It's strange how one can go from total confidence to utter anxiety while soaring through the air in a titanium tube with wings. One's adventurous nature dissolves with every provocative bump the turbulence produces--images of the sky pouring into the fuselage around you as the plane rips to shreds and the blue ocean becomes visible beneath your feet as you suddenly realize that your body is at terminal velocity and the only thing you can relish in is the fact that if Usain Bolt were also on this flight you might finally be able to tie him in some kid of a race. I also think about how annoying it would be to die in the cold waters of the Atlantic; not the fact that if I had managed to survive the fall in the first place, considering that hopeful (and naive) belief that somehow my heart would stop working in mid air because my body knows I'm about to die and wants to spare me the suffering, that I would be floating above countless carnivorous creatures that wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a surfer and seal. Being rent to shreds by a pod of orcas or a gam of sharks sounds romantic, when you hold it next to the thought of freezing to death in the ocean after falling out of the sky. Just think about Titanic. They had to add romance to Jack's death scene to make you ignore the fact that there was enough space for both of them to survive on the plank of wood, and especially the fact that Jack may have struggled a little more to survive than he did even if he loved this woman society would never allow him to marry. Imagine the other lonely saps on the Titanic who didn't have a giant plank of wood to rest on, or an aristocratic lover to send them down into the abyss.
I'm not afraid of flying, the images listed above popped into my head while I was flying because I disagree with the way we portray death. There's this false narrative about the way we die. I've been around death and dying for about fifteen years now, (if you add up the time I spent in the fire department in El Paso and my subsequent years in nursing) to realize that we just don't die that way. You don't get shot in the belly and die instantly. You don't fall out of plane and die of shock. I men what the hell is this shock thing anyway? (I don't mean the shock we refer to in the medical community I mean the one we see in movies were there's an uninjured person sitting on the back of an ambulance staring off into the distance with a blanket wrapped around them, rocking back and forth) We die because our brain stops getting the nutrients it requires, in the form of glucose and oxygen. So if you get shot in the heart, the heart doesn't work, then there's no blood flow to the brain, the brain tissue dies, and when enough of it dies, kaput! What does this mean? It means that unless you get shot in the brain stem there is no instant death. In theory, the only credible portrayals of death are those seen on the Walking Dead when the living characters kill the undead ones. SURPRISE they're already dead! This isn't a rant on the evils of T.V. It would suck to watch people die over long realistic periods of time, so for the sake of cinema i'll suspend my disbelief. I'm only referencing this now so that you can understand my state of mind. Recently I have started to imagine what that moment would be like. That precise second when you're not drugged up on morphine or juiced up on adrenaline, and your body can do nothing more than fail at trying to survive.
Bear with me, por favor. I know this is morbid. I'm at a Starbucks. That's morbid too. At a Starbucks in Barcelona. I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's the only place, that is empty enough for me to hide in without being harassed for not buying anything more than a coffee. I just got back from my Pittsburgh/NYC trip. The topic stems from there. I have a friend who's terminally ill. Terminally ill with a disease that has completely limited his ability to enjoy life in any way that he deems meaningful. He has little to no intestine and is unable to absorb nutrients and is TPN dependent.(he gets his food through an IV). This is also coupled with severe, chronic pain. He has been ill as long as I have known him, and he is going to die next month. I went to see him. I said my piece to him, and now it's time for me to come back to reality, with the understanding that the tearful goodbye at the top of his stairs will be the last time I see him alive.I'd describe it as a proactive death. He knows, and because of this he can tell others, and day goodbye.
The first of my friends is about to die. Morrissey, and the ill-fated Hector come to mind.
After a flight from Mallorca to JFK, and a bus ride from New York to Pittsburgh There was no pretense. No façade. He was the same, eloquent person I had met ten years ago. The paragon of Sri Lankan refinement, only much thinner. I found him having his morning tea, I grabbed myself a cup and took a seat. He chided me within a few minutes of the start of our conversation. It was not for abandoning him these long years over the ensuing shame that stemmed from my divorce, but it seemed to come from a deep sense of compassion. He was worried about me, about the unknowns of my future.
"Jorge, you have to learn how to compromise. Learn, before you become too set in your ways. Learn before you get too old. Learn before something, like a kid, forces you against your will to make a compromise" He went on to say that it was easy for me to uproot myself whenever I didn't want to give in to someone else. He said, "You're handsome, charming, and intelligent." (I'm not making this up I swear) "These things are your weakness. It's easy for you to start over because people are receptive to you, but what would happen if you were met with a situation you could not escape? What then?"
So how does one compromise? A compromise, assuming there are two or more parties who have to decided what to do, is deciding to do something that pleases all involved, or displeases all parties equally when their options are incompatible. The ideal compromise is the one that pleases everyone involved.Win win. Now considering this, how do we take into consideration the unbridled pursuit of our dreams? Because that's like totally the meaning of life, right? The truth is I don't know. Sorry. There's no wisdom to be bestowed, I'm only writing about this because it was something that he told me, and it made me slightly uncomfortable; I knew, for that reason, that there had to be truth to it. Besides if I was able to answer the question in my first blog post, it would be like the character in a horror film deciding to lock the basement door, and call the cops, instead of walking down the stairs to see where that eager groaning and metallic scrapping sound were coming from.
In truth I imagine the answer is balance. It's always balance. You have to know when to compromise, and when not. I can figure neither out.
I would say that the most difficult part of my stay with him was watching his friends and family come spend a day or two in his company, and then say goodbye: cousins, aunts, nieces, and godchildren. It was difficult because I knew that I too, would have to say goodbye. Even if I had decided to stay until the very end. I watched as they took all of their grief and emotion, translated it into a conversation about the inner workings of their daily lives, and poured it all out until he had heard the very last drop. He's a great listener, and for that reason it's almost impossible to learn anything about him. I imagine that the visitors arrived, as I did, with the intention of listening, but in the end found themselves recounting their lives.
He always tricks you into speaking. I had to force myself to not fill the silence with my stupid babbling, because I knew that I would only be able to see and hear him for the next few days. I would hear myself, unfortunately, until the day of my death, seeing as there's no way to escape the sound of my internal narrator. I'm glad I listened. He told me about a place in Sri Lanka, an opening in mountains, a nook that looked like the Scottish moors, where he had gone as kid to camp. It was the time that he learned, after their guide made a wrong turn and found himself in front of an entire herd of water buffalo, that the most dangerous animals on the island weren't the leopards. That night they slept in an enclosed courtyard to protect themselves from the leopards and the elephants. The thing that he remembered most was the way the elephants reached into the courtyard with their trunks and pried about. "I remember reaching up and feeling the warmth of their breath on my hand." He said to me one night while we looked through his yearbook. The faces of the boys from his old school hiding among the dense foliage must have triggered his memory, but I was glad he shared it with me.
Before leaving for my trip I was worried about what the holiday itself would be like. Spending two weeks with your terminally ill friend doesn't sound like it would be on anybodies top five plans for the new year. It sounds painful. When I received the message from him telling me he had set a date to enter hospice I decided to go. I knew I had to go. I understood and supported his decision. I mean how many people are able to both end their suffering and yet bring about a sense of closure? The sheer unpredictability of death makes it impossible. When you're unsure about the date of your death, you're willing to part with precious time, to waste it might be the better way to say it. We wantonly give hours and even years of our lives to persons, places, careers, and things that make us miserable. It is only when death rears its head that we can recognize that the days of our lives are a currency that can be cashed and never deposited.
I'm grateful that he was able to spend a bit of his time on me.
I'm not afraid of flying, the images listed above popped into my head while I was flying because I disagree with the way we portray death. There's this false narrative about the way we die. I've been around death and dying for about fifteen years now, (if you add up the time I spent in the fire department in El Paso and my subsequent years in nursing) to realize that we just don't die that way. You don't get shot in the belly and die instantly. You don't fall out of plane and die of shock. I men what the hell is this shock thing anyway? (I don't mean the shock we refer to in the medical community I mean the one we see in movies were there's an uninjured person sitting on the back of an ambulance staring off into the distance with a blanket wrapped around them, rocking back and forth) We die because our brain stops getting the nutrients it requires, in the form of glucose and oxygen. So if you get shot in the heart, the heart doesn't work, then there's no blood flow to the brain, the brain tissue dies, and when enough of it dies, kaput! What does this mean? It means that unless you get shot in the brain stem there is no instant death. In theory, the only credible portrayals of death are those seen on the Walking Dead when the living characters kill the undead ones. SURPRISE they're already dead! This isn't a rant on the evils of T.V. It would suck to watch people die over long realistic periods of time, so for the sake of cinema i'll suspend my disbelief. I'm only referencing this now so that you can understand my state of mind. Recently I have started to imagine what that moment would be like. That precise second when you're not drugged up on morphine or juiced up on adrenaline, and your body can do nothing more than fail at trying to survive.
Bear with me, por favor. I know this is morbid. I'm at a Starbucks. That's morbid too. At a Starbucks in Barcelona. I'm ashamed to admit it, but it's the only place, that is empty enough for me to hide in without being harassed for not buying anything more than a coffee. I just got back from my Pittsburgh/NYC trip. The topic stems from there. I have a friend who's terminally ill. Terminally ill with a disease that has completely limited his ability to enjoy life in any way that he deems meaningful. He has little to no intestine and is unable to absorb nutrients and is TPN dependent.(he gets his food through an IV). This is also coupled with severe, chronic pain. He has been ill as long as I have known him, and he is going to die next month. I went to see him. I said my piece to him, and now it's time for me to come back to reality, with the understanding that the tearful goodbye at the top of his stairs will be the last time I see him alive.I'd describe it as a proactive death. He knows, and because of this he can tell others, and day goodbye.
The first of my friends is about to die. Morrissey, and the ill-fated Hector come to mind.
After a flight from Mallorca to JFK, and a bus ride from New York to Pittsburgh There was no pretense. No façade. He was the same, eloquent person I had met ten years ago. The paragon of Sri Lankan refinement, only much thinner. I found him having his morning tea, I grabbed myself a cup and took a seat. He chided me within a few minutes of the start of our conversation. It was not for abandoning him these long years over the ensuing shame that stemmed from my divorce, but it seemed to come from a deep sense of compassion. He was worried about me, about the unknowns of my future.
"Jorge, you have to learn how to compromise. Learn, before you become too set in your ways. Learn before you get too old. Learn before something, like a kid, forces you against your will to make a compromise" He went on to say that it was easy for me to uproot myself whenever I didn't want to give in to someone else. He said, "You're handsome, charming, and intelligent." (I'm not making this up I swear) "These things are your weakness. It's easy for you to start over because people are receptive to you, but what would happen if you were met with a situation you could not escape? What then?"
So how does one compromise? A compromise, assuming there are two or more parties who have to decided what to do, is deciding to do something that pleases all involved, or displeases all parties equally when their options are incompatible. The ideal compromise is the one that pleases everyone involved.Win win. Now considering this, how do we take into consideration the unbridled pursuit of our dreams? Because that's like totally the meaning of life, right? The truth is I don't know. Sorry. There's no wisdom to be bestowed, I'm only writing about this because it was something that he told me, and it made me slightly uncomfortable; I knew, for that reason, that there had to be truth to it. Besides if I was able to answer the question in my first blog post, it would be like the character in a horror film deciding to lock the basement door, and call the cops, instead of walking down the stairs to see where that eager groaning and metallic scrapping sound were coming from.
In truth I imagine the answer is balance. It's always balance. You have to know when to compromise, and when not. I can figure neither out.
I would say that the most difficult part of my stay with him was watching his friends and family come spend a day or two in his company, and then say goodbye: cousins, aunts, nieces, and godchildren. It was difficult because I knew that I too, would have to say goodbye. Even if I had decided to stay until the very end. I watched as they took all of their grief and emotion, translated it into a conversation about the inner workings of their daily lives, and poured it all out until he had heard the very last drop. He's a great listener, and for that reason it's almost impossible to learn anything about him. I imagine that the visitors arrived, as I did, with the intention of listening, but in the end found themselves recounting their lives.
He always tricks you into speaking. I had to force myself to not fill the silence with my stupid babbling, because I knew that I would only be able to see and hear him for the next few days. I would hear myself, unfortunately, until the day of my death, seeing as there's no way to escape the sound of my internal narrator. I'm glad I listened. He told me about a place in Sri Lanka, an opening in mountains, a nook that looked like the Scottish moors, where he had gone as kid to camp. It was the time that he learned, after their guide made a wrong turn and found himself in front of an entire herd of water buffalo, that the most dangerous animals on the island weren't the leopards. That night they slept in an enclosed courtyard to protect themselves from the leopards and the elephants. The thing that he remembered most was the way the elephants reached into the courtyard with their trunks and pried about. "I remember reaching up and feeling the warmth of their breath on my hand." He said to me one night while we looked through his yearbook. The faces of the boys from his old school hiding among the dense foliage must have triggered his memory, but I was glad he shared it with me.
Before leaving for my trip I was worried about what the holiday itself would be like. Spending two weeks with your terminally ill friend doesn't sound like it would be on anybodies top five plans for the new year. It sounds painful. When I received the message from him telling me he had set a date to enter hospice I decided to go. I knew I had to go. I understood and supported his decision. I mean how many people are able to both end their suffering and yet bring about a sense of closure? The sheer unpredictability of death makes it impossible. When you're unsure about the date of your death, you're willing to part with precious time, to waste it might be the better way to say it. We wantonly give hours and even years of our lives to persons, places, careers, and things that make us miserable. It is only when death rears its head that we can recognize that the days of our lives are a currency that can be cashed and never deposited.
I'm grateful that he was able to spend a bit of his time on me.
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