DNR

by Dennis Green

I’ve had “extraordinary measures” taken to keep me alive. CPR, clot-busters, ventilation, (where they put a big plastic tube down your throat, pump in oxygen and drain the lungs of fluid back out), quad bypass surgery and a stent sandwich. And long ago, I signed a living will, a power of attorney and a DNR. “Do Not Resusitate.” If my heart stops again, no more CPR.

My last heart attack, my sixth, went on for about 90 minutes before the paramedics reached my side. At first, I wasn’t sure it was really happening, because the sensation was quite different from such episodes before. This pain was high on the right side of my chest, without any pain radiating down my arm, or tingling in the hands. I called Diane, she came home from her office and called 911. They were here in minutes.

But I’ve also seen people over 70, who have terminal illnesses, die a horrible death because they haven’t made their wishes known, or because they are afraid to let go, a lingering tortuous ending with restraints, ventilation, medication, intrusive and invasive procedures, the works. No way to go.

So I have the paperwork on file with Kaiser Permanente, and with my attorney, and my mind and heart have been at ease with this for quite some time now. My father, in his final years, provided the perfect role model, so at peace with his fate, so confirmed that he had lived long enough and well enough to let go gracefully.

There’s a happiness of sorts I can’t even quite describe. It’s a resting place, everywhere I go, a sense of perfect peacefulness no matter what disturbances may be going on around me. An absence of all tension, striving, anxiety, friction, any sense of being weighted down by memories or years.

“Shantih, Shantih, Shantih,” Eliot writes, “The Peace that Passeth All Understanding.” It’s the very last line in What the Thunder Said, section five of The Waste Land, a modern Upanishad, and only now am I beginning to understand that wonderful, strange, harrowing long poem, because I feel it in my very bones. Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.

Eliot saw modern culture as a vast waste land, not just television programming, but everything a reductio ad absurdum of the highest human faculties of thought and philosophy, history, rhetorics, semantics and cunning, to “The Real Housewives of Orange County.” But what has this to do with how we die?

Well, at the beginning of his poem, in Latin, Eliot describes Sybil, who has asked the gods for eternal life, but neglected to ask for eternal youth, a bag of rotting flesh hanging outside the gates of the city, teased by young boys, who poke at her with sticks and ask her, “Sybil, Sybil, what do you want?” And she respondebat “I want to die!”

The blessing that she seeks, we all seek. And in the writing of this poem, Eliot found it too. Shantih. Shantih. Shantih.

I watched on PBS the other day a debate about life extension. What, they asked, if we could live to be 200? Would we still retire at 65? How many careers would we have? Would we simply be bags of rotting flesh? Ah, I thought to myself, the old Methuselah Complex!

And I also thought, “My God! Two hundred years! No. Thank. You. God.”

©2010 Dennis Green