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."