Why are the dying in such foul moods sometimes? Why the moodiness when you say you’re not in pain, Mr. Hospice? Is it a pain you don’t know how to talk about? Well, I can say this: For those not fully invested in their consciousness being transferred to some sweet hereafter, it’s irritating when we’re lately being challenged to produce a lasting, permanent self. Where is it now that everything else is falling away? If only we had a longer life to find it, huh? That can be an affront, for one thing — the not-existing thing. That’s a short answer.
The long answer is a lived experiment in avoiding the mental suffering about non-existence. That could take us years of studying, reflecting, and meditating to unpack some of it. And then it’s not like a rational argument one can follow using words, although study and understanding precedes the feeling part. But one must experience waking up for themselves, so that it’s obvious as turning on a light and seeing. Telling a teenager what we as adults know seldom heads off heartache for the cubby. Telling an older adult, one who has lived in this long-confirmed illusion that he is distinct from others, to stop searching for a self, results in similar blank stares. How can we build an intellectual understanding of something which all our lived assumptions reject out of hand, unexamined? Experience can’t be transferred, only earned.
I haven’t completed the diligence of meditation effort and only borrow somewhat from those who have completed the course. My teachers tell me that the point of beginners’ not finding a permanent, unified, and lasting self IS the point of our frustrated looking, and once convinced to just relax and sit calmly in that glimmer of knowing, to deepen my experience of that.
Let’s essay something closer to the short answer to make this root of mortality’s affront clearer.
We’ll all be dying ourselves one day, which is a good thing. If life were merely a Shirley Jackson-type lottery that determined who gets sacrificed, or, for those who put stock in the Rapture, consider life to be like a royal children’s dress rehearsal before the big party, then we’d be in trouble come the end of our three score and ten. In the meantime, we (still) have the pandemic and many other uncertainties to remind us of how one day we’ll be forced to stop distracting ourselves and confront the unsettled feeling of losing control. Can we compare economic uncertainty to close encounters with mortality? Perhaps.
If we humans who live in this desire realm can never be fully satisfied, and everyone is bound to die one day, then being overdrawn at the bank is an irritation that can (weakly) compare with dying, in that both involve losing control. For the unexamined life of the privileged, a simple matter of receiving a greeting from the oncology receptionist can make or wreck an hour’s mood. Any drift toward the suffering of getting what we don’t want (from a traffic ticket to a terminal diagnosis), of not getting what we desire (supposedly inexhaustible), or the boring dullness of indifference is met with a degree of anxiety.
I’m curious about anxiety. We’re all expert at avoiding it. My hero, Harry Stack Sullivan, studied anxiety so closely as to detail how and when in a child’s development this anxiety determines his personality — the combination of feelings and mental constructions that constitute consciousness. For all I studied in his writings, I don’t recall Sullivan ever finding a perduring, unchanging and unified rock of personality. What he found were traumatized people who coped with living by shutting out their painful memories. When triggered and the hair on the back of their neck stands up, like a flash and without time for a thought they’re washing their hands until they’re raw, flicking the light switches for another ten-count, or checking their stove burners so that they can’t leave the house to keep a job. Or the raped one eats, and eats. The PTSD set is well represented at Twelve Step meetings. Anything is preferable to feeling anxiety.
When you’re climbing above the tree line and the sky darkens, the temperature drops like an underwater thermocline and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you know with a little experience that your body needs to drop down to the earth. Now. Failure to do so will result in being electrocuted. No one should just appear three thousand meters up a rocky slope and not know about keeping safe in a storm. But it seems like many who have climbed the summits of their lives are reminded of this by their terminal disease, who just woke up and found themselves there, and I find them badly upset sometimes, the anger being a mask for their existential anxieties.
Lately my bank balances have been trimmed by a combined settlement of IRS demands and family needs, and from those reduced numbers a little of my anxiety comes. Little things irritate me when I’m thus preoccupied; where was my expansive humor I so lately embraced? The financially well-off can better afford to ease their minds, to avoid some of our anxieties, to relax for a while. They have choices. And so, they can live on average 20 years longer. That’s why any upset can come like a catastrophe later, when a life of comfort is unpracticed at dealing with occasional face splats. The first time we cross into the land of the insolvent, it’s a hint of what passing over a more desolate border feels like that Susan Sontag describes on the first page of her Illness As Metaphor (1978).
Sontag wrote this book like a victory lap after beating at age 42 the long odds of having 31 lymph nodes filled with tumors from her breast cancer. Then she beat uterine sarcoma in her mid-60s. But when her stem cell transplant didn’t work at age 71 and her doctor said that her leukemia was back, her son David Reiff witnessed her scream, “But this means I’m going to die!” That’s a cry of someone who had long pushed out of her mind the irritating paradox of not finding a self, after a lifetime of cerebration being unable to rationalize her way toward a realization of not-self, rather than letting her mind simply rest in the experience of having no self to find.
I can write this calmly, now while I’m not dying, and take some time to conceptualize the inexpressible because I’m not terminally sick and distracted, not now alarmed by the sudden to-do lists of catching the start of my pain, nausea, or depression and managing my friends’ and family’s anxieties about saying the wrong things around me — all exhausting stuff, especially the social burdens.
“I can’t imagine your –“
YES, I know…thanks.
It’s better when visiting to bring something of utility without being asked, and then sit with the loved one who is struggling with a new diagnosis or bout of symptoms. Don’t talk so much, or at least not about how you’re feeling. Our time is precious. “There is so much we (still) have to go through”, I heard a Tillerman sing one time in the 1970s, during tea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_and_Son_(song)
Hospice Nursing 1 Day at a Time 