Comin' for to Carry Me Home
A hospice nurse, an unsober saint, what "Less Than Zero" is greater than, and more
Creatures, there’s a lot I can’t explain. There are more things in heaven and earth, creatures, than are dreamt of in anybody’s philosophy.
My best friend gave me Hadley Vlahos’s memoir of hospice nursing, The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life’s Final Moments. She had been really struck by it, and I found it impossible to put down. My best friend is not religious; Vlahos was raised Episcopalian, but the emphasis of her book is on the unknown and perhaps unknowable. There are strange things that happen at the edges of life. She records encounters that follow somewhat predictable patterns, yet their very predictability makes them hard to explain: A unique experience might be a hallucination, but seeing the same kind of experience happen again and again makes it seem more like an event. A part of what it means to be human, even if it’s not a part we can explain. (In that way this book reminded me of Carlos Eire’s brilliant They Flew: A History of the Impossible; my review here, interview with Eire on my friend Stephen’s podcast here.)
I don’t want to say too much more. Vlahos is up-front about her own current understanding of what she saw in hospice, but she isn’t preachy (or anti-preachy!). She is always gentle in acknowledging how deeply death challenges our preexisting understanding of the world and ourselves. There is no belief that can protect someone against the inexplicable.
She also tells parts of her own story, including the startling story of her decision to have the child she conceived at age nineteen. She doesn’t shape the book around money, class, and shame, but those themes are inescapable in a book about the US health care system. The chapter that takes place mostly in a tent encampment is, again, forthright without being pushy.
Look, ok, the fabric of the book is reconstructed conversations, and sometimes they get a little too perfect. A coworker’s righteous rant that ends, “[A]nd this meeting could have been an email,” feels especially scripted. But I was willing to trust that Vlahos was conveying the general tenor of events and conversations, with an inevitable but not insurmountable coloring of bias.
There’s one thing Vlahos doesn’t talk about, which I’ve heard from others who have been with someone in their final moments. Many people see deceased loved ones, who come to let them know it’s time to make the crossing. (There’s a chapter on a woman with Alzheimer’s in which Vlahos says some especially powerful things about what it means when we say someone is “not all there.”) But others see terrifying visions of what seem to be demons or hellscapes. What does that mean?
I don’t know; it seems not my place to come up with some kind of position statement. I thought about what I might say to someone having that awful experience. Maybe I would say something like, This is the hard part. This is the crossing, and passing through these gates can be very frightening. But this is only the crossing, and there is light and welcome and a soft place to land on the other side. I think I would try to convey hope and the possibility of trust even amid fear, because I don’t think anyone can be entirely lost who still holds onto the possibility of light.
Why do some people receive such comfort at the end of their lives, while others face terrors? This is a question I basically suspect it’s wrong to answer. It reminded me of a question Maia Szalavitz raises in Unbroken Brain, perhaps the hardest question anyone can pose to 12 Step models of recovery: If a Higher Power can rescue you, why doesn’t that Power rescue everyone who prays sincerely for recovery?
There are bad answers to this question: “It works if you work it!” (So if it doesn’t work, you didn’t work it? This is a caricature of Calvinism.) When I think about people who sincerely seek recovery and self-surrender and yet persistently relapse, I think of, like, Sebastian from Brideshead, or St Mark Ji Tianxing in the real world. God can work with great and even shocking power in a life which does not achieve sobriety.
And yet any attempt to say what exactly God is doing in that kind of life becomes rancid and dehumanizing very quickly. “Your suffering can be a hopeful example for others!”, you are a victim soul, your perseverance in spite of repeated experiences of failure is so inspiring. This is unresponsive to the infinite worth of the individual. God does not use any of us, not even the saints, as “life lessons” or utensils. Even the martyrs are not meant merely to be signs.
Suddenly obsessed with this movie substack even though they say Less Than Zero is a worse cocaine movie than Clean and Sober. Lol come on. C&S has its moments, and Michael Keaton is bearishly faboo, but it’s a self-serious film. Lugubrious! Civic-minded! No fun! LTZ is hot and fun. Consequences are fun! Consequences are extremely addictive (the only problem is that you build up tolerance for them, too).
Like, what is it that makes “fun” different from joy or happiness or even pleasure? Could it be the fake, plastic palm tree quality of fun? Could it be the shrugging awareness of something missing (everybody in LTZ talks like actors reading lines, I love it, that is how these characters should be if they were real) or even the enticing promise of coming punishment? Insufficiency and the thrill of dread are part of what everybody likes about fun. The downward spiral! Why would you even invite the piper if he’ll never make you pay?
The Reveal’s review goes out of its way to praise LTZ’s cinematographer, Ed Lachman. Notice how they don’t say a daggone thing about the look and style of C&S? That’s because it’s boring. A movie is more than just dialogue and acting!
So I don’t agree that Robert Downey Jr & James Spader “deserve a better movie” (who cares what anybody deserves) but if you feel that way, let me please introduce you to Tuff Turf, what a dumbass gem. If you want a better version of Clean & Sober, I liked 1995’s Drunks quite a bit.
Anyway, here’s a lovely passage about the breathtaking No-Face train scene from Spirited Away:
One last thing I will say about Spirited Away is that I’m scanning the notes I took from this viewing and they look like a crazy person wrote them. This is a compliment. While my notes will include observations and lines I will consider highlighting, they’re also just a reminder of the basic action of the film, such as “soot sprites give her shoes back,” which of course is what soot sprites do when they’re not hauling hunks of coal. Accepting the world Miyazaki has created for us is one of the chief pleasures of Spirited Away, and while the famed train sequence is as good a standalone piece of animation as I can recall, I think it benefits from the headspace the film puts you in before you get there. All the abstraction in this spirit world, combined with Chihiro’s struggles to find her footing there, eventually leads to acclimation, which then allows for [the] sequence to work its magic, as we accept it on the terms Miyazaki has dictated. It’s a great feeling and one that makes the film endlessly rewatchable.
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And: I really appreciated their tribute to the city of Chicago on film: “On watching movies filmed in my city before it was mine.” DC Cab is nobody’s masterpiece but the closing credits, with the Cardozo HS Marching Band, are inexpressibly poignant. A cameo by Marion Barry, still mayor of the vanished world. I shouldn’t do a paid subscription to these guys right now but maybe you can.
Totentanz
“Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries,” via Jesse Walker: “The earliest depiction of a printing shop and press is thought to be a 1499 dance of death published in Lyon by Mathias Huss, which survives (for now) in two known copies.”
And: The Modern Saints, a project in which saints from the ancient world through the twentieth century are represented in unexpected settings and appearances, is having their summer sale! “Now through July 19th, get a free print of any saint when you buy two 5"x7" prints of any saints! Just add three 5"x7" prints to your cart on themodernsaints.com and use code ‘christmasinjuly’ at checkout.” Go and see what you find.
Now Playing
Oingo Boingo, “No One Lives Forever.”
Skeleton in undies accosting wealthy lady by Johann Rudolf Feyerabend, photographed by Vassil I think, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.