As I lay dying

Why do we live for 20 years, just to die for the 50 more ahead?                  -

--David Bowie

Why do we live for 50 years, Just to die for the 20 more ahead?

--Steven Weinreb

The Scream

looks similar, no?

            As I lay dying, last June, on our bedroom  sulk couch, ( every married couple’s bedroom needs a sulk couch. That or twin beds. ) watching  The Big Bang Theory reruns,  I realized I should  reread  Falkner’s opus. Turns out, I should have been reading the New Testament. Luke 23, to be exact.

            Reading As I lay dying seemed appropriate.   As a Cornell Freshman , I read Pnin, Nabokov’s  pale parody of academic life at a University  neither Ivy league nor Cow College. . I read A Movable Feast, Hemmingway’s Parisian memoirs, in the city of lights.  I tried again to read Ulysses while biking across Ireland, until  threatened by bludgeoning  from my bike mates.  

            Which brings us to  Falkner’s Gothic Southern novel. As I Lay Dying is the literary equivalent of  Munch’s The Scream, making a similar point : We live isolated in a surreal, garish world of misery  only to die alone, under the indifference of Heaven. I don’t think I’m revealing much by describing the novels’ final scene:  The recently widowed father takes money intended for his daughter’s abortion  to buy a set of false teeth  so  he can date again. Really

            The title is enigmatic. Who is dying? I assumed Faulkner was giving voice to Addie Burden, the woman who dies early on and whose rotting corpse  is conveyed across the  south,  fulfilling her wish to be buried in Jefferson.  Really. After all, she narrates one of the chapters, death hasn’t slowed her  ability to kibitz.

            On re-reading, I realized the “I” refers to us all, we all lie dying, sometimes on a red muslin couch.  Ask not for whom they televise The Big Bang Theory in the middle of the day when we should be working.  They televise it for thee. 

            I find odd comfort in this thought. I’ve been feeling singled out lately.  True, I am healing.  I am working again, but my recent life story sounds as improbable and gothic as, well, as a Faulkner novel. Have I ever met a patient who received a lethal cancer diagnosis,  failed conventional chemotherapy, experienced liver failure , went blind,  lost the use of his right leg,  and then spent 3 weeks in a hospital as  doctors struggled to treat and re-inflate an abscessed  lung?  Really.

           My self-pity is woefully misplaced, as self- pity usually is.  I have patients with stories worse than mine.  But  what binds all us pre- geezers  together  is the reality  that we all die a little when we turn 50.  We die in myriad,  sad ways. Our parents die, taking a little bit of us with them. By the start of our sixth decade,    we’ve all sat in hospice rooms with their soothing quilts. We’ve held vigils in aseptic  ICUs,  whose  cold,  electronic  lights twinkle like a sky filled with dying stars  silently going nova.

            We turn fifty and our marriages die, shattering  our illusion that we were blessed with the perfect partner,  that we were unique, we had connected with another human being on a profound level unreached since  Willie S  wrote of the  Capulets  and Montagues.  Our children leave home, taking small hunks of us with them.  And then, we start getting sick.  We all don’t  contract cancer, but rest assured,  we each have a destroying angel picked out for us, and he is coming up the driveway as we speak. He makes his appearance at the same time you get your first AARP letter.

            We were designed to die at fifty . Half  a century  gave our ancestors time to  raise kids, and  then have a little  time  left to reminisce in front of the cave over a simpler time before the invention of the wheel and how fire hasn’t really made anyone  happier, only busier.

            Dying is universal. Resignation in the face of death is not.  I know many 55 year olders, mostly men, who lie on their sulk couches, watching  football and waiting for  the Reaper to make their demise official.  Some  refuse to accept the  dying of the light and party on, with varying degrees of success.  Look at Madonna or Mick Jagger. Look at Jerry brown, California’s bald  solemn Governor  who smoked grass with girlfriend  Linda Ronstadt  40 years ago. To paraphrase Edmund Kean,  Dying is easy, reincarnation is hard.

         My own rebirth was a messy, exhausting process. I  had been a negligent  father, husband, and  friend when I was sick. Once I regained some of my strength, I embarked on a frantic  mission to prove I was whole again. We biked across the finger lakes, we spent a week at the  Mohunk resort in NY. We biked 50 miles to Northampton, to dine with Harley  and Serita, who had been so supportive when I was sick.  I worried that if every day  had become a  sacred gift,  spending an afternoon watching  The Big Bang Theory reruns bordered on the blasphemous.  Any day I didn’t witness a sunset or read a poem was a day wasted.

         My zeal was misguided. To quote Socrates: Beware the  bareness of a busy life.

.  I sought advice from someone who  actually had been resurrected. What did Jesus do when he  returned from his burial cave? Did he throw an extravagant  party?  Did He  catch  the first mule to Jerusalem to appear  at some  Mid Eastern  nightspot?  I’m sure they would have comped his drinks.          What did He do  when he returned to Earth?  First, he contacts Mary Magdaline, and then he has  brunch with friends. Really. Luke, back me up:

 he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.

I feel this is proof  Jesus was a NJB.  Upon regaining consciousness, He  immediately contacts  his girlfriend to reassure her that he  wasn’t hanging out with some  Shiksa, and then  finds friends to share brunch.    

     . The message  in Luke is clear: When you come back to life, keep things simple,  have a nice piece of fish, don’t  celebrate by  taking your son to a lovely  but exhausting  feast at an Williamsburg  Asian fusion restaurant to prove you’re an involved, loving and generous dad.  Resurrection is about making reconnections, not about  feats of  endurance and dramatic partying.

         I miss Nora Ephron. She died twice, once recently of Leukemia, making us  blood cancer buddies, She chronicled her first death in Heartburn. She  first  died  at 38 when her husband left her for another woman. She marked her rebirth not  through  a series of  extravagant affairs but by longing for her routine life:

         I love the every everydayness of  marriage, I love finding out what’s for dinner and  do we owe the Richardsons.

Just like Jesus, she longs for  a little nosh and quiet get- togethers with friends.

         We live, we die, some of us are lucky to be reborn, more or less as we were,
 but with a  quiet gratitude that will  transform the next  phase of our lives. After my brush with death, I  first resolved to  suck the life blood out of every day.  Now, I think I’ll call my brothers and sisters- in- law to see what they’re up to on this lovely, cool New England day.