DYING AS A FULL-TIME JOB

When I was five I was terrified after hearing about some elderly relative who died in his sleep. Peaceful it might have been, but ontologically distressing. I didn’t want to die in my sleep at any age. How would I know I was dead?

Now, however, death has become a curriculum, like getting a Bachelor’s degree. Four years of exams and all your family’s savings. I learned this the hard way after I was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a deadly bone marrow disease. But could I gasp and complain on my own comfortable bed like Ivan Ilych? No. There were IV’s and X-rays and interminable doctors’ appointments, white walls and cold corridors, long needles and chalky pills. After only a couple weeks I was exhausted. Not so much from the illness as from the effort to treat it.

Characters in literature died quickly, as did most real people before the advent of modern medicine. Even the tiresome deathbed scenes in Victorian novels only last a few pages. But I was facing long chapters before the end of my tale. No chance of dying in my sleep, because I couldn’t sleep. I recalled Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain. There was a character who took years to die. But she hardly had to work at it. Get her temperature taken a few times a day, an X-ray here and there. And she was hanging out in the Swiss Alps. I was in Cleveland with a view of the helipad.

What happened to the rest cure? To mineral springs and grand hotels with casinos where invalids in tuxedos could smoke cigars and play roulette while waiting for the reaper to grab them like some spectral croupier?

Had this then become the morbid conclusion to the American work ethic, that we had to work hard even to die? After a while I concluded the responsible response to this laborious and inefficient process was to survive it. Death was simply taking too much of my time.