We all live precariously. A satellite might fall on your head any minute, and you know it. That sudden thirst may be diabetes, and you know it. Someone may be waiting in the next alley to rob and kill you, and you know it.
But we contrive to forget, most of the time, what we know. We don’t even need to affix to our death the dismissive label “not yet” which Heidegger so masterfully deconstructs in his 1927 Being and Time. We just don’t think about it in the first place.
Such strategies are no longer open to me. When your life depends on something as complex as a dialysis machine, and when connecting to that machine is as complicated a series of rituals as it is, and when the penalty for a bad performance is death, you can’t afford to pretend that there is no such thing as personal extinction. You are in a sort of Hobbesian state of nature: just as “primitive man” is either at war or preparing for it, so you are either fighting for your life or preparing for the battle.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I find this situation surprisingly comfortable. A three-step process led to this serenity. Step One weas realizing that the Catholic account of what awaited me (and you) after death, the account I grew up with, was pure BS. The idea that a good and loving God would damn anyone for all eternity is as contradictory as a square circle, and I am not about to worship square circles—or nutball gods.
Step Two was the realization that there is not, and cannot be, any afterlife whatsoever. I am in some sense identical with my body, even if it is in the Hegelian sense that it is my body, this very one, whose idcntity with me I must at all costs deny. Negation, Hegel would ay (and sort of said) is identity (and you can’t think about death without dialectics).
The third step was to understand the nature of my total annihilation. After I die, there will not only be no version of John McCumber frying in hell (or, less probably, blissing out in heaven); There will not even be an empty John McCumber staring forever into featureless darkness. True, in my last few minutes, I will doubtless regret not seeing my grandchildren grow up, and not seeing my children grow old. But my actual death will make those regrets vanish. I won’t miss the world, or anything about it.
So what’s to fear? What’s to be upset about? I’ll be gone. In the meantime, I live on the edge of this. I do not stare into the abyss, or it into me, as Nietzsche said[ it is far too close for that. But it does send me, occasionally, friendly reminders that it is there, waiting, and will not wait long.
One of those reminders came last week, in the form of a leak in the cord that connects me to my dialysis machine. Air got into the cord, and air is laden with bacteria. The contents of my body include, now, dialysate, the dextrose solution which the machine pumps into me to cleanse my blood. Dialysate is very bacterium-friendly, so any infection grows quickly, and can become quickly fatal. To forestall this, I spent a week getting antibiotics pumped into me, during which I couldn’t do much else.
It was a very close call, but I am back and will resume posting. Until next time.