Dying Is an Art

Rachel Watts

In Nike Sulway’s Dying in the First Person, protagonist Samuel meditates on the grammar of death. “There are words,” he says, “they are simple and plain enough, but the grammar of dying is difficult.” Is death “what has occurred, what occurs, what will occur, what is always occurring?”

I am sent home to die.

I am struck while crossing the street.

I am never old.

The weather has officially turned.

In my courtyard, the trees are bare. They are Sylvia Plath. Only the lemongrass seems to live, and even that is a violence, an aggressive Tyler Durden fertility that drops seeds and grows serrated fronds up into the washing line because I haven’t trimmed it in so long. I regret planting that lemongrass. I thought I would use it for cooking, but the dead only eat air and I think myself one of them.

When I try to sleep, I think quiet thoughts to make my mind small. I imagine a circle of light from a single lamp and, like on a musical stage, that circle grows smaller. Eventually, in my imagination, I am alone with my own death.

I come home and my office has been turned into my dying room, which is fitting.

Or perhaps I don’t come home at all.

I make my partner promise to smuggle the dog into my hospital room.

I assume I will not outlive the dog.

In The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, Katie Roiphe opens her meditation on death by explaining her childhood battling illness. She describes forgetting how to breathe, like “being pulled underwater”. A hospital intern sticks things into her to measure her oxygen levels, and in the next bed a baby’s heart stops. “This is when I start writing this book,” Roiphe says.

It is 2001 and I am at my father’s graveside in Jakarta, listening to a sermon delivered by an imam in a language I can’t understand. His body is delivered to the earth. A goat approaches and starts eating the flowers that line the gaping hole.

This is when I start writing this essay.

1957. Plath wrote in her diary: Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide.

A heart attack. A stroke. Swift, hard syllables.

Cancer. Suicide. Whispers, both of them.

Some infection. Meningitis. Encephalitis. They linger on the tongue, like grapes, round and full.

“Chloe climbs hand-over-hand up the curdled lining of her own throat,” writes Chuck Palahniuk’s narrator in Fight Club.

Still. I am never old.

Roiphe describes Susan Sontag as incorporating the dark glamour of death into her writer’s pose. “I am gleaming with survivorship,” Sontag wrote in the eighties. And, perhaps, so is Roiphe.

Where does Roiphe’s “sex appeal of death” come from in my life, having never even seen its face? Where do I get off, picturing my own death, regarding the suffering of others and absorbing it into my fictive word-view? Perhaps what I write on, what I am fascinated with, is not death. Perhaps it is survival.

Dad died when he was 39.

I assume I will not be old. That this is a particular universal law.

The tires scream before the sound of metal on metal, jaws clashing together at high speed. Then, nothing.

The masks drop from above but no amount of oxygen will prevent gravity from opening her arms and taking the aluminium aircraft back.

I slip getting out of the shower and strike my head on the edge of the bathtub.

I am never old.

I am 39 this year.

I am often unwell. Not sick like Roiphe was sick. Not dying like Chloe back there is dying. I carry an infection of the mind. I take a pill each day and I meditate. I carry crystals. I do not believe in crystal healing vibrations, but I do believe in the placebo effect.

My father was a geologist. He collected stones too.

In addition to crystals, I collect books and suicides. Woolf, Plath, Hemingway.

I do not fear death.

I do fear pain. Sickness.

Roiphe writes that when Sigmund Freud was dying, his dog refused to be by his side. The dog, unambivalent as dogs are, sensed death already in the room.

I don’t want to scare my dog.

Family members find they cannot care for their dying loved one at home, despite the best of intentions. Exhaustion sets in. Fear takes them by the hand. We are so removed from our mortality, the process of dying is another realm. The holiest realm.

I watch people dying on television.

I suspect there is something wrong with me.

I watch hospital documentaries and stories about the terminally ill.

I am never old. But what if I were? I picture myself, old and trembling. Left behind by dog and partner. Waiting for death to enter the room.

What took you so long?

It wasn’t your time.

I was expecting you.

It wasn’t your time.

Do normal people converse with death?

Perhaps I shouldn’t take suicides for role models.

Well, what now?

It is your time.

What will it be like?

No-one can say.

Should I be standing? Lying down?

It makes no difference.

I think I’ll lie down.

 

How fanciful my ideas are here in a 21^st century Australian home, as though the land I write on wasn’t stolen by force, as though it wasn’t the site of a genocide you will never hear about on the news. I write seemingly a million miles from the death camps, the torture and starvation, the exonerated, ongoing slaughter of First Nations peoples. It is my backyard. Colonialism: the machinery of the export of industrialised death. That I should expect a privileged death. That I should have a conversation with death.

Albert Camus once wrote a book called The Happy Death. It wasn’t published. He described suicide as being “prepared within the silence of the heart, as is art.”

I live in the silence of the heart.

I die in the silence of the heart.

Do you remember my father?

I never forget.

Did you know his wife was pregnant?

Birth is not my area.

 

In Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers, a family in mourning is visited by a crow. The crow says: “In other versions I am a doctor or a ghost. Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can’t, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.” Perhaps the theatrical battles are what grip me. Like Sulway’s Samuel, I grapple with the grammar of death: “Perhaps the only certainty is that, in death, he has become more irreducibly a creature of language.”

My days are language. My dreams are images. There is no overlap.

The circle of light narrows.

Did you take my dog?

I take everyone, eventually.

I thought I saw you there.

It seems unlikely.

I thought I saw you.

Perhaps.

Virginia Woolf often wrote to her older self in her diary. “I fancy old Virginia, putting on her spectacles to read of March 1920 will decidedly wish me to continue. Greetings! My dear ghost; and take heed that I don’t think 50 a very great age.”

I am never old.

I watch her putting the stones in the pocket of her coat.

I don’t tell her to stop.

© 2019 Rachel Watts

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Rachel Watts is an author and former journalist from Perth, Western Australia. Her essays and fiction have been published by Westerly, Island, Kill Your Darlings, Tincture and more. Her young adult, climate change novella Survival was released in March 2018. She writes speculative and literary fiction with a focus on memory, gender, violence and the environment. She finds joy running creative writing workshops for adults and teens. You can find her at wattswrites.com and @watts_writes.