Talking Tuesday: Cheating Death

A few weeks ago, I read a New York Times review of Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, Natural Causes, in which the author of Nikeled and Dimed takes on the medical industrial complex.  She notes that Americans have a peculiar obsession with avoiding death, and her book aims to address death head on.  The review went on to note that at the heart of the medicalization of the approach to the body is an attempt to control our physical selves.  Ehrenreich asks us to relinquish that control, to acknowledge that, in the end, we really have no control over our bodies, and ultimately, our deaths.  It comes for us all.

I say this not to be morbid, but rather to point out that Ehrenreich is right.  We don't have the control that we think we do.  Not over our bodies, not over our lives.  There is so much illusion of control, given to us by technology and medical advances that it can be easy to forget the mortal coil.  I also think it is easy to forget how fragile life is, and how most of humanity has lived close to the line for most of human history.  All medical technology has done is to provide a tiny buffer between us and the veil.  A few more cosmic minutes.  Death still waits at the end of the line. 

As someone with a fair share of medical issues, and with children who are alive because of extensive medical intervention, I don't say this lightly.  Would I rather be visiting the grave of my daughter these past six and a half years, or raising her?  The latter, obviously.  I've buried one child already; that was enough. 

So I'm not anti-medical intervention.  But I do want to think a bit more about keeping death in my front view and to really consider what is necessary.  "Keep your mind in hell and despair not," to quote the saint.  (I have also been burned by many medical professionals who are too busy to take my "womanly" concerns seriously, or just don't have the answers I seek about how to take care of my body the best I can).  That is what being healthy is, when it comes right down to it: being a good steward of the body that God has given me.  I can't stop what will happen in the end, can't delay it, because my days are numbered in God's Great Book of Days.  But I can take care of the time I have been given in the best way I can. 

I turn 39 in a few weeks (I know, hardly the end of the road, so to speak), and I'm looking a bit older these days.  On the one hand, I never wanted to be the person who couldn't stand the visible signs of aging.  I didn't mind when a few gray hairs showed up in my late teens, and wasn't too bothered when the backs of my hands started to look wrinkled and crepey.  I thought it funny having "old age" eyes as a kid, but now that I'm squinting at fine print and glasses are not optional, it seems less humorous.  As fewer things in my body continue to work they way they are "supposed" to, the more I think about what it is to be healthy.  What it is to get older in this body and not fetishize youth.

The last few years have been (and continue to be) tremendously confusing for me on an ontological level.  There are many reasons for this, but I've tried very hard to figure it out, to get to the other side of it.  But I can't.  And perhaps that is what it is: it is just life.  It's hard, you live it, and then you die.  The end. 

I don't have answers, but this is what I do know.  I can't slow down the clock or turn it back.  I can live with the choices I've made that have brought me thus far, and try to make good (or better) ones going forward.  I can try to make better food choices (I suspect this will be a lifelong struggle). I can accept the limitations of my body and my self.  I can remind myself that it is not a moral failing to sit down in the middle of the day for a bit and do nothing worthwhile.  That most things don't turn out the way I hoped or expected.  Sometimes they turn out better and sometimes they turn out worse.  That's just life.  I can seek spiritual solutions to the things that ail me.  Soul treatment is infinitely harder than body treatment, I find. 

Mostly, I think, I just need to learn to live with the confusion.  Because that's life.