Falling Slowly

My grandmother didn't die last weekend.

We were kind of expecting her to - she looked worse than she had for a while. There was trouble breathing, trouble swallowing and a throat infection of some sort (don't ask me which was caused by what), and it looked like something that might finally get the better of what's left of her.

But... she didn't die. She's slightly better now. I suppose I should be happy about that, and on one level I am. Mostly, I'm just resigned.

It reminded me, though, how we're still expecting her to die on poetic grounds. It's like we've read and heard too many stories about people dying once they've done this, that or the other, and we keep looking for the poetic moment of closure, after which she can "rest".

Time after time there's a moment, a milestone, a visit, an illness... and we think she's surely had enough now. Now she's had the chance to say or do x, y or z - so she should just go to sleep and let go... right?

Somehow we've all got this strange idea that life is some big switch that we can choose to keep on or turn off depending on whether or not we have the will to keep living. It's this concept that just seems to haunt the collective consciousness of our culture.

Watching my grandmother sink into death over the last few years, though, and looking at her neighbours in the nursing home doing the same thing, I don't think life is that co-operative.

I think it doesn't matter how much you might want to stop living, you just keep falling slowly until you've run out of space to fall.

The more we treat ourselves and our loved ones with medicines and care designed to "help" them, the more falling space we give them. Living longer is not necessarily living better - it's just living longer. We don't get to "drift away" just because we've had that final, poetic moment and "now we can rest". We just keep falling slowly...

At some point, life stops being a gift and becomes a sentence. No poetry in the world can change that.