The Mundanity of Dying: Part Four
“I can’t even cross the room without gasping for breath.”
“You need to go to the doctor.”
“I’ve been to the doctor. You were there.”
“That was three weeks ago.”
“The doctor won’t answer the phone!”
“I’ll come pick you up and take you to the urgency room right now.”
“No, I won’t go.”
This was the conversation I had with my father this morning. It’s a frustrating and annoying circle to dance around yet we seem to do it every other day. He feels miserable but refuses help.
Thanatos. The death drive, as Freud put it. Of course, here it’s not some metaphor or framework but an acute and persistent desire for the end of life. Faith won’t let him simply kill himself and so he neglects his ailments, yet he cannot help but complain about them to anyone nearby.
It often feels like arguing with a toddler.
Every week, his health gets worse. Every week, he keeps surviving. He lashes out because of the pain, the difficulty of being shackled in his body, but it’s hard to feel anything but frustration.
The very first essay I posted here discussing my dad’s failing health and the eventuality of his death.
God of War: God of Games
I never played the many previous God of War games. I’ve heard they’re fun and exciting and brutal fighting games — and I love fighting games — about the Greek pantheon — and I love dead gods — so I knew they were likely the kind of game I’d love to love to talk about because I’m the kind of insufferable fool who will tell you about how Orpheus birthed S…
That was four years ago.
We’ve been watching him die for four years, but especially for the last two. We cannot help him. He will not help himself.
And so we all sit here, waiting. We sit here hoping and hating that hope.
Should we hope for his death? What kind of person does that? What kind of person would hope that their own father would die?
If there was hope that he’d get better, we’d hope for that. We’d hope for him to improve and maybe gain another decade of his life.
But if he lives another decade of pain, is that a kindness? For anyone?
What do we hope for?
What do we pray for?
What is death but the end of pain? The end of agony.
A gift to one who has sought it for the better part of a decade. A man who seeks his everlasting reward in heaven, who receives the Last Rites nearly once a month, convinced each time that he’s caught in his final moments.
Imagine believing in your final moments of life for years? Trapped in this spectral liminal space between an agonizing life and the promise of eternity. The way this curdles the mind, the way the strokes have carved holes in his brain, the way the encephalitis he suffered when he was seventeen dug ravines into his neural landscape.
Death keeps calling me
She’s gonna set me free
But when. When will Death wrap her hands round my father and say enough is enough?
And what must we do until then?
Goddamn. This was brutal.