Let’s Talk About Death And the life you lead up to it.
I died.
For 3 minutes, my heart stopped. I knew I was dying; I felt my heart blip out as I screamed, “I’m dying!” in the recovery room. Pretty sure everyone in the building heard me.
Do you know what they record on your medical record if you die and someone revives you? They don’t notate that you died or that your heart stopped. They only put on your medical record the before and after.
Mine reads stroke. It reads a medical term for it and some fancy terms to describe exactly what happened to me.
But you can read about it in another essay I wrote. You read that one, and then come back and read this one.
I’ll wait.
Post-Stroke: Not Like The Movies
Except my life doesn’t deliver snow-capped mountains nor breakfast each morning. My life barely delivers a morning. It is not unusual for me to wake up at 1 or 2 p.m. to begin what is my day as a post-dual-stroke patient. Fatigue is a huge part of life after stroke, life after what they now refer to as near-death, because I survived it. I sleep a lot. Well, at least in this phase of my decline.
Post-stroke life is very different from pre-stroke life. Not that I can remember with detail much of it. Most of it is blips and flashes. They are memories that float into view when my amygdala is triggered. Then, they are gone as quickly as they came. I once described it as a package of Swiss cheese. Really good Swiss cheese where the holes are all in different places on each slice. That is what my post-stroke near-death experience memories are like. Each day I take a new slice out of the package with new holes to navigate.
Pre-Stroke: Accomplished and Successful
Many would have, and likely still do, called me brilliant and successful. I lived a workaholic life. I had worked my way up to a C-suite role at a prestigious medical firm after non-profits and private firms. Tim Tebow was one of our clients.
I began my career giving CEOs and CFOs jobs and ended up sitting at the same boardroom table at the end. Accomplished in less than 10 years. Like I did with photography, I became an accomplished photographer in under 10 years. I even mingled with people like Ozzy, Amy, and Rob (that’s Osborne, Lee, and Zombie). I lived my life to work for these people.
As a touring, full-time photographer, I did my job so well that clients hired me for my work, but also liked my attitude, which was not that of a starry-eyed groupie wanting to get on the tour bus at any cost. I had no interest in that tour bus. I didn't want to get involved in the lives of those I photographed. I needed to get what they and the fans wanted. I had a job to do, and I was out.
I did the same in my corporate life. I had a job to do and I was out. I was not friends with coworkers or bosses during my career. It served me well. In my photographer years, I took on a pseudonym to put a barrier between myself and others. In my corporate life, the new name wasn’t needed. My presence was one of a no-nonsense "bulldog," as one of my vice presidents put it once.
Leaving the Corporate World For Community
I navigated the rat race of both a corporate “day” life and an artist “night” life.
Meanwhile, I built community in private as an end-of-life doula. Before the pandemic, I left my corporate job for good. A doctor diagnosed me with clinical burnout, and I wanted something different. I took on the role of a death companion full-time, and I never turned away a client, paying or pro bono. I counted my lucky stars daily. I had enough work credits to get a good amount from unemployment. After all, I had worked for a paycheck my entire life, since I was 11. I had been paying into unemployment and taxes since then. I used a part of the money I received to build a business, to be able to work pro bono as a grief coach and counselor. The rest went to family and friends who needed help.
I only stopped taking clients after both strokes. I couldn't handle others' grief while navigating my own. I had been doing it since I was 16, with one short break for my younger brother's death. It was time to nurture myself.
My Friend: Death
At 16, can you imagine the clarity I needed to navigate terminal illness and dying?
I had seen death over and over, looked it in the eye from the time I was 3. Death became an occasional companion when I saw my stepfather, my mother's husband, get shot. We became even more familiar when my friend died in 3rd grade. That was the first open casket I had ever seen. That closeness continued when my uncle died a few months after his breast cancer diagnosis. I talked to Death after it took my brother's best friend in elementary school. He had tried to save his drowning sibling. The list goes on and on.
Death became my friend, though, when my biological mother died, I was a caregiver to her over her final two years of terminal illness. I watched her decline. I watched her in active death.1
I saw and held the hand of a lot of people in active death. I watched their slow decline, their swift drop-off, and their terminal illness. I was a patient advocate for those in the last 5 years of their lives; average people like me. It didn't matter what brought them to death's door. What mattered was that they had someone to help them across the threshold. Because death itself doesn’t carry you across the threshold. Death only waits. It enters the room and waits. It witnesses, like us end-of-life caregivers do. But it does not act until the very end, once the spirit crosses the threshold. The vessel, left behind, as we must care for it, cleanse it, and bury it in the fertile ground. There, it will nurture new life. I suppose this is why I am a huge proponent of simple burials, of the choice whether to embalm2, or shrouds, and pine boxes.
Death is my partner in observation and witnessing. We are the giver and death is the receiver. We wait for the human being’s vessel to discard the soul and hand over the soul to death.
In the End: An Examined Life
But what happens in between? What happens to human beings who enter the stages of dying and know that it is happening? Are they aware of it?
Yes.
I can tell you with complete certainty that human beings are aware they are dying. The difference in the experience is the life that someone led up to it.
If you lived an examined life, the end is rather peaceful. The only part that disrupts the peace is the physical changes that occur in a short time. I will spare you the details.
I know that my biological mother examined her life. She was not a good mother. She knew this, and so did my sister and I, as we watched her settle into the end. She had already examined what she had done with her life over the course of the two years I spent as her caregiver. She did everything she could to ensure I never went hungry or without basic needs, even from her bed. Her husband was not a good person. But even he ensured that I was fed. I went to their house every other day and on weekends. They always had ribs, roast, hamburgers, veggies, fruit, and my favorite soda. She had studied how her actions starved me physically, spiritually, and emotionally in the life she forced me to lead as a child.
She had examined the harm she had done. She was willing to accept any consequences for it.
She slipped from this world to the next after 10 p.m. My sister and I were trying to open the hospice care center's front door with the keypad. My mother made sure we were not present for the final handover. I look back on it now as a gift. I am not sure I was prepared to be the final wayfarer of her soul to my old pal Death. She knew this, and so did Death.
They planned her exit together to spare my sister and me. Although I still hold her accountable on this side, I know it was her examined life that told her to let us go while we were not looking.
In the End: Too Late to Examine
But what about those who did not live an examined life? What about those who spent their lives in their human vessels harming others; trying to not only destroy others' vessels but also damage their
souls. What happens to those people?
I can only tell you what I observed. There is no pleasure in telling you this. I have never wanted anyone, even my enemies, to suffer. I have seen the worst from those who have spent their lives harming others.
They claw at life.
Most of them wait until those final hours to examine their lives, except by then it's too late. These dying people rage and rant; they curse and slur. They don't wish they had been meaner to people. There are no extra points for the havoc they wreaked on others and themselves.
They must conduct the examination on the other side with Death instead.
_____
1
Active death is the final stages of death before a human being’s body ends its cycle. We are all biological systems, therefore, clinically we have an active dying process that is staged usually by hospice or medical professionals. Death companions and end-of-life doulas manage that process between family and medical intervention. Vitas Health has a 2020 article on these clinical stages: https://www.vitas.com/for-healthcare-professionals/making-th...
2
In the US, some states do not require embalming, it is a choice in body disposition. Disposition is the term we use to describe what happens to the body, or vessel, after the soul or spirit has left.