As much as I have used the words of Marilyn Monroe, “Die young and leave a good looking corpse,” they have always been in jest.
I don’t want to die.
To be clear, I don’t believe in an afterlife. I have the utmost respect for others’ religions, but I am not going to heaven or hell or even the Fields of Asphodel. I do not believe death is going to be a reflective period, where we look back on all the unfortunate wardrobe decisions we made in seventh grade. Because death is equivalent to nothing, I have always believed that the consciousness of life, something, must inherently be better than the vast nothingness of death. However, I don’t think most, even the religious, want to die either.
Except for Dudley Clendinen.
Already gay and a recovering alcoholic, Clendinen has maybe a year left to live. Though most diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, spend hundreds of thousands on products to increase their lifespan or take a grab-life-by-the-horns approach to their death sentence and cross everything off their bucket list (the approach I was certain I would take), Clendinen has chosen to do neither. Instead he refers affectionately to his terminal illness as, “Lou.” In his last months, he has chosen to live his life normally, and dedicate the last time he has with a functioning body to talk about death.
The friendliness with which he approaches his imminent death was shocking to me. Clendinen points out that in American culture, “we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is.” Clendinen has chosen to embrace his death, and after reading his article, I am much more in agreement with him.
Apart from having gone through a magnificent set of unique experiences, Clendinen’s persuasive power comes from a bare honesty and plainspoken tone. He doesn’t present himself as enlightened—right off the bat, the reader likes this man. “I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.”
Clendinen slowly comes around to announcing his embrace of death, first by denouncing alternative options with mechanical, un-human language. “Maintained by feeding and waste tubes, breathing and suctioning machines.” He then brings up the last years of his mother’s life, where her body suffered a similar fate his would if he attempted to cure his disease. “She was being bathed and diapered and dressed and fed, and for the last several years, she looked at me, her only son, as she might have at a passing cloud.” Clendinen drops such deeply personal experiences as this with ease, letting the reader connect to him with the same lack of difficulty.
Reading Clendinen’s words has not given me a death wish, but it has given me hope for a peace with the enormity of dying. With the final installment of the movie series in mind, I leave you with another one of my favorite death quotes (one I probably don’t use often enough) from the mouth of Albus Dumbledore; “Death is nothing but the next great adventure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/opinion/sunday/10als.html?ref=contributors
1 comment:
I have ever-changing sentiments about the prospect of death, but one thing I am sure about: nothing can rival life; because we experience it for a definite amount of time, we are aware that there is an end and therefore have the motivation to live it to the fullest. I imagine that if there is some sort of afterlife, it is an everlasting experience and thus time might as well not exist. I can imagine myself doing an eternity of nothingness, simply because the time I have left is infinite.
Although I can understand Clendinen's contentedness with the thought of dying because his body is suffering, this appears as a sign of weakness to me. I would find it very admirable if Clendinen proclaimed that he was not ready to die, and that he had yet to live his life. I once read an autobiography (I can't remember the who the author was) in which the person explained that although she was battling old age and her fair share of illnesses, she refused to die. She claimed that death had visited and had a conversation with her, resulting in her telling death she wasn't finished and he just had to wait. Of course any claim like this written by an elderly woman is likely lack validity. However, I appreciated and respected this idea.
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