There are facts about body death that you don’t think about until you are staring at someone close-er to dying than you have ever been. Agéd dying is so much different than movie dying. I am wishing for explosive blasts and car crashes and blood. Mud and dirt and tears. At this moment, I’m sure the guillotine would be a better end than body death: general organ failure.
Unlike action heroes cut down in their prime, when bodies are closer to the ashes-and-dust phase, they don’t work very well. It is shocking. Skin is like overripe peaches: easily bruised and torn away with the slightest handling. Anemic blood comes closer to resembling fruit juice.
Liquids dribble out with no force as the body weight drops and the human frame seems to become depressurized. Bloody urine is a strange bright color against the toilet edges, a wet slash down the front of the porcelain, and an awkward curve where the commode meets tile floor.
When a Body dies, the waste removal systems get clogged and sluggish, and even the pharmaceutical draino causes only momentary bursts of vile smelling, ammonia-laden stool. Valves all over the body breakdown, and past a certain point, replacing the hardware becomes pointless. Every screw is stripped, and nothing holds in. There are no anchors for attachments. They all pull out.
Tissues inside become as weak and flimsy as the skin outside. Abdominal walls tear and organs once held in place begin to spill outward, herniated bulging controlled with wide bands of elastic and ample widths of soft Velcro.
The worst is watching the person, the human inside the body, become detached from the Death of the Body. After awhile, watching your own body die, watching your own flesh lose control leads to an acceptance of the Body Death. I see in the eyes, the wanting – wanting to do certain things and not being able to do them. Wanting the Body to at least behave like a trained dog: Sit! Stand! Roll over! As these things become impossible, there is an acceptance of what can never happen on command again.
Acceptance of help, of assistance. There is help with love, there is help for pay. But thankfully, for this situation, there is help. There has been help when it was most needed. Throw money at the problem. Hired nurses, caregivers, staff. It doesn’t matter whose husband, brother, sister, cousin…get someone else to clean up as the body decays, dies, melts away flake by flake.
When the body dies but the person who has always inhabited it is not ready to die with it there is an awkward silence. An anger, a denial, and perhaps withdrawal. Detachment from the body, with all of its disgusting death throes. The here-and-now, present in the moment becomes far too painful to experience.
And so the questions, “How do you feel?” And “where does it hurt?” Become the most painful questions of all, because the real answer is “I don’t want to know.”
“I want, more than anything, to leave this body. To disassociate with this mass that disobeys and derides me at every unclear, rattling breath. That contradicts my desires in spitefulness, leaving me lying, unable to move, soaked in my cold feces.
“And so, I must tune it out. Leave it behind. Watch TV. Look at the faces of my loved ones. Leave the body behind, damn fool thing, to do whatever the hell it wants, without me. Sleeping is nice. There’s no body in dreams. I long for dreams of hauling, moving, hammering, building, riding my bicycle, dancing with my wife, and even fathering children. Any dream where my body was strong, where it did exactly what I told it, and so, we were together, body and soul, as being human should be.”
Is that what is in the dreams?
What is happening when the flickering blue-veined eyelids stretch over bulging eyeballs? What can the dying eyes still see? They still like pretty girls, as evidenced by the blonde Barbie realtor my dad picked, instead of the charming Ken doll.
The whole thing is just horrible. Not because my dad is going to die, because we all are going to die, but rather because my dad’s body will die and he won’t want to go with it. That is sad. That my father’s soul and heart will not get an option to linger behind, fulfilling whatever impetus remains of life. Whatever final adventures my father wanted to achieve.
Take the train to the Grand Canyon. See more of the world. Watch his grandchildren graduate from High School, or College. Whatever it is that was important to him, whatever his work was in this life, will he feel that he has completed it? Will he be at peace when his Body dissolves into mush – no more individualized cells, doing small jobs in harmony; instead, poisoned and broken fluids all running together inside, ending the lungs, heart, bowels.
