water falling from the sky

The magician David Blaine has been floating in a fish bowl for a week. It was installed in the middle of Lincoln Center in New York, complete with: bright lights, medics on alert, sports-drink tubal feedings, and a hungry public. In a few moments, he’ll take a deep breath and try to break an underwater record.

Obviously David is an attention-loving drama queen. Born on April 4th, he’s an Aries fascinated with death. We have a few things in common.

Tonight there’s a terrible storm coating the Twin Cities. I can hear the thunderclouds rattling over the top of my small orange house. I’m two weeks out of surgery, recovering with a cumbersome plastic brace around my neck, so I sit here in front of the television, watching David and thinking about what I’m always thinking about.

The surgery wasn’t as horrible as I thought it’d be. The worst part was the pre-op procedure: walking into a large tiled room and taking my clothes off behind a curtain. I rolled on anti-embolism tights (TEDS, the nurses called them), and waited for my family. Several nurses walked in and out with strange pumps and clipboards and machines that took my pulse. I cried from the anxiety and from the i-v drip. The last thing I remember was being given a sedative, and smiling as I was rolled away on the hospital bed with Mark holding my hand like an extra on “ER”, and the cold feel of the lights in the operating room. That was it.

A big white space; one worth almost three hours.

I can’t recall where I was when I woke up, either, but the anesthesia and the morphine made me so sick that I spent the next three days throwing up. I couldn't take lights or movement or stimulus of any kind, and a nurse I swear was the Savior brought me earplugs against the sucking of the negative-ion fan in my hospital room. In moments of partial lucidity, I phone-called a few friends (this achieves results very similar to drunk-dialing), and yelled at Mark for smelling like Chinese food.

At home now, I spend most of my evenings in the warm womb of a Percocet-generic. My toes sometimes quiver, and it is such a funny, pleasant side effect that I dangle my feet from the side of the rental hospital bed and just feel it. This reminds me of doing ecstacy in college. It reminds me of saying “blow me up” and feeling damp handtowels covered in VapoRub draped over my face.

My days are made difficult by tasks as small as showering or sitting passenger in a car. Everything seems to make my muscles ache and the skin around my neck and head tighten. I tried to take a walk around our nieghborhood with Mark this weekend, but I couldn’t turn to look at a passing face, a flowering yard, traffic. And I fell into a rage when it took more than ten minutes to pull a bottle of water down from the shelf.

Still, it’s not so bad. The pain is not sharp or excrutiating or stinging. It is not something I can’t handle, especially when my dreamy p.m. commences.

Oh, David Blaine just failed. He’s blacked-out after 7 minutes.

Mark is pulling his paperwork together and is about to head upstairs, to where he’s been sleeping alone since the surgery. I ask him what he thinks about this stunt.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I wonder what kind of thoughts you have when you’re floating underwater for 180 hours.”

Hmm. I wonder too.

the living will

So I will be undergoing surgery; Discectomy and Fusion, to be exact. I found out two weeks ago and now–after the medical appointments, the EKG, the blood test, the nervous decision whether to go with a bone grafted from my hip or with a cadaver bone, the frantic pace at which I've been working, the telling and re-telling of it all to friends and coworkers–I'm ready. I'm ready to get wheeled into an operating room, and sleep.
I've been getting a lot of the same questions. The hospital called again today to make sure that I know what procedure I'm having and what the risks are. They asked if I had made a living will. "Yes," I said. So here it is.



MY LIVING WILL

I, "n." , a resident of the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, State of Minnesota, being of sound and disposing mind, memory and understanding, do hereby willfully and voluntarily make, publish and declare this to be my LIVING WILL, making known my desire that my life shall not be artificially prolonged under the circumstances set forth below, and do hereby declare:

l. This LIVING WILL is directed mostly to my family and my fiance, who will be aware that this is posted here, on my blog. It is also directed to my physician(s), hospital staff, my attorney, any medical facility in whose care I happen to be, and to any individual who may become responsible for my health, welfare or affairs. (Note to the President, his brother Jeb and the entire Religious Right: stay out of my life and my death.)

2. Death is the one certainty following birth. Those of us who are lucky get personal milestones (write books, have children, share a life) but, whether we achieve them or not, we all die. So please, let this statement stand as an expression of my wishes now, while I am still able to do so.

3. If at any time I should have a terminal condition and my attending physician has determined that there can be no recovery from such condition and my death is imminent, where the application of life-prolonging procedures and "heroic measures" would serve only to artificially prolong the dying process, I direct that such procedures be withheld or withdrawn, and that I be permitted to die naturally. I do not fear death itself as much as hopeless pain. I therefore ask that medication be mercifully (and copiously) administered to me and that any medical procedures be performed on me which are deemed necessary to provide me with comfort or to alleviate pain. Basically, I am a wimp when it comes to pain, so keep the meds coming.

4. In the absence of my ability to give directions regarding the use of such life-prolonging procedures, it is my intention that this declaration shall be honored by my family and physician as the final expression of my legal right to refuse medical or surgical treatment and accept the consequences for such refusal.

5. In the event that I am diagnosed as comatose, I ask that I be provided with substantial life support for a whole eight week term. (Eight is my lucky number; on its side, a figure eight symbolizes eternity, and I find that soothing. If you readers find that hokey, too bad, this is my living will.) On the first day of the ninth week, please take me off of all life support and allow me to expire.

6. I understand the full import of this declaration and I am emotionally and mentally competent to make this declaration. I feel calmer now than I have in a week. I would very much like not to die and for my family not to be put in a position where they must face my death, but in the event that I must, I hope that this directive makes their time easier.

"n.", Declarant


p.s. Mark is my witness. It is 9:30pm on Tuesday, April 18, 2006, and we're both working on our laptops at our dining room table. I just asked him to say something to prove he knows about this and he said, "I know what 'n.' wants to happen if she turns into a vegetable." Nice.



I feel like I'm on a roll, and I have a thought or two about how my funeral should go, so here...

MY FUNERAL DIRECTIVE

1. I would like to be an organ donor. However, I'd like an open casket viewing, so surgeon(s), please be kind with the harvesting.

2. A full-service funeral is for me. Included should be the traditional wake, the parade that follows the hearse to the cemetery and a proper burial. I do NOT want to be cremated. (I visited a crematory on a high school theology class trip, and have been shocked about the process since then.)

3. Please have my casket lined with bright pink, high-thread-count sateen cotton sheets. I recognize that this sounds frivolous, but it amuses me now to think that if I'm going to have to prematurely R.I.P., I'll be doing it in comfort. I love my current high-thread-count sheets and I love pink, so make it happen. The material of the casket is less important, so plastic, plywood, whatever.

4. I would also like a few of my favorite books buried with me. (Neruda poems, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Story of O) And, I would like my short stories and my favorite pen (the one Mark gave me) stuffed in the casket somewhere. Please also tuck my leopard-skin boots into the coffin; they seem to be such a staple as to who I am. And don't forget to add a photo of my parents, my sisters, Mark and also Stitch (and Huck, possibly).

5. I can't decide what I should wear, so I'll allow my family and my fiance to decide. One moment, I believe that wearing my wedding dress seems right, and the next, I'm thinking that maybe something more comfortable (silk pj's?) would be better. It's the same ol' female dilemma, multiplied by forever. Ugh. What I do know about my looks is that I'd like my hair down, over my shoulders. Please ask Mark to find me a "tiara" to match whatever I'm wearing; he'll know what I mean.

6. I'd love to be placed in a mausoleum or in a plot with a wrought-iron fence around it, in an old sleepy cemetery somewhere in the South. Florida seems an obvious choice, but I really need to be interred in a place that doesn't look like one of those new, cookie-cutter cemeteries. The Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah is a perfect example of what I have in mind. There are ancient trees with Spanish moss, beautiful antique gravestones and Johnny Mercer's grave. Do the best you can. And keep in mind I'll haunt you all if you f-up my requests.

7. Re my tombstone: I've always loved the stones that have angels carved on top. Please write on it my accomplishments. I prefer "Fucking awesome diva art director princess" to "Daughter of blah-blah-blah, etc." Also include the Neruda that was to be engraved on my wedding ring.

8. Mark, please play the guitar for me. I love you terribly. Mami & Daddy, your primijenita loves you. Don't be sad; you gave me a beautiful family life and made me who I was. Toads, I know you'll be a huge success and a wonderful mother. I'll be watching. Luli, you're the best. You are so much like me (believe it or not), so work hard and live hard, and I'll be living through you.

"n.", Declarant

mortality watch (continued)

The New Yorker [Apr.3], in a Medical Dispatch article called "Being There", discusses whether or not family members should be permitted to hang out in emergency rooms while their loved ones are resuscitated and/or die. It comes up in the piece that Americans today are equipped to handle the gore of splitting ribs and tracheotomies and such that are done as last measures in emergency rooms. It's because we watch "ER" and "Rescue 911" and though not mentioned–but undoubtably connected–because we played games like Quake in our college dorm rooms and now spend our paychecks on the newest version of Halo.

I don't think this is a bad thing. I prefer a culture of music without censored lyrics and a society that isn't forced to be Pleasantville. I deeply wish that we were able to explore the subjects and creativity of European advertising and television programming. I think that, in general, when the doors and the shutters are blasted open and light fills up every crevice of our world, things get better. To hell with mystique... a strip club with its lights on is not seedy, it is not sexy, but it is true.

Mark and I had lunch in an Ecuadorian polleria after my hospital visit last week, and we watched a spanish-language news show while we ate our chicken. "More dead in Mexico", the voiceover declared, and the tv screen filled up with the image of a pickup truck, bullet holes out the back window and a body slumped in the truckbed. We could only make out the dead's arm, the arm of a man in a light blue flannel. Mark's reaction surprised me; he wondered with borderline disgust if the cameras were going to get any closer to the dead, and immediately this reminded me of the controversy around showing the flag-draped coffins of our war dead on the nightly news. So what would it mean to face death with the lights on?

The very first thought coming out of the gates of this question is that we'd all be even more desensitized and violent. Death wouldn't be such a big deal, would it? Not when we're all watching an electric chair electrocution with the fam over dinner, and raising our little death-aware, trenchcoat-mafia toddlers. But the fact is, it just isn't much of a big deal now, when you can upload as much Marilyn Manson as you want to your iPod, or beat up a prostitute on GTA San Andreas, or get your own boxed set of Faces Of Death for $69.98 and watch it while debating whether the terrorist attacks of September 11th (2,986 dead) or the American acts in the Iraq War (2,327 dead) are worse. This post, itself, began as a result of the mortality-related headlines I was noticing.

So truly, death surrounds us, but we're not really seeing it. We are fascinated by costume death-the blood and the gore–but often we do not connect with the moment that the brain shuts down and the heart stops and the life has ended. Putting our arms around how to deal with that, how to face it or react to it, is still difficult. That is still traumatic, and we avoid it, for example, by not allowing ourselves to see real death on the news or by making rules that keep us out of the emergency room.

Death illuminated would mean taking in the very important experience of human mortality at the cost of some naivete that we are obviously already willing to give up.

I think in some ways we're like a bunch of primitives, hiding from lightning and never learning that it is a current that jumps from cloud to cloud, never harnessing electricity or knowing how to grow from it. I'll end this thought the way the article in The New Yorker did, with the quote of hospital manager: "I would want to be [in the emergency room]. Even when they start putting in the lines, or taking blood, or putting in a chest tube, or doing a resuscitation... Suppose you had the opportunity to spend the last three minutes on earth with your wife. She is semi-concsious and she is probably going to die. Would you want to say a few words to her, or would you rather be someplace else? I think most people would say they want to be with her."

synchronicity, mortality

This week I've had to contend with hospital visits, X-rays, MRIs, and all the other fun things that come along as a result of a malformed c5 vertebra. I've experienced the tingly fingertips, and the acute back pain and the SOMA drug trips. It's nothing serious (just some pinched nerves), but it's becoming an incredible lesson in the value of my life, appropriately arriving at the cusp of my 29th birthday.

Let's chat Synchronicity first. I remember the college Ethics class where the word first came up, and The Artist's Way that I used to quote like the bible, and that book I adopted afterward, The Celestine Prophecy. I must've used "synchronicity" a million times in the days when I was working as an artist's apprentice in South Florida, and I can almost recall word-for-word a conversation I had with a boyfriend about the difference between "synchronicity" and the more frivolous, pedestrian "serendipity". ("By coincidence and by accident are, like, totally different things," I'm sure we told each other.) Well, a few days ago, sitting in the passenger's seat of my own car as I'm being driven to the pharmacy for the second time in forty-eight hours, I found myself thinking of Synchronicity again.

The thing is, I've been picking up bits about death and dying recently. A lot of them. One friend just told me about a co-worker who, though he's in his 30's, is dying of cancer. My writing group is critiquing a (really great, honest and riveting) story about caskets and suicide. Yesterday on Oprah (which I don't watch, but which happened to be on in the lobby at work, where I found myself working on a project for a couple of hours), there was an update on the woman who, after finding out she was terminally ill, made videos of herself dispensing advice to her baby daughter. (The daughter is now a lovely 13 year old, and her father is about to remarry.) And as a captive audience during the 20-minute MRI, I heard an NPR piece about a man who recorded a "journal" of his deterioration from the moment he learned he had an inoperable brain tumor to the day he could no longer form coherent sentences.

I could come up with many more examples, but the point is that death seems to be all around me lately, and I wondered, is mortality a subject that is really coming up more than usual? Or am I just more sensitive to it now that I am feeling sick and scared, the way that I started noticing more Scion xB's after I got one of my own?

I decided to keep open to death-related news and here are some things I've discovered...

The bird flu is going to infect/kill free-range poultry first, because, ironically, the chickens are able to run around in less-protected areas. [CityPages]

According to People magazine [Apr.3], Andrea Yates recently learned of her June 22 capital murder retrial (and her ex-husband's new marriage), a man named David Swain may have killed his wife while scuba diving on vacation, there's more "shocking evidence" surrounding Princess Diana's death (like, an illegal embalming procedure may have hidden a pregnancy) and the super-elegant, amazing fashion designer Oleg Cassini just passed away.

American military casualties in Iraq since the start of the war (in March of '03) has reached 2,327. [antiwar.com]

Nobody knows where the man who invented the ferris wheel–G.W. Ferris–was buried. [picked this up in a coversation]

On CNN...the last Pope's last words were "read me the Bible", an earthquake killed 66 Iranians, the wild coyote who was captured in NYC died while being released, and the guy who played "Zorro" on tv is recently deceased.

And for something too fucked up to describe, check out www.LifeGem.com

So, I'm discovering these things as I'm being illuminated into the "quirks" of my body, the things that I cannot change, the things that I'll have to learn to live with and that will affect the kind of life I lead. I'm also about to celebrate my birthday, and I'll be doing it with my first grey hair and ten pounds too many. I'm a little down on me (on how few friends I keep in touch with, on how messy my closet is, on how much tension I carry around every day) and I can't help feeling that all the data I've been collecting lately is more than just random happenstance. My brain is trying to make out the pattern, it's squinting at this bizarro connect-the-dots, but I haven't come up with the life lesson yet...

the human condition

It's been a long, long time since I last wrote, mostly because I've been busy at the agency. In these productive few months, my partner and I have developed an idea for a documentary film, as well as produced ads for: an agricultural bank, a workboot company, a therapeutic pet food, and our state lottery. But, I missed writing, so here I am.

By now, everyone should be familiar with Post Secret (postsecret.blogspot.com, for those of you who've been hiding under a rock). It's a brilliant idea, and I enjoy checking in every now and again to realign myself with the human condition. I'm going to borrow their concept for this, my first blog in a few months.

So here they are, some secrets of mine:

• I once believed wholeheartedly that I'd wait until I got married before having sex; this idea lasted until I was 15.

• An ex sent me an email to say that he and his wife are having a baby, and this made me cry, not because I miss him or want him back, but because I want him to be unhappy without me.

• I'm $600 past due on my student loan, but I'm going to spend my next paycheck on something else. Something girly.

• Every time I'm driving, I call someone so that I won't have to be alone with my thoughts.

another run-on because i'm in the mood

A “Francophile”. That’s what she tells everyone she is, but the truth is that even after looking up the word, she can’t be completely certain that “a person who admires France, its people, or its culture” describes the braid of craving in her stomach, the way she hugs herself, digging the tip of her nails into the soft side of her arms, when on her way out the door each day, her gaze lands on the photograph–the one taken on the Rue de Rivoli where daddy’s eyes are two dark horizons, bent at the ends in their joy, and his smile is so open that his pink gums make a second set of lips–the one that makes her hope, dream, long for a moment like that–lover to lover–and that makes her wonder if it’ll ever be possible with Luke, or if like Daddy, she’ll have to wait until her spouse dies to walk with that strange sort of self-assurance, to pout and to laugh and to curse out loud, to drink wine every night until her lips are stained dark and to roam free–really free–with an adolescent lover, which of course makes her think, oh no (oh yes) how very French.

run-on memorial

On Sept. 11, 2002, I was in New York. These are my thoughts about the tribute given on that day.


I’ve watched all the specials filmed in black-and-white with the National Anthem playing softly in the background and tonight, I heard the Anthem again, sung in waves by the Opera and watched as the Prima Donna reached for the orphaned child–the one that had been chosen specially for this–and I heard the crowd murmur, “how moving” and I overheard the journalists say, “how moving”, but I really hadn’t been witness to anything moving at all until the moment when the quiet memorial was lit–all 176 bulbs that are a ghost of the souls, and flesh lives, and pieces of days that so many widow now–and whose shining beams became brighter and whiter as the seconds wore, so that I felt called-out, transparent, a cynic gleaming in the pearly light.

permanent ink

I came across this about last year and dismissed it as a far-fetched idea. Today, I ran into an article about it again, and thought I'd share...

Writer Shelley Jackson's story, "Skin" is to be written on the bodies of willing participants. Each participant must agree to have one word of her story tattooed upon his/her body. The text will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium. The full text will be known only to participants, who receive their word by mail only after signing up.

1780 of the 2095 participants she needs have already signed up. For more info, go to: http://ineradicablestain.com/skin.html

I thought about volunteering for about a millisecond. With my luck, I'd get the word: "moist".
Or, "cockqueanan". Or "shuttlecock", "crud", "pungent", "onomatopoeia", "vomitory", "feces", "gangrene", "encroach", "Uranus", "fat"...