In a recent Writer’s Diary,
writes:Modernity convinces us that there’s a means to control everything in our lives; that there are mechanisms to control both the nature outside of us and within. There are pills, apps, machines, as well as ideological rules and social mores that promise to ameliorate the most frightful and wooly aspects of being alive, being an animal in a complex social reality. This pills, apps, machines can work for awhile, or seem to be, but at the cost of our complete disabling; before too long, we’re dependent on them, can’t function without them. The control freak is born out of the terror of realizing there is no real agency over uncertainty, and that whatever native strength one has has been un-trained.
This is very true, and puts me in mind of what has long seemed to me the most pressing of our current “intimations of deprival”—to adapt a phrase from the Canadian political philosopher (or, better, student of political philosophy), George Grant. The “deprival” in question is, in some sense, the deprival of death, of death as something outside our control yet casting its shadow over our lives; the deprival consists in the wish to remain in touch with this outside force being reduced to an arbitrary personal preference, like “natural birth,” or, as the wish diminishes further, a quaint predilection, as for vinyl records and rotary phones.
I first thought of this vividly upon reading Sheila Heti’s recent book Pure Colour—or, before that, an essay that relates the same experience, the death of the writer’s father. This death, as portrayed in both works (perhaps more compellingly in the essay than the novel) is an occasion of vigil, of ritual, of rite of passage.
“Recollecting the bedroom in which my father died,” Heti writes in the essay,
I also primarily see colors, as George did in recalling that canvas. I do not see the sharp line where the wall becomes ceiling but rather a swirling of the deepest greens and maroons, from my brother’s covering the windows with posters and towels, and the slight flickering yellow of the beeswax candle that my brother and I put on the dresser. And the brighter light that flooded in from the hall. The nurses came and went. My brother and I turned our father’s body over and helped him move his legs. His eyes were generally closed that week. His mouth was very dry. My brother and I sat on opposite sides of the bed, looking at each other across it with wide eyes, staring, often not knowing what to do. My mind needs only to glance back on the week my father was dying to feel a trembling at the terrible magnificence of life and death—it is how I imagine the religious feel when they contemplate the majesty of God. The memory of that week threatens to take over everything: every single memory of my father and every understanding I have of life.
In the novel, this scene is transposed from the hospital (where I take it Heti’s father died in real life, as the “nurses” and “brighter light that flooded in from the hall” suggest) to the family home, but without notable increase in “magnificence.” In both, there is the sense of a task to which one has been summoned, of which one must show oneself worthy. The beeswax candle on the dresser, amidst the siblings’ vigil, is not far off from the rite of carrying a lighted candle from one end to another of a sunken pool in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. There is the sense of death, when it comes, as something earned—earned by both the dying man and his children, and in the nature of a culmination. (Hence perhaps the rather discomfiting coda the episode receives in the novel, where, after her father’s death, the protagonist Mira realizes she has felt “his spirit ejaculate into her.”)
Pure Colour was published in 2022. The autobiographical essay appeared in January 2020. Between those two dates, the federal government of Canada, where Heti lives, passed Bill C-7, which extended the legality of euthanasia, which had been legally available to the terminally ill since 2016, to a broader set of “patients,” including those with disabilities and chronic conditions. (Chronic conditions that, in one widely publicized case, apparently include homelessness—a shocking turn that should not be shocking at all, given recent years’ extreme latitude for metaphorical applications of medical concepts, whether that of “trauma” or “epidemic.”) The possible extension of legal euthanasia to sufferers from mental illnesses—infallibly to be distinguished, I am sure, from the sorrow and pain of life—is currently being studied. The discourse of “accessibility” adds a new layer of euphemism to what already seems a triple veil: “MAiD,” standing in for “Medical Assistance In Dying,” itself standing in for the now apparently strengthless original euphemism, “euthanasia” itself.
There is, as always, much to be said, and much opportunity to be glib. It is not lost on me that “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”—to speak of suddenly quaint things—is a son’s poem, not a father’s; its wish is for the heroic perpetuation of a strength now, presumably, already broken. But whatever caution one must have in speaking about what, as one of the living, one has by definition not experienced, I am certain there is a vast gulf to be crossed between what has long been the lay practice of easing the dead upon their final journey—I think here of Paul Morel and his sister, giddy from nights and nights of waking, feeding their mother a dish of milk with an overdose of morphia after nights of suffering in Sons and Lovers—and the emergent regime. And I am just as certain that, when a family member of mine recently told me, unbidden, that “hospice care in the United States is already functionally providing medical assistance in dying,” she speaks tendentiously, and horrifically. The difference lies in the sense of an external power, of something beyond one’s control. Whatever one thinks about the administration of morphia to a dying person, the fact is they are dying. Whoever enters hospice care has already crossed the irrevocable threshold. The concern from then on is with management. Which is to say that it is instrumental, subordinate to ends it does not define. The management, whatever else one wants to say about it, is of something outside human decision.
Does the scene of the encounter with the “magnificence of life and death” in Heti’s novel and essay mark it historically, as peculiar to a place in time? Not necessarily. Assisted suicide for terminally ill patients has been legal in Canada since 2016. Such recourse was in principle available to Heti’s father at the time he became terminally ill. His children’s decision to keep vigil by his side in the way they did, whether at home or in the hospital, was already both traditional and, in its vehemence of love and ritual, idiosyncratic; it was, perhaps, already beyond the reach of fashion.
Still, you can’t help wondering. The more out of step one becomes, the more apt one is to feel—at least some people do—disinclined to be burdensome. (The kind of palpable feeling of being burdensome that was communicated to me that I ought to be feeling, when, changing planes recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, I “opted out” of a biometric scan—though that is a subject for another time.) Whether or not people wish to accommodate themselves, they will succumb, ultimately, to their wish to accommodate others. (I will assume, for argument’s sake, that the pressure to accommodate proceeds from within rather than being imposed from without, as I should expect it to be in all but most deranged fantasy scenarios of our possible future; though, of course, the distinction between inner and outer promptings is exactly what conformity blurs.)
Heti herself, for all her considerable individuality, will not insist on her own idiosyncrasy beyond a certain point. In her second-most recent novel, Motherhood, the narrator seeks treatment for depression and anxiety. She tries psychoanalysis, then antidepressants. Her anxiety disappears. “Am I annoyed? Am I disappointed?” she asks herself.
A little bit, yes. I wanted my own magic to get rid of the pain, but I suppose one’s private alchemy never works as well as drugs. Philosophy, psychology, God, writing down one’s dreams—they work as well as a bloodletting, or leeches, or any medical intervention that does not work.1
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