september 10, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

This week marks the three-year anniversary of the closest I’ve ever come to dying (as far as I know). 

Dying is a great reason to do things. It lends a sense of urgency where otherwise, were time unlimited, it would be easy to be complacent. Want to write songs? Stories? Do it—you could be dead soon. 

I woke up one day with chest pain, and thought I pulled a muscle. Then it got worse, and worse. One blood test later and I was in the ER, then admitted, for two lungs full of blood clots. I was told if I waited another night, it would have been lights out. 

I was also told that my drinking habit thinned my blood enough to prevent a heart attack and might have saved my life. That was possibly the worst thing I could have heard at the time, and I certainly used it as an excuse. But a few years later, after plenty of irresponsible behavior, things are a little more under wraps. 

It ebbs and flows, anyway. 

There was lots of time spent feeling sorry for myself. Probably about a solid year, at least while I tried to build some fitness back up. I went from running half marathons in July to struggling with stairs in September. I fixated for most of that time on how close I came to dying for essentially no reason, and thought about how little my life had amounted to up to that point in my own eyes. Laying in a hospital with intravenous blood thinners running through me, I remember thinking I had so much left to write. There was so much left to do. So many relationships to mend. Tattoos to get. Places to see. It felt like oversleeping, and waking up too late to make it to work on time. Except, I felt late to life. I still do, a lot of the time.

But on good days it fuels creativity, the fear; it drives me to write lyrics or parse something out on guitar. On some bad days, it leads to an extra beer. And on most days, it falls somewhere on a continuum between those two, which I consider somewhat opposing forces: the drive to make things, and the drive to numb out. 

One night, over an irresponsible volume of whiskey, I talked with a friend about everything I thought about on that hospital bed, when I was scared that I would die. It was about 8 months afterward, in a dorm in Vermont in July with no air conditioning. My voice felt small, but I raised it to compete with a box fan pointing directly at our heads. The tone was very “woe is me.” My friend said something I still think about, if not every day, then at least once or twice a week: 

“All of this is a gift. Now you know what you’ll think about on your death bed. Because you already kind of have, now.” 

Paraphrasing here: he went on to argue that most people live their whole lives never knowing what they’ll think at the approaching concept of death, and that I’ve experienced something most people realize too late. He then challenged me to follow through, and live life in a way that would ease some of the anxieties I felt at the sudden prospect of dying. 

Most people only experience their death bed once, if they even get the opportunity for that level of clarity. It feels like almost getting hit by a car, and then chuckling while your pulse settles.

Today, I think that maybe I haven’t lived up to my friend’s challenge, fully. My chest kind of hurts today, and every breath is a wince, and it reminds me of the fear, and renews one that wonders if my lungs will ever clot again. It’s something I have to monitor, anyway. There is of course a general anxiety about anything health-related that could happen—I’ve had somewhat bad luck in that department on a couple of occasions, times my body decided for auto-immune reasons or reasons otherwise unknown to almost shut down. 

Before my lungs, it was my guts—I don’t even have a large intestine anymore, owed to it being taken completely out when I was twelve because of untreatable ulcerative colitis. I don’t write about it much because it isn’t a sexy illness, at least as far as illnesses can be sexy. You shit ten+ times a day, and you bleed, and you wither in strength and look doughy and bloated from prolonged treatment with Prednisone, and the whole experience of it is laced with this strange prepubescent shame for me, even though I’m sure no one gives a shit (pun unintentional but convenient) or would think less of me for talking about it. 

Anyway, the prospect of dying is still scary to me, so evidently I have work to do. I’d like to write more songs, better songs, songs that more fully express what I feel I’m capable of as a musician. I would like to write fiction again. I want to get along better with some people in my family before one or all of us die. I want to be kinder, more patient, more curious. My goals range from concrete to vague, but they add up to a sense of longing that I suspect is impossible to fully assuage. 

There’s something intimate, weird, and difficult about admitting here in basic terms that I’m afraid to die, even though it must be something everyone thinks at one point or another. I used to tell people, usually fueled by a beer or four, often wrapped in the haze of cigarette smoke outside a dive bar or at a party, that I wasn’t afraid to die. In technical terms, we call that a complete bald-faced fucking lie, something I’d say if the topic came up, to sound cool. Well, it wasn’t just trying to sound cool, I guess—it was also making death smaller, taking it from the big scary concrete reality I had just learned it to be, and making it nothing more than an abstract concept that I, Cool Guy, Did Not Fear. But every time I said that, I think it just made me more terrified– as if claiming otherwise was to tempt fate. 

I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but my gut says probably not. I definitely don’t think whatever is out there has been described in writing by human beings, so that means conventional religion isn’t really my vibe, either. But there’s something about saying things out loud, or writing them down, relating to death or the gods that makes me superstitious. Catch me knocking wood after every sentence written here. There’s an adage attributed to a war correspondent named Ernie Pyle that goes “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In days when I was a smarter smart ass than I am now, I’d retort “yeah, that’s because the atheists were smart enough to stay home.” But I see the wisdom in it now, begrudgingly. 

Maybe it’s less about death being big than it is about us being small. Or, death making us feel small. The idea of dying definitely made me feel small, but it also made me feel paradoxically big; there was this idea that we all construct the world in our minds, so when any of us die, a version of the world dies with us. A perspective dies, and in a perspective is a world. 

No thought is too egocentric when you think you’re dying, either. Maybe this speaks to the ego being the one that fears. I’d guess that the Buddhists would say that overcoming the fear of death is about fundamentally rejecting attachment to your own selfhood, and adopting a perspective that contextualizes us as just one part of a much larger whole, to which we are connected inexorably by being alive, which includes the natural thing that is dying. But, I was not, and am not, an enlightened Buddhist.

When it all went down, I was twenty-two and it felt like my world was fading from the edges and it was fucking terrifying. I think admitting that freely is evidence of progress, at least in terms of not avoiding thinking about it anymore, and not lying, I’m sure very obviously so, to the contrary.

It would be irresponsible to omit the fact that surviving the whole thing left me with an all-too-brief sense of euphoria, too. The summer before my lungs shut down, I was super depressed. Like, capital D Depressed, card-carrying, according to my therapist at the time. I spent a lot of time laying in bed, a lot of time stoned, a lot of time mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or Twitter—behaviors that I’m sure contributed to the nuclear bomb of a blood clot that must have formed somewhere inside, before breaking into a bunch of tiny lung-seeking missiles. Behaviors that definitely reinforced the organism’s tendency toward being depressed. Behaviors intended to avoid pain that virtually ensured it, made it a self-sustaining loop.

To that point in my life, the whole death scare thing was the most life-affirming experience I had ever had. 

After I got discharged, I remember how good the air felt flying past me through the open window of my sister’s car, how blue the sky looked, how sweet everything tasted, how funny the world was. How good it was that on that day, I had not died in a hospital. All stereotypical things, cliches, but cliches for a reason. I’m the kind of guy that understands truisms on a cerebral level, but until I experience them directly, they just don’t viscerally sink in. Life had become one of those, for me—the way I was living, life itself didn’t feel that valuable a commodity. Taken for granted. The universe, with its characteristically poetic sense of humor, said to me, “life feels worthless? Let’s see how you feel when it’s almost taken away.” As if I was some kid and life was some toy I was uninterested in playing with until another kid tried to take it. Then, suddenly, it was mine. 

I’m not sure what this adds up to, other than reflections on almost dying excused by the fact of the calendar anniversary. I try not to think about it that often. Yet again, maybe it’s the only thing I think about at all.