The Dying

I’ve written somewhere herein that we don’t die all at once.  The process starts around our fortieth birthday, picks up steam rapidly, and culminates in actual death later on.  I would now add that it is not a linear progression, a day by day process.  No, it proceeds by fits and starts. 

We go along with about the same body and health for matters of months or years, with no change at all, no apparent aging.  Then we suffer some kind of event, a stress event or a health event, and after the days or weeks of the event we discover that something has changed.  We have aged.  The event has shortened our lives by months or years. 

For example:  in my late thirties I suffered a burst appendix.  I had been rolling along for years, same diet, same sleep habits, same physical capabilities, same weight, same appearance.  Then I got sick.  For six months I had what was misdiagnosed as a series of stomach flu episodes and lower digestive tract problems, featuring lots of vomiting and diarrhea.  I never got a fever, and my stomach did not palpate as though my appendix were the problem.  I had no health insurance, so no sophisticated diagnostics were employed.   I dropped some weight, and I had only started out in the low one-forties.  I became alarmingly weak and exhausted, by the end I could not speak with a full voice.  Finally my poor inflamed appendix popped, an experience that will get your attention, I can tell you.   I signed a permission slip for exploratory abdominal surgery, because they still hadn’t figured out that it was my appendix, and there followed a week in the hospital, bowels frozen by the anesthesia and almost hourly anesthetics, successfully fighting off the peritonitis.  It was terrible. 

I came home weighing about 123 pounds (at five feet, nine inches tall) and looking like death warmed over.  I got better, but I realized that the experience had aged me.  The weight came back on differently, more around the middle.  I was no longer inclined to run up stairs willy-nilly.  I’ve noticed the phenomenon since then on a couple of occasions.  Something like that pushes you down the field suddenly after having lingered at the forty yard line for some time. 

It’s like a jump-cut in the movies.  It’s a wonderful technique, most famously visible in the movie “Breathless” by Jean-Luc Goddard.  There’ll be a scene, static for a while, and then suddenly some time has been cut out and the scene jumps to almost the same scene some time later, perhaps from a slightly different angle.  It can be disconcerting, and it is meant to be.  It is an intentional violation of the rules of continuity editing, which is sometimes called “Hollywood editing,” or “invisible editing.”  The jump cut draws attention to the mechanics of film making, much like the life event draws attention to the process of aging.  

Something like that long ago event is happening to me now, less dramatically perhaps, but maybe more dangerously at my age.  A push down the field is more serious at sixty-five than it was a thirty-nine.  I’m not complaining, it’s the human condition and we all suffer equally.  It seems that life is a lot like high school, or boot camp.  We enter the experience terribly confused and at a big disadvantage.  Then over time we figure it out, we learn how it all works.  And then, around the time when we have learned all that we need to know, we graduate.  Cruel irony, that.