Being Mortal
Saturday, January 18
Today’s text is Joe Carlsmith’s reflections on Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, as re-shared by Michael Nielsen. In other words, a reflection on a reflection on a reflection on a text.
It’s a familiar motif: the patient emerges from the hospital, newly diagnosed, newly short of time, and with new clarity about what really matters, and about the preciousness of what she’s had all along. As a result, her remaining time is charged with greater meaning and intimacy. I think Tim McGraw’s song “Live Like You Were Dying” is actually a pretty good expression of this: “I loved deeper, I spoke sweeter, I gave forgiveness I’d been denying.”
For a long time, one of my guiding goals in life has to been start early on this. To reach the end of my life, and to have learned already, or as deeply as possible, whatever lessons in preciousness and fleetingness and beauty that death can teach; and to have been doing the whole time what I would’ve wanted myself to do, at least in expectation, with those lessons in mind.
Often this feels easiest when I’m alone. Somehow the social world is harder. It’s one thing to recognize the preciousness of life and of our time together; it’s another to hold onto that recognition, and to infuse our interactions with it, amidst the forceful currents of sociality — the habits and uncertainties, the comfortable defaults, the fears and blocks and distances between us.
And indeed, a more vivid awareness of death is no guarantee of intimacy: if it’s hard in everyday life, or around the dinner table at Christmas, or on intermittent phone calls, deathbeds won’t always make it easy. We can miss each other, we can fail to be truly together in this world, even in our final moments. Here I’m reminded of a funeral I once went to, in which even the remarks from the family of the deceased felt to me formulaic and stilted and distant. Part of this, I expect, was the difficulty of expressing things in that public context; but it was also a reminder to me that certain kinds of closeness can just not happen. Deathbeds are no exception.
Still, reading Gawande’s book, and now writing about it, has left me, for now, with some small measure of the consciousness that I think the approach of death can bring. I feel more aware of my body’s fleeting strength and health; my ability to run and jump and walk up stairs; the softness of the clothes on my skin. And I feel, as well, the urgency of certain projects; the preciousness of certain relationships; the shallowness of certain hesitations and pre-occupations; the costs of wasting time. You can’t keep any of it; there’s nothing to hold back for; your life is always flowing outwards, through you and away from you, into the world; the only thing to do is to give it away on purpose, and the question is where and to what.
I’ve mentioned before the value I find in keeping a copy of a week-based calendar of your life. It’s a memento mori, yes, but it’s also a comprehensible visualization of the time we might expect (but are by no means guaranteed) to have left.
When you see it all laid out on one page, it's not that much. Since I first started tracking it, I’ve seen two full rows checked off, which makes the coming rows feel a whole lot more important.