Learning How to Die and Live Again

Summer Chronicle #4

We come and go every day.  Scores of us are born and scores of us die.  There is nothing special about it. 

Last year, on this exact date, I almost died of acute liver failure when my immune system turned on itself.  All my systems were collapsing—I was having trouble moving, eating, even thinking.  I lay awake in the dead of night listening to the coded alerts in the hospital, some signifying birth, others indicating more grim outcomes.  In my wing, I heard screaming, rustling, cursing, moaning, and weeping leak in from near and distant rooms.  And then, discordantly, the nursery rhyme announcing a delivery. 

It was a dance of life and death. 

In the time immediately before my transplant surgery, my wife read poetry to me in a tender voice and stroked my forehead.  My son held my hand.  I was hours away from dying, and I almost did. 

At one point, you are asked to sign a document indicating that you know you could die from the procedure.  What is your religious preference?  Who gets to make decisions for you? 

There is nothing like being wheeled away from your loved ones for what could be the last time, feeling the last kiss, the last touch of a hand, getting the last sight of their faces, and hearing the last loving farewell.  Tears do not convey the depth of the grief or the desperation of the hope.

I remember, quite vividly, the hallway on the way to the operating room as strangers were wheeling me toward an uncertain fate—the bright lights and blank ceiling, the slow steady movement of the gurney.  Being enveloped in the bustle and white noise lends the passage from room to room a surreal intensity.  I was keenly aware of everything, watching it all while living it all. 

Breathing in, breathing out.  Again and again and again. 

You are there and not there.  Vanishing into a liminal space where you finger the edge of death as you wait for the unspeakable grace of a gift from a dead person, their family mourning as you wait in limbo for hours to see if another person’s organ can save your life. 

The room is antiseptic and packed with a myriad of machines and surgical devices.  People’s voices are calm and serious.  Things are explained to you.  Then you drift into blankness, a purgatory from which you may or may not emerge.  You can’t control anything, so you surrender, yield to whatever fate awaits. 

Every year, close to 2,000 people die waiting to get this chance at a second life.  Last year, a record 10,660 people received liver transplants, 1,089 in California.  Of my fellow travelers, about twenty-five percent will die soon after the procedure or within five years. 

Making it to one-year is a big deal.  It means I’m more likely to join the seventy-five percent of people who survive five years or longer.  Many much longer than that.  How much longer?  I don’t know, but then again, neither does anyone.  It would be foolish to bank on something other than what is at this very moment. 

Of course, I am deeply grateful for the stranger’s gift, and the compassion, care, and support of many others.  I stop and sit with that and return to the touchstone of that space of suffering, absolute leveling, and deep humility as often as I can.  I savor its rawness and want only to, as Thoreau said, suck the marrow out of life from here on in.  Thus, I return home to life rather than the mindless death-in-life that we so often confuse with living. 

My recovery also took every ounce of courage, discipline, and tenacity I had to crawl my way back to health.  It was ass-kickingly grueling, sometimes humiliating, and brutalizing every day, with lots of new obstacles, setbacks, and unforeseen challenges. It was, as one nurse put it, like someone dropped a nuclear bomb on my life as it was, and I had to start over. 

But I don’t have any Horatio Alger stories for you, no triumphant affirmations, or tales of miraculous transformation.  Apologies, dear reader, I already had a tragic sense of life, had done what I could to love others and live in the moment.    

What happens to you though, when you almost die, is that your sense of yourself is utterly shattered.  

It’s one thing to think of what you mean when you say “I” as a philosophical construct; it’s quite another thing to lose it completely and have to grope your way back to the fiction of you, to perilously navigate a course in order to pull into the port of your illusory self, struggling all the while to stand on shaky legs on ground that is always shifting under your feet. 

The key to not fearing this moment is to realize that there never has been ground to stand on.  There is no “you” and “me” because, as Shunryu Suzuki says, “What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door.” 

Our breath comes in and goes out, inside and outside, coming and going.  Days, hours, seconds, waking and falling to sleep, sunrises and sunsets, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—they arise and fall and rise again. 

It all passes through us, makes and unmakes us.  Every sight, sound, taste, feeling, smell are part of the all-encompassing music of always dying and becoming.  Clarice Lispector put it this way: “I am joyful in this very instant because I refuse to be defeated: so I love.  As an answer.  Impersonal love, it love, even the love that ends.  And my own death and that of those we love must be joyful.  I don’t know how, but they must be.  That is living: they joy of the it.” 

Every pitch in the ballgame matters.  There is never a moment that is not there to be savored.  The beautiful mystery in the eyes of the others.  The madness and the magic of crowds.  The lonely, still quiet at dawn.  It’s all there, all the time.

I remember, for weeks after my surgery, fighting to roll out of bed, get dressed, and push myself to move fast enough to arrive at the hospital before the lab opened for my blood tests. Just do this one thing, I’d say to myself, just this one thing.  I slid down the stairs on my bottom and trembled through each step with the aid of a walker as I made my way to the front door and then across the street to my car.

In the cool grey morning, just after dawn, I would listen to the first song on the latest Wilco album that had become the unintentional soundtrack to my life.  When it got to the chorus, I smiled through tears:

It’s good to be alive

It’s good to be alive

It’s good to know we die

It’s good to know

Infinite surprise

Infinite surprise

Infinite surprise

Infinite surprise

And after the blood test, I willed myself back out to my car, drove home, and sat with a cup of coffee on my porch, each sip like a sacrament as I listened to the birdsong and watched the sun slowly break its way through the clouds to illuminate the green leaves on the trees and sparkle on the morning dew on the little patch of grass right there in front of me.   

Note on the Summer Chronicles:

A decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn.  Last summer, a health crisis intervened, but I made it through to the other side of that and here I am again, writing, word by word, breath by breath. 

Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:

In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil.  As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes.  The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press." 

What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles."  As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word."  It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt. 

More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe.  Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector.  So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd." 

Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.