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79 Chapter 3 Disciplines of Dying FIVE YEARS AFTER MAJOR SAMSUTHI ARRIVED in the United States his first wife was diagnosed with liver cancer and died. He told the story in Lao to our interpreter, who in turn retold it to me. Then, as if this mediated account were insufficient, Major Samsuthi addressed me directly in English, saying “My wife. Liver cancer. No doctor in the world can treat liver cancer.” He attributed her illness in part to the years they spent with their three children in a reeducation camp in Laos. It was there that her health problems began. “During those thirteen years . . . we did hard labor,” he said. “When we fell ill we had no medicine. We didn’t get enough to eat so our health was poor. . . . If there had been no change of government in Laos, maybe my wife would not have died. We would still live peacefully.” In this account, her hospital death, the very one that elicited nightmares after our last conversation, borrows some of its troubling force from the permission to die (Foucault 1990) that prevailed in the thanatopolitical space of the reeducation camp. In U.S. hospital wards permission to die is extended to patients who hover between life and death, often on mechanical ventilators, unable to breathe on their own. In wartime Laos and Cambodia, on the other hand, such permissionwas experienced in combat zones and camps,where thewonders (and horrors) of life-prolonging medical technologies were remote. Emigrants remember stepping over dead bodies, giving away children, and watching as Buddhist wats were turned into torture chambers. Death took the shapes of starvation,landmines,andguerillawarfare,moreoftenthantheshapesof cancer or car accidents. During those sameyears, other memories accumulated for U.S. publics: the media-ted memories of technologically prolonged lives (and deaths)that eventuallyprompted calls for “natural dying” and “deathwith dignity .”These memorieswere organized moreby the dread of alingering mechanized death than of a violent death among enemies. Even as rumors circulated inThai refugee camps and U.S.housing projects about premature deaths resulting from medical experimentation on refugeebodies, stories of mechanically prolonged lives were repeatedly featured in North American media. If the stories told in Southeast Asian communities reiterated the chronic risks of medical inadequacy, disregard, and neglect, stories told within the U.S. mainstream reiterated rather the dangers of medical excess. When bioethicist Jennifer Beste raises the question, what if dying is not losing a war, she voices what sections of the U.S. public have been asking for decades. If death, Beste argues, is not an enemy to be fought to the bitter end, then surely there is no need to instill hope in the patient in order to raise her morale for a last rally (2005, 229). Beste’s call for the pacification of dying follows a trend in U.S. popular discourse since the 1960s. At that time a demilitarization of death, inwhich doctors and patientswere invited tolay down the technological weapons and psychological defenses that had been marshaled against mortality, resonated well with a nation grown tired of a seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia waged with seemingly useless though expensive technological hardware. While those who were living in the war zones faced a lack of medical technology, many in the United States were worried about an overuse of medical technology. And while for those in Laos and Cambodia, death was often the result of losing a battle in a literal sense, many in the United States worked to imagine death without struggle. This image of peaceful death, Iwill suggest, is not onlylocatablewithin abacklash to militarism, but is also embedded within a specific numinological vision, in which nature is the privileged site for the release of a Christian soul from the medical technology that would entrap it in matter. Pacifying Death Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross begins her influential book On Death and Dying, published in 1969, with an elegiac memory from her Swiss childhood in which a dying farmer spoke with family and friends, arranging his affairs with equanimity, saying goodbye, and sipping a favorite wine rather than a sedative (1969, 5). Following the death, she noted, the man lay in “his own beloved home which he had built.” “In that country today,” she continued, “there is still no make-believe slumber room, no embalming, no false makeup to pretend sleep.” Without overtly referring to the farmer’s death as more natural than the deaths she was attending in a New York hospital...

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