Death Social Media Style
Unless you have a clock at home that runs backward, you're done. Eventually. But must we luxuriate in our done-ness, sharing with all and sundry, always and forever?
“Attention must be paid.”
So said Linda Loman about her husband Willy in the acclaimed play Death of a Salesman. The hapless and overmatched Willy Loman is having his case pled by his wife to his sons. Linda, some sort of literary stand-in for death, love and memory, almost the defense attorney for Willy, is persuasive. But her persuading me, a product of an unhealthy father/son dymanic, is a tougher call.
Moreover, when peeping what social media has turned us into I must request some sort of reprieve. Your mother/father/sister/brother/wife/husband/child dying is a terrible event (in anyone’s life). More if it’s unexpected. But just as horribly if it is a long time coming.
An event like this might unseat you. Let’s correct that: it might unseat YOU. However, I’m less concerned about you and much more concerned about ME in this instance. What does the cumulative effect of the world dying around us/me have on us/me when day after day we/I have to be exposed to misery and more specifically the misery of others?
Add to this the poorly placed love affairs with strangers that guide our relationships with celebrities and we’re in a terribly reduced position of feeling forever acquainted with loss and its after effects. Day after day. Week after week.
I am not without understanding here. A friend, whose name in the name of good taste I will leave out, announced to all, via social media, that he was getting married. A good use of the space, billboarding life events that buoy our sense of wonder at the wonderfulness of life.
“Nah. You’re not dying.” Then after a minute the New Yorker in me demanded a more accurate rendering. “Yeah. I think you’re dying.”
Before the year was done, however, he had another announcement. His wife, having met someone at their wedding, had left him for the someone she had met at their wedding. He was announcing this over social media, he explained, because he didn’t want to have to ever have to talk about it again. So, like having a misery stenographer on hand he wanted to document for the world why he was no longer married after having made such a big deal of getting married.
It made sense. Who would want to repeat that story? Again and again?
However, death is somehow oddly different. That is, he could always get married again. But, unless it’s Jesus we’re talking about, very few deaths become undeaths. So we’re left with the most final of resolutions. With none of the counterbalancing good parts, if there were any. Not that those would balance it. It, in this instance, being moments redolent of regret, unmeasured misery and sorrow.
There has to be a reason we do it, outside of the issue of delegating out our load to lighten it. And outside of the economy of telling everyone at once. I haven’t been able to figure out why and what though.
Right up until: “I think I’m dying.”
Back up a bit. I made my way to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California. An email had sent me here and I made my way up to Room 3333. I hate hospitals having an aggressive fear of both death and disease. So the fewer people I talk to, the better. No idea if I was supposed to “check in” or not, I just went to the room.
“You recognize me?
“No.” They had me in a mask and truthfully I barely recognized him. But since the email I knew I was going to see Steve Shaughnessy, next to last drummer for Whipping Boy (Pictured above, far left). I pulled my mask off of my face. “Eugene! How the fuck did you find me?”
“Social media. And Todd told me.”
Steve, also a native New Yorker is also a merciless realist, like a lot of native New Yorkers. So when I asked him if it was COVID related, his apparent downturn in circumstance, he demurred.
“No. Much worse than that. I think I’m dying.”
From? From all of the shit that the warnings on packs of cigarettes warn you against. Heart attacks, emphysema, attendant breathing problems, pulmonary shit. The proverbial “it all.” As in he was dying from it all.
“Nah. You’re not dying.” Then after a minute the New Yorker in me demanded a more accurate rendering. “Yeah. I think you’re dying.”
The doctors had said that he’d be out of there after a few days. He got in Thursday and I went to see him the next Wednesday. More than a few days by anyone’s rendering. He and I also twigged that being “out of there” didn’t necessarily mean “alive”. Which made us laugh.
Before he started wheezing and struggling for breath.
“Can you walk on your own? Without a walker? Can you get to the toilet and use it yourself? Do you need help to do this or get dressed?”
Yes, yes, yes and no, no.
Then another nice American twist: “My landlady said to me as they were bringing me here that if I couldn’t get up the stairs [his Section 8 apartment was on the second floor] when I got out, I’d have to move.”
“What about a first floor apartment?”
Well, he was on the waitlist for that but it wasn’t likely since when were you ever in the heart of Silicon Valley going to be able to live in Palo Alto on the scant amount he was paying for Section 8 housing? He had been there himself since the 1970s, so it wasn’t likely. Being retired and broke what’s the next stop then?
“A nursing home.”
Steve is about 10 years older than me and like me knows that the kind of nursing home they have ready for retired Section 8’ers is no place anyone sane wants to go to. His best friend Joe Beets made this same calculation and before it got to this he had moved to Europe. The possibility of nuclear war with Russia didn’t hold a candle to either living out his golden years under a bridge, or in a home with the indigent.
Steve was stuck and when a nurse advocate came in to ask him a few questions he answered the way you do if you’re trying to get unstuck.
“Can you walk on your own? Without a walker? Can you get to the toilet and use it yourself? Do you need help to do this or get dressed?”
Yes, yes, yes and no, no.
She makes notes and rolls out. And eventually so do I. Two days later OXBOW guitarist Niko Wenner set out to visit him and found Steve in familiar fettle. His mind/wit, always razor sharp, remained so, even if his body, now weighing only 98 pounds suffered.
But there was a twist. Steve had stopped eating. “Nothing appeals to me,” he said of the hospital food. Or any food at all really.
So, yeah: Steve, like all of us, is dying. But unlike most of the rest of us his dying is not remote. It’s highly likely, and on the occasion of every breath he struggles to draw, highly likely to be his last.
However, he seems resolved to go Eva Peron on all of this. That is, don’t cry for him Argentina. Or anywhere or anyone else. About 30 years ago he let his broken answering machine go un-replaced. He broke up with his long time girlfriend, a comely lass 20 years his junior, telling her on exit, “I wear black tshirts and work in a record store. The last woman to really find me attractive probably died in the ‘70s.”
He stopped walking to work since his first heart attack and then stopped working, his days full of sports viewing, baseball being his main addiction. If you wanted to see him you had to go by his place and knock. And this was no guarantee either. Sometimes he didn’t answer and if later called on to explain would say it was because he was sleeping.
No, despite not seeming fully like he wants to die, it seems he had been done with living a long time ago. This was not accidental. This was purposeful. So, here we are a fan of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and a crack drummer besides, still sharp as a needle was facing the payment he had put into play decades earlier. None of this could have been much of a surprise to him, and yet his dismay did seem to surprise him.
I hung for an hour. Promised if he made it out I’d help him get groceries when he needed them. Told him I’d make mention of all of this on social media and that brings us up to today. A day, as far as I know, that sees him still alive.
So, yes, attention must be paid. And it has and will be. All on this side of the grave. And when he’s on the other side? You won’t be hearing it from me. I mean I try to say my goodbyes to the living and like Jesus admonished in the face of those who went public with their praying, I’m doing mine, as I should, in secret.
I mean his problem is not my problem and my problem is not your problem, so consider this the correct kind of attention and make note: your time, too, is coming.
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 55 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps. Or so they tell me.
For those following/caring, they are supposed to be moving him to a nursing home/hospice care today. Call him if you can.
That's an eloquently written downer.