Staring Mortality in the Face
By Rebecca Spencer McCurdy
In January of 2018 I came very close to losing my husband of 40 years. We had gone to the emergency room at our local hospital because Jim kept “almost” passing out. While we were there and he was connected to heart monitors, he went into v.tach. For those not familiar with such matters… as we certainly were not at the time… v. tach, or ventricular tachycardia, is a rhythm dysfunction of the heart where the ventricles begin beating so fast that the pumping of the heart becomes completely ineffective. Usually, as we were told so many times, people with v.tach have no idea there is anything wrong. They just pass out and die… no pain, no warning. They are just gone.
When Jim went into v.tach while on the heart monitors, the emergency room staff appeared to go into panic mode. But Jim came out of it, and they sent him by ambulance, immediately, to a hospital with a more robust cardiac care unit. While there, he proceeded to have 200 more episodes. One of the doctors who came to Jim’s room in the cardiac care unit repeatedly said, “You should be dead.” I think he meant, “You are lucky to be alive,” which is the verbiage I would have preferred.
You would think that working for decades in hospice care would be enough to convince me of my own mortality; but apparently there are levels of understanding when it comes to perceiving one’s ultimate fate. Because and seeing my vital, strong, energetic husband face his own death, certainly took me several levels of understanding deeper.
What advantages are there to knowing you are going to die? I recently had a conversation with some friends who have lived in Thailand for many years. They said that hospice has not been able to gain a foothold there, because the culture is very closed to conversation about the end of life. There is a strong belief that talking about death invites death.
I also have many friends who have emigrated from Cameroon to the United States. They tell me the same thing about their culture. It is considered taboo to talk about the possibility of death. In Thailand and Cameroon, and perhaps many other places around the globe, the unwillingness to face death prevents them from having the kind of holistic, supportive care that many of us believe so strongly people need at the end of life.
Another advantage to knowing that you are going to die is that it allows for some really important conversation. There are some significant things we are less likely to have the chance to say to those we love most if we are pretending that we will live forever. Dr. Ira Byock, an early pioneer in palliative medicine, identified five such things. They are 1) “Forgive me,” 2) “I forgive you,” 3) “Thank you,” 4) “I love you,” and 5) “Good-bye.”
As it turns out, Jim and I don’t have to say “goodbye” quite yet, but we are being very careful not to delay saying the rest on a regular basis.
Knowing, and practicing the knowledge that we are mortal, allows us to value our lives as the precious commodities they are. It reminds us to pay attention to the moments that matter the most, with the understanding that there are only a limited number of them.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, knowledge of, and openness to, our own mortality, reminds us to attend to that which is immortal in us, because we are cognizant of the expiration date our mortal bodies are all invisibly stamped with. If part of me is fleeting and part of me is eternal, understanding which is which, is the best possible motivation for establishing my priorities wisely.