How do you write about dying when you’re still trying to learn how to live? It’s a bit like writing about a blinking halogen light that shu...
How do you write about dying when you’re still trying to learn how to live? It’s a bit like writing about a blinking halogen light that shuts off even before it has achieved brilliance. It’s caught in a loop of attempting brightness and shutting down, light and dark.
You wish the halogen light blinded you and blue-grey clouds floated before your eyes, the kind you see when you’ve stared into the sun for too long. Then, you’d have something concrete to hold on to, something to write about. But dying is the great unknowable of our existence, just like the hours before our breathing finally stops.
As I read American surgeon-writer Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End again, I kept returning to a line I’d written in a review of the book five years ago. What matters in the end is not how we die but how we live. Before we die, that is.
I kept wondering: What must the time leading up to our breath finally leaving us be like? How do we endure the pain of a terminal illness, the anxieties of leaving people behind, and the fear of the great unknowable? I kept thinking of severely ill Covid patients quarantined in ICUs,...
