Tag: dying

Last Days – “When the Cranes Fly South”

Have you ever wondered what your last days will look like?  For most people, death is a process and not a moment.  Authors have tried to capture that experience – one thinks of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych – but not from experience.  Jorge Borges tries to image meeting his own dying self in “August 25, 1983.” No one gets to look back on their own end times; few of us can reliably predict when it will happen.  Borges was off by three years to the good.

I am often skeptical about books about old age, books with elderly protagonists, which are written by young people.  But Lisa Ridzén’s novel, When the Cranes Fly South, rings true.  The author says that she was inspired by the case notes she found from her grandfather’s carers during the end of his life.  She gives us what feels like a true picture of the messiness, the inevitability, and the release of death.  It is a lovely book.  I was also deeply impressed by the Swedish health care/home care system, which faithfully provides for visits four times a day.  The carers feed the grandfather, take care of the dog, bring in firewood – and generally do whatever is necessary to put an old man’s mind to rest.

But, of course, the old man’s mind does not rest, he does not go easy into that good night.  His wonderful canine companion, Sixten, is a large elkhound and the subject of controversy with Hans, his son, who thinks it is not fair to the dog or the caregivers to confine the dog with a sick old man.  Hans also insists that his father (Bo) take regular visits to his wife, who is in the deep haze of dementia and has been in a memory care home for a couple of years.  Bo can see no point in visiting the “husk” of his lifelong love, and when his poor wife throws them out of her room at the care home, we sympathize with Bo, who knows enough to keep memories separate from the current realities of his life.  Bo preserves one of his wife’s favorite scarves in a canning jar, so that he can occasionally open it to get a whiff of how she used to smell and think about how things used to be.  He loves his wife; he treasures his memories.  In his weakened state, he cannot reconcile the reality of her dementia with the warm feeling he gets every time he opens the canning jar.

Two of the passages which rang true for me had to with Hans, Bo’s son.  Hans is trying to do right by his father while working a demanding job and mourning the end of his marriage.  Bo wishes he could help Hans put all these challenges into perspective:

Despite everything, I wish there was something I could say to help Hans.  To make him realize he can stop stressing.  Maybe he would stop thinking about Sixten if he just relaxed a little.  But I don’t know what I can do about his restlessness.

Bo thinks about the fact that Hans will be in his place someday, dying and at the mercy of his daughter and the caregivers:

How will he react when Ellinor [Hans’s daughter] tells him he is no longer capable of taking care of himself?  Who will he be once he stops working, once his body  starts to give up the way they always do?   Right then, I realize that he might end up like you [Bo’s wife/Hans’ mother], forgetting Ellinor and drifting from one day to the next, and I pull a face and shake my head.

Of course, Hans cannot imagine himself in his father’s place, but the truth is that both things – the stress today and the inevitability of aging tomorrow – are related.  If death and old age were constant companions, were realized as inevitabilities, perhaps the stresses of the present moment would diminish in proportion.

This book was a huge bestseller and award-winner in Sweden.  Recently, I wrote about the Swedish bestseller about “death cleaning.”  Clearly, Swedish readers are eager for real discussions about old age and preparations for the end of life.  This is to their credit.  When the Cranes Fly South is not an easy book in some ways; death is often messy and Ridzén gives us clear images of incontinence, falls, nostalgia, grief – losses of all kinds.  We get the picture of a man who knows he has to leave, but clings to those things that give his life meaning – his dog, his woods, the scent of his wife’s scarf – as long as he can.  While we feel for him and with him, he is not an object of pity by the reader, by his caretakers, or by himself.

For most of the book, we are in Bo’s head.  Again, I was suspicious of a first novel by a 36-year-old which tried to enter the mind of a dying 89-year-old.  Who am I to say if it is accurate?  But it feels right, and it got me thinking about how I would handle my own last days, what needs to be discarded, and what needs to be held onto until the very end.  Highly recommended.

Death is a major (and the final) life event.  We have elaborate rituals for childbirth, fairy-tale weddings, graduations, and other major life events.  But it is much harder to orchestrate death.  In the Middle Ages, it was very important to have a “good death,” shriven of our sins, family around, comfortable in one’s own bed.  There was even a term for the art of ending your life well: ars moriendi.  By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, however, death had become a more private and hidden affair.  People today plan their funerals, create bucket lists, and do extensive estate planning, but do they think about their actual death?  Of course, it is not easy.  My husband was recently in the hospital again, and there is nothing more impersonal than a hospital.  But that is where a lot of dying happens.

We might start by trying to imagine what kind of death we would have, what we would want.  You might try, as Borges did, to write a story about the end of your life.  Where do you think you’ll be?  Who will be there?  What will you be thinking about?  We have little control about our dying, but conjuring up the end might give us a little more clarity on the things we can control.

In When the Cranes Fly South, Bo has a good death.  He has the people he loves around him and his hand on the head of his beloved elkhound.  “Everything is crystal clear,” he thinks.  At least, that is the way our author imagined it would happen.  May everything be “crystal clear” for you in your last moments.  I often wonder if, at that moment when everything extraneous fades away, we will see more clearly.  May it be so for all of us.

 

 

 

Vollendungsroman, the Apocalyptic, and “What Are You Going Through?”

I have written several times about a genre called the Vollendungsroman – novels about becoming old.  There is also a particular category of stories about people who are confronted by a terminal diagnosis, well aware that they are facing death and living through their “end times.” I don’t know whether there is a specific label for such writings.  (Readers, help me with this!)  Anyway, there are some very good examples out there, and I recently read a new one.  It was What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez.  Here is the thing that is different about this novel: it combines a story about age and the end of a life with the prospect of the universal end of life as we know it.  The microcosm and the macrocosm, both facing apocalypse.   Think about it.

The book opens with the narrator going to a lecture by a man who has written an important piece of work about the irredeemable damage humans have done to their planet.  It ends as the narrator stays with a  friend who is planning to end her own life before the final assault of the cancer that is killing her.  In between, there is clear contemplation of aging, death, and disaster.  The latter are on levels – from runaway global warming to a terminal cancer diagnosis to an overflowing bathtub.

One might question whether the prognosis for the earth is really as apocalyptic as is presented by the speaker in the first chapter, but no one can debate whether death is apocalyptic for the dying individual. (Even if one believes in an afterlife, death is still the end of this life, life as we know it.)  And it is not apocalyptic as in the warnings of Jeremiah or Jonah, where the purpose is repentance.  It is more like the irreversible prophecies of Cassandra, which no one believed but were nevertheless true. There is no real hope for the terminal patient.  The question is how is one – one person or one people –  to deal with the reality of the situation.

I have written elsewhere on the pre-Enlightenment view that the human body was a microcosm of the macrocosm, the world – both of which were decaying from their Edenic self.  The earth was growing old and decaying and so – once we had reached the peak of our life cycle at 33 – were we.  Not the view of infinite progress that the Enlightenment drew, but, rather, apocalypse all around.  Was it easier to die knowing that the world was dying too?

What Are You Going Through,  the title of Nunez’s novel, comes from an essay by Simone Weil.  She quotes it as the magic question in the search for the Grail and says that “the love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’”

Henning Mankell asks and answers this question in a memoir he wrote just before he died.  The author of the terrific Wallander mysteries and also a theater producer and a crusader for the rights of the oppressed, Mankell was given an “incurable” diagnosis of lung cancer in 2013 and died in 2015.  His account is called Quicksand: What It Means to Be a Human Being.  A human being, one particular human being.  Quicksand is a record of Mankell’s thoughts as he goes through chemotherapy and the realization of his mortality.  He chooses, however, to dwell on the positive, the gifts that life has bestowed on him.  Although he is only 65 upon his diagnosis , he realizes that he has escaped his end many times and has had a far longer life than many people on this planet can expect. While he admits that death is always an “uninvited guest,” he puts it in perspective:

…if, like me, you have lived for approaching seventy years, longer than most people in the world could ever dream of, it is easier to become reconciled to the fact that an incurable disease has taken over your body.

Maybe.  The Bible only offers us three score and ten, but we have come to expect more.

Once Mankell tells us how he has come to terms with what has happened to him, he does a kind of life review, dwelling mostly on high points of his life.  It is not the rituals of our culture, the technical progress, nor political movements that he dwells upon; it is the wonderful people he has met who rise up despite the obstacles that civilization erects in front of them.  It is the joys of creative interaction. The book ends when chemotherapy has given him a “breathing space” (which turned out to be brief).  He says this:

I am living today in that breathing space.  I occasionally think about my disease, about death, and about the fact that there are no guarantees when it comes to cancer.

But most of all I live in anticipation of new uplifting experiences.  Of times when nobody robs me of the pleasure of creating things myself, or enjoying what others have created.

Mankell’s is a kind of gratitude journal for his life.  I hope when my final diagnosis comes, I can be so positive.  And before then, I can more often ask myself and those around me, “What are you going through?”

I recommend both these books about dying – one fiction and one non-fiction.  Neither takes us to the utter brink; no one who hasn’t been there can know and those who go over aren’t around to write about it.

For a little comic relief about aging (and you might need it at this point), this week’s story is “Closing Time.” Its title is homage to the wonderful song about the end of the party by Leonard Cohen.  Enjoy.