*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal July 21, 2010 ***
This entry isn't inspired by my scanning radio stations and happening across a "radiovangelist" or political commentator, as several of my blog entries are. It's inspired by my hearing a song on my at-work music library. Specifically, the song is "What Sarah Said," by Death Cab for Cutie.
I heard this song today, not for the first time, and the lyrics struck me--also not for the first time, but somehow they struck me harder than usual today.
For context, here are the lyrics. It's the last couple of lines that particularly struck me:
WHAT SARAH SAID
And it came to me then that every plan
Is a tiny prayer to Father Time
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU
That reeked of piss and 409.
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself
That I'd already taken too much today
As each descending peak on the LCD
Took you a little farther away from me
Away from me.
Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines
In a place where we only say goodbye
It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend
On a faulty camera in our minds.
But I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose
Than to have never lain beside at all
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground
As the TV entertained itself.
'Cause there's no comfort
In the waiting room
Just nervous pacers
Bracing for bad news
And then the nurse comes round
And everyone lifts their heads But I'm thinking of what Sarah said:
That love is watching someone die.
So who's going to watch you die?
Maybe I'm especially attuned to this right now because I've watched the recent episodes of Deadliest Catch on Discovery, the ones dealing with the death of Captain Phil Harris, and they've reminded me of my own father's death.
I got to thinking that while this is by no means an exhaustive definition of love, it does serve as a pretty good definition by example. Love is watching someone die.
For me, this may be a sobering way to look at things, but it is not--for me, anyway--a depressing one. It sobers me because it is so beautiful and powerful, not because it's so sad.
Watching someone die, being right there with a person when that person dies, is a beautiful, courageous, and loving thing to do. I think it's a tremendous gift both to the dying person and to the person who is watching the dying person die. It's an experience of which accidents, violence, and sudden illness can often rob us, for ourselves and for our loved ones. The loss of that experience just might be the most tragic thing of all about those ways of dying.
My brother, a few of my aunts and uncles, my stepmother, and I got to watch my father die. I don't mean we were there in the hospital room with him just before, and then the medical personnel ushered us out of the room while they worked on him before coming down the hall to inform us he was gone. I mean we were right there, gathered around his bed as he took his last breath, letting him know it was okay to let go. Barring the opportunity to have him live longer, I am enormously glad that I, and we, and he, had the opportunity to have that experience. Through most of my life I wasn't very close to my father, but in that moment none of that past distance mattered. Watching him die was one of the closest experiences we could have shared, the massive doses of morphine he was on at the time notwithstanding.
When we love someone, whether it's a family member or a friend or a romantic partner, at some level we are taking on the risk that one of us might well have to confront the death of the other. What better way to confront the death of our beloved person, or for our beloved person to confront our deaths, than to do so together when circumstances permit? How better to honor our love and connection with this person than for the one who will live on to hold the hand of the one who is dying through those final moments? What better way for the living person to begin to heal the pain of the loss than by being there to make sure that the last thing the dying person hears is the living person's "I love you?"
Certainly it can be a difficult, wrenching, painful thing to do. That's a big part of exactly what makes it such a beautiful, powerful, courageous, loving gift. "This hurts like hell," we're telling our beloved person--or we're hearing it from him or her--"and I love you enough to do it for you anyway."
For many people, the risk they take on in agreeing to love someone is ameliorated (I presume) by their belief that even after death, they will one day be reunited with their loved ones in an after-life. As an atheist, I don't believe this is true. When I die, that's it. When my loved ones die, I will not see them ever again, and they will continue to exist only in my memory and the memories of others who knew them.
You might think that this would make death even scarier and more horrible for me. Actually, it doesn't. I look at death not as an enemy but as an ally. The realization that I and everyone I love will one day die and that for any given loved one I don't know which of us will die first can be a great motivator. I don't get an "after-life mulligan;" if I want someone to know how much I love him or her, or if I want to accomplish something on my own or in the context of my connection with someone, I had better get busy doing that because this current life is the only opportunity I have. That prospect is scary, yes, and it's also--in my view--enormously hopeful. I have theist friends who have trouble grasping that, but it's true for me.
That does not mean that death is always a pleasant ally to have. Often its reminders are surprising, ill-timed by my standards, and painful. Paradoxically, that's precisely what is valuable about them.
So for the theist and the non-theist alike, the gift of watching someone die is a precious and weighty gift, not to be given or asked lightly. In each of our lives may be many casual acquaintances and high-level friends to whom we might not offer this gift, and of whom we might not ask it.
The question, then, becomes the same one from the last line of the song: Who's going to watch you die? Conversely, Whom will you watch die? Whom do you love enough to stand together at the edge of the abyss until one of you steps into it?
If not just anyone, then who? How does that list compare with the list of the people who receive your time and energy? What, if anything, does the answer to that second question tell you?
There's more to love than watching someone die, but if watching someone die is a great example of what really loving someone looks like, then it seems to me that it's a good idea to live my life and to love my loves with the awareness that I might have to live that example with my loved ones at any time.
May I be so fortunate. Mind you, I'm in no hurry whatsoever for my death or that of any of my loved ones. But death has no respect for my timetable, so I'd better get busy living and loving in the way that will give rise to the offering and asking of the gift of watching someone die.
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