There are different ways to die…like almost drowning in Belize.
©Patrick McDonnell
There are so many ways to die, and I have experienced a lot of them. I am still standing here able to write about it. Death drowning — twice, car accidents, going to sleep at the wheel, asthma attack and anaphylactic shock from insect bites (too many times to remember), beat up — twice but I gave as good as I got, falling off mountains (drunk and sober). Then the subtler ways to die; depression and alcoholism. Then how many times have other people tried to kill me? Let me count...when you have an older brother who wants to play Cain and Abel. Medically speaking I have been pretty close to the pearly gates but my guardian angel has come to my aid, lifting me up to walk again, to stare up at the blood splatters on the ceiling of the recovery room.
But physical pain is nothing compared to emotional pain. How many times have I died from rejection, from a cold word or look from someone who I cared for? A young love is all fire, and ice. Older love simmers long and steady, till it dies. When you make your walls higher and the doors and windows tighter, someone always sneaks in, like a thief in the night, and puts a dagger in your heart, so that every heart beat is a painful reminder of what you can't have. Love is a form of death; what did my mother in law do? Give a friend a gun saying if she married she might as well kill herself? Is love not a drug? When I was young I fell at every look, at the drop of a hat, whenever I saw a pretty face. It was all superficial, not deep or important. Only later did I see beyond the cover, find that some books had nice dust jackets but were blank inside. Love is like death in a way; you take part of your soul and give it to someone else, hoping they will take care of it. Like sending it to the dry cleaners then it comes back in tatters.
I have seen evil and death in other people's eyes. In the old days in New York, taking the subway was like going into a jungle, where you felt you were the prey, and the wolves circled around you. I can feel evil, taste it and smell it, like the smell of death at Dachau death camp outside of Munich, when I was 4 years old, and you remember it. I rediscovered it again in the Dallas morgue where I saw a young woman. Perfect as virgin snow, with a red circle on her head, where the 22 went in. Death givers love to suck the life out of you. Some do it slowly, as your back bone turns to jello and they whisper their lies into your ears, and you believe what they say about you. Because everyone else goes along with them. They love groups. They love to be the center and manipulator of people, as they dispense their judgements and opinions. No one dares question them. They deliver the death of a thousand cuts, of little lies and criticisms, till your life is gone. Those are death singers, like the sirens of Ulysses, whose words bring you into their clutches. You end up in a living death.
Then there are the death givers, the bullies, who like hurting others. They feed on your fear. If you are brave then they will try to break you. If you are smart they will cut you down. If you don't understand, then they give you their version of events, and make you believe their lies. They have dead eyes. They are Zombies, some even revel in it, not needing a masquerade. But they find victims who seek death and destruction. The Thanatos drive is stronger than the life drive. They try to convince you that death is good, and life is bad. Why struggle, why desire, or love, or need others? They are like vampires seeking victims for their collection.
Have I seen death up close? Oh yes. I have carved up corpses in a dissecting lab. My mother, god bless her, donated her body to the anatomy class, to give me nightmares. Yet I don't fear death, nor do I seek it. Life is more interesting than death. La petit mort is more my thing. The agony and ecstasy of living, with all its problems, can beat death any day. Someone called me persistent. Persistence pays off, eventually. Sisyphus who rolls the stone up the hill only to see it fall back down has a better life than the person in the ground pushing up daisies. So I take up the task of pushing life along. My life is like a rolling stone, or a pebble bouncing along the water, till it stops. Fighting every minute, hour or day is better than slowly dying.
This was brought home to me recently when I had the choice of doing nothing and watching a tragedy unfold, or dive into the fray, and give a 100% of myself. I either give 100 % or nothing, why be mediocre? Despite all the demons I was fighting and even as I played at being George and the Dragon, I wondered if the damsel in distress wouldn't go back to the dragon after being saved? I had seen that scenario before, been caught unawares. Nothing is as simple as it first seems. Yet at the end maybe some good came of it. I just couldn't do a Pontius Pilate and wash my hands of it. They say the hero gets the girl, well that isn't always true, sometimes she goes off with the other guy or girl. History repeats itself, first as tragedy then as a farce.
Sometimes life is a joke; I was reminded of this when we traveled to Belize. We had taken anti-malaria pills for a month before the trip that upset our stomachs. On the plane my wife was having a bad reaction as the door closed and I gave her Benadryl for the anaphylactic shock. My symptoms were worse but unseen. I discovered this when we all went on the reef. I had been swimming in the pool training for months, and had built up my lung capacity to where it had been when I was young. Or so I thought. SO I didn’t wear a life jacket. Big mistake.
A boat full of young English students came by and they all jumped in and they were diving down on the reef in deep water. SO I decided to do the same. I went down deep, at least 10 feet if not more and then I came back to the surface where I couldn’t breath, my lungs were compressed. I went down again and back up and then down again. On the third try at breathing I thought, ’this is it, this is how I will die.” And somehow I felt at ease with it, dying in such a beautify place. But my wife came up to me - she was wearing a life jacket - and grabbed me. “What are your doing? “ she asked. Drowning.
The dive master came over and took me to the shallows, where I finally could catch my breath. We discussed how a tourist had died on the reef a week ago. I had read about it on the Internet.
We went out again to dive on the reef but I wore a life vest and kept close to the boat.
When we returned home I had signs of a ‘walking pneumonia” and I went to have x rays taken. My lung had collapsed on my left side; my left diaphragm was paralysed. It still is, but because of yoga breathing I am still alive. Enough said. You can see the X-Ray below to see what I have.
