Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make

Notes on My Dying

19 VVVVVVVVVVV Notes on My Dying RUTHANN ROBSON I believe in death with dignity, don’t you? At least in the abstract. Grace. Nobility. Even beauty. As abstract as that. As abstract as other people. As abstract as characters in fiction. “All anyone wants is a good death,” I read. This is in a short story. It’s a prize-winning story, a story about a nurse who is dying of cancer . She is graceful, noble, and even beautiful. I hate the story. I hate stories about people dying of cancer, no matter how graceful, noble, or beautiful. When I read the author’s note, I learn that he is an administrator in the famous cancer center where I am enduring chemotherapy and the news that I am going to die very shortly. This is what I say to his story: I do not want your good death. This is what I say to his biography: You make your living off other people’s deaths. This is what I insist: I am not your story. If I were constructing this as a story, with myself as the protagonist, I would not only be dignified, I would be brave and beautiful, courageous and kind, humorous and honorable. I would enshrine myself in narrative. But this cannot be a success because the elements of narrative are corrupted. There is no beginning. The beginning is not diagnosis. The beginning is before that. Before the suspicions, before the reconstructed past when one began to feel this or that, before everything except a tiny cell that got twisted and frisky. The absence of the beginning is compounded by the middle collapsing into the past. Everything is end. Some endings are longer than others. I am trying to act as if I have a future. When I’m not too weak, I go to work. I go to the library and the post office. I go for walks. And when I am too weak, I go anyway. The worst that could happen to me is already happening. I cannot pretend I am who I was a few months before, so I pretend I am a fashion model. I am a Buddhist nun with a shaved head. I am anorexic. I have a lovely pallor. I have a noble beauty, a beautiful nobility. I am not interested in fooling anyone except myself. I call it survival. I survived a dangerous adolescence. In school, the sentiments of “Death Be Not Proud” belied its title. On the large and small screens, Love Story jerked tears, and the body bags and the immolated monks screamed for my attention. In the streets and bathrooms, needles in the arm and suicide sang their romantic dirges. Not all of us made it. When I made it to twenty-one, I assumed I would live until eightyseven . Death was for the young. And the old. At twenty-six, I was hospitalized intermittently for six weeks with a strange malady that spiked my temperature to 107 degrees. RUTHANN ROBSON 20 “You should be dead,” the doctor said, confirming my temperature . “I’m not,” I replied, thinking myself witty. The year was 1984. I was sure I had AIDS. Instead, I was diagnosed with pesticide poisoning, contracted from the sugarcane fields where the migrant farm workers who were my clients worked. A nurse told me I should be grateful for the advancement of antibiotics. No one told me I should be irate about the development of agribusiness. I knew I had almost died. I thought I was cured. There are those who argue that cancer is ancient, prevalent now because other diseases have been cured and humans live longer, and unconnected to environmental degradation. My body knows differently. But who is there to blame? Industrialization? Capitalism? Corporate greed? Anger is the second stage of dying in the classic work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She notes that dying can cause a “usually dignified” person to act “furious,” but with a bit of tolerance by the caregivers , the patient’s anger can be soothed. Dying people, above all, want to be heard. I do not want to be heard. I do not want to talk. I want to live. My first decision about dying is that I will die at home. I will have the control and comfort I would not have in a hospital. The winter sun will be weak but...