DRIVEL: Opinions and Review

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“Deathstyle” -- Celebrating the Big 0-0!
                        Boomers rebrand mortality

Pete Townshend, 1965, age 20:
"Hope I die before I get old"

Greer Thomas, 2006, age 17:
"People will just schedule their deaths like they schedule their births with C-sections."

Greer Thomas, 1992, age 3:  "How come people don't last so long?"  (after finding out for the first time that people die.)"

Boomers don’t care if they die.  They just don’t wanna get old.  They’ll actually be happier to die than to get old.
Seriously.  They’ve all told me, I know.
Therefore, something weird and potentially amazingly lovely this way cometh.  And I don’t see no way around it, nope.

It’s the final expression of a formula these people have become used to:  We rule.  When clouds formed over Woodstock, boomers chanted no rain.  (a poetic act, as far as explaining who they are:  Faith and arrogance, narcissism and grandiosity, primitive belief in numbers.  A powerful and blinkered brew.)

Boomers rebrand everything they live through—cuz they feel like they do everything for the first time.  (Or more accurately, the thing didn't really HAPPEN until they did it.)   They spun all rites of passage:  puberty, sex, mating, weddings, divorce [eg: used to be a tragedy, now it’s a realtor’s market niche], birth, and even dying, sorta, which now has a cottage industry of artists who can make it pretty.

So what happens when we extrapolate this trend?
People will choose and plan the time and style of their passing. The lovely things that only get said at funerals will move to a more popular timeslot that coincides with the lifespan of the protagonist.

At our "Concsious Passage" rituals--just a generic working title---we’ll get to see all our homies, looking as fine as they ever could look, all cleaned up real pretty.  We’ll get to tell them exactly how much we love them, without, at long last, any whiff of agenda..  Peace will be made with all who choose it.  Slates will be cleaned.  Karma will have its oil changed and wheels balanced and run smoother.

First natural knee-jerk question:  Is this selfish?  Is this rude to one’s survivors?  Answer:  Can we, as survivors, say with a straight face, “How dare anyone expect to leave us, rather than being totally and completely surprised to leave us?”  — Pardon me?

Pragmatists will be aroused to contemplate plummeting healthcare costs for Level Four care, cuz Pete Townshend don’t need no stinkin Level Four—officially, the stage at which feeding and toileting are no longer, um, independent tasks.

A person’s leaving will become a product of what they would most enjoy, when they would most enjoy it, and with whom.  In terms of What Comes Next and How to Like It, is this not currently the biggest abdication of art and design imaginable?--that as a culture, we leave each other with nothing to look forward to?

I'm a mother and I instinctively want to comfort my babies even through their own dying, even after I'm gone.  I had midwives at their arrivals, and I would have midwives at their departures, too.  That's just a given. 

Attendance at one of these [branded event concept here] would be of even greater significance than weddings and funerals are now.  An unplanned, un-produced passage might register someday as any other ungroomed aspect of life.  Odd to think about.  Yet when did birth come to involve music and lighting and hot tubs and cameras and videos and captions and subtitles--and even select audience members?

Look at it this way:  Artists would dominate palliative care teams and have a lot happier clientele.  Right now, it’s all the -ologists, who are skilled and sincere and not known for their great soundtracks.  The artists come with sound and light and fragrance.  With real live tenderness and beauty, with lullabies to contrast with the machines that go ping.

This is not a joke.  The instant the boomers feel the good sharp wake-up smack of an alternative to incontinence products—an industry of producers will be there to do the same for dying that they’ve done for every other passage.

But the deathstyle thing won’t be tawdry.  I think it will be quite lovely.  We’ll dump the illogical moral hissyfit over choosing one’s method and time of death, and free up the tons of energy spent in all the sad, closeted things we do to pretend we didn’t see it coming.

“What a shock, what a tragedy”--what a WHAT?!  Whoever didn’t see death coming, just don’t know nuthin about event planning, that’s clear.

How will this work?  Not sure, exactly.  How do weddings work?  But the means to end life peacefully and consciously and with the same fond wrapping of custom creativity that we lavish on every other passage – is intriguing, ya?

Thinkaboudit:  The randomness of death is what makes it so annoying to us.  We're terrified it's going to sneak up on us, surprise us with its certainty.  We spend way too much time ignoring it or fighting with it instead of designing around it.  

It’s there, it’s coming, it’s guaranteed.  What primitive little corner of the brain still believes that not having an umbrella will stop the rain?  Or that a badly designed, ugly umbrella will make the rain less wet?

(NOTE:  If I get hit by a bus next week, nope, that was not my idea.  Unless there was a blues band playing at the intersection and I was observed doing a grand jeté in front of the bus while wearing a t-shirt saying More Cowbell— no, that wasn't my idea, it was just good old-fashioned random death.)

Big sincere question:  What’s the big deal with taking the randomness out of dying?

ANALOGY:  When we go to live entertainment, do we stay until the performers have removed all makeup and costumes and do we follow them home to watch them brush their teeth and put on their fuzzy slippers and wait for them to say “Time for you to go home now”?  Nope.

Why do we do this with our own lives?  Why do we stick around until someone has to say “time for you to go now”?  Usually, don’t we go when it’s very clearly over and we’re still nicely dressed for the trip home?

We know we have to go; we just want to pretend we don’t know.  Yet planning something gorgeous and personal and decent and free of fear and pain – just seems so consistent with every other passage that's been re-packaged.  Right now, folks are so busy spewing poetic death metaphors that they miss their only chance to be the metaphor, to just do it one time for real.

Please just don’t pretend you thought of all this and said No thanks.  You just never thought of it at all.

All I know is that if god were a woman and on our side, this is what we would feel free to do and feel loved for:
We would take pride in our ability to do this human thing for each other, to be brave and cheerful, to be maternal, creative and deliberate, with the definingly human part of ourselves, our dying part.

~Hic jacet~

ADDENDUM::   Five years after writing this, it has begun.

Bonus drivel:

What if:  everyone’s life were accorded three acts?  And any time after 50, one is allowed to plan something lovely for an exit, and carry it all out the way weddings or bat mitzvahs or quinceaneras are carried out today.  (Allowed, not obligated.)

Socializing, food, spiritual metaphors and rituals--or a simple farewell with only family and a blankie and a quiet nightynight and sleep tight.

Point is that the boomers will find a way to introduce this concept and I’m so curious to see how they do it.  What will it be called?  What will be the first test-case to blast the whole idea into public consciousness?  Who will be the Rosa Parks, the Roe v Wade, the Karen Quinlan?

Will the practice slide in quietly, via subtle changes in healthcare and in homes for the elderly?  Will there come to be certain facilities that people “know about” where you can go to have your party of passing? (Will musicians arriving be a sign that angels are on their way?)

It’s coming, that’s all I know.  A friend of mine kept a stash for just such a purpose.  She didn’t have to use it, cuz she was in a great hospice with nightclub light, candles, roses, and music, and she snoozed out to the tune of Sunny Side of the Street..

[We told her Irish jokes and she snickered with her last few teaspoons of air.  I told her that I’d promised celibacy if I could just make it to her dying in one piece, without a ticket, at rally driver speed.  She really laffed at that.  Cuz I didn’t get one dang ticket.  After many hours at 100mph+.]

She laffed, we put her swimsuit-hottie photo on her dying-room door, plus her photo in uniform from her professional life, and we made sure people knew whose passage was happening there, with as much thoughtfulness and art as we could.

One of the palliative care nurses told us that if we wanted, we could put her in an ambulance and drive quietly out of town to wherever she thought it was pretty and let her breathe her last breath.  People who design death for a living, get it.  Maybe it will be the boomer medics who will pioneer the way.  That would sure make sense.

Hope we can get it together to make this work, and no, I don’t think the insurance companies should have a problem.  Do they actually believe that a conscious death robs random death of its right to preside—and robs them of their chance to compensate families for their tragically unexpected loss? That’s just goofy, darlins.

See you at my whoop-up!

_________________________________________

(Coda for the morbidly fascinated:)
Whoop-up would go a little something like this.
After the party, the symbolic stuff, the roasts, the peacemaking , the music, the readings, I would retire to some private area with my kevorkinator™--whatever person and/or machine was necessary to shuffle off this mortal coil.  I would have designed this event in some way.  We’d ring Peter's doorbell and check in. 

Some sound or signal would reveal this to the guests, which would be cause for a major whoop with the noisemakers provided.  A blues band would play some upbeat shuffle and people would go outside to beer tents. My daughters would unveil the inukshuk they designed for my marker.  Exactly 5'2".  [This is actually their idea.]

I would not be seen again, and would be whisked straight to the nearest medical school, where students would be amazed at the things I’ve paid the kevorkinator™ to hide in my body cavities.  Probably things that blink or make noise or pop up.  Or maybe just little notes:  Did you wash your hands?  Or maybe the entire Celine Dion catalog on rectal size i-pod.

The taxpayers will fund this with all the pension funds I don’t plan to collect.

[All cartoons from www.cartoonbank.com]

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