning it years into the future.

But I did not plan for them to die. I should have, I suppose, since I know we all die.

Yet I failed to plan for them to die. One even told me, told me how, and I nodded my head quietly, thinking she was venting. Hoping she was venting.

She wasn’t venting. I failed. It haunts me.

Another died of the flu. How? Had I been there would something else have happened?

There is no solace here. But there is a silent rage at the world, at myself, and those who take it for granted.

 

Mortality

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Skull facsimileWe humans have contemplated mortality for as long as we have been conscious – we’ve developed philosophy, and arguably, theology from it. So many do so much to avoid the inevitable, and yet it remains. We have people working right now to squeeze a little more life into our mortal coils. We live longer because of modern medicine, shoveling coal into the engine of society.

But… why? Are our lives so great that we simply have to continue on? How many more years of traffic, of software patches, of reveling in the idiocy of ‘leaders’… do we want more of that, not less? Do we want to work longer toward a retirement that society robs us of through the flawed ponzi scheme of economics that are based on the assumption that a larger population will produce more and thus be able to support a minority of aged people? There’s so much wrong with that assumption.

And yet, when in a hospital bed, being told by someone who casually hangs a stethoscope over their neck, that they will die… there is surprise. There is denial. There are questions of how long. There is almost no question of the quality of life except in movies and television shows. Those who believe in a deity will make urgent requests for more time, more medical bills, more of the same of  life that so few actually get to enjoy before. Those who do not believe may accept or not, they may fight or not, but typically they do not accept (denial), they do fight. Every breath is a battle.

Spoiler: We’re all going to die at some point. Every breath is a battle anyway; nothing has changed other than someone assigning a possible date that is closer than we might have expected. The world continues to spin.

Some of us fight for relevancy beyond our lifetimes – very few are actually remembered. Think of all those dressed so well after they died, over the ages. As of 2016, there were 100.8 billion dead humans. Our global population is roughly 7 billion at this time. How many are remembered? How many stand out? How many dead people can you think of right now? And how many of them will be remembered in a few hundred years?

But societies, cultures, civilizations – we remember those as we are taught, as was recorded by those who bothered. Even the dead ones. Especially the dead ones.

And underneath all of this, underneath all the things in ‘life’, there is this mortality that we deny through our actions, our words… and what we do not deny, we reinvent into another life, as if this one wasn’t quite enough. As if we have some higher purpose defined by people thousands of years ago scribbling into books.

And yet there are some, very few, that accept that they are already dead. Maybe they’re onto something. Maybe we already are, maybe we’re just echoes of society’s demands, the tools of our tools (Thoreau), going through the motions like Sisyphus, our blood turning the wheel of the great engine of society driving us… where?