A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories - Softcover
A focused personal and ethical examination of life in the face of death, by one of our most acclaimed essayists.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Nancy Mairs is author of several acclaimed books, including Ordinary Time, Carnal Acts, Remembering the Bone House, and Plaintext.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Because in 1972 I learned that I have multiple sclerosis, I have reflected for
more than quarter of a century on the issues that confront a person who,
because of physical and/or mental deviance(s) from the nondisabled norm,
tends to be viewed by society at large with the classical tragic emotions of
pity and terror and deemed to be stuck in a life not worth living. A logical next
step seemed to entail reflecting upon social attitudes toward the only
available alternative. Although many people are quick enough to sanction
death for others-in such forms as abortion, euthanasia, and capital
punishment-few seem capable of contemplating their own end, or that of
anyone with whom they are intimate, with anything like equanimity. I thought
I might try.
Beneath my interest in death, as in disability before it, lay my desire to
understand the role of affliction in perfecting human experience. Although
suffering is a state often considered scandalous in modern society, a mark of
illness to be cured or moral deviance to be corrected, from a spiritual
perspective it is simply an element in the human condition, to be neither
courted nor combated. To refuse to suffer is to refuse fully to live. Doing so
leads not only to risky behaviors (self-mutilation, anorexia nervosa, and
addiction all stem from an inauthentic relation to suffering) but also to an
anesthesia of the soul which renders play all but impossible. In short,
suffering needs to be redeemed and reincorporated into the framework we
use to ascribe meaning to otherwise chaotic experience. Without death to
round our little lives, they have neither shape nor sweetness nor significance.
When I was offered a contract to write a book about death, however, I replied
that I might just as soon do the dying itself. I wasn't speaking figuratively or
facetiously. I meant simply that I had reached the point in my crippled life
where, my losses hugely outweighing my gains, death seemed less like
subject matter than like an act to be got on with and out of the way. Then my
condition began to suggest that I might in fact get my half-heedless wish. I
might never complete such a book. I might never even get it fairly started.
And I discovered that I am perhaps nowhere near as scornful of my rubbishy
existence as I've often made myself out to be.
I'm willing enough to die. Some mornings I have waked weeping to find myself
still alive. I no longer face the challenge of living a new day well, to which my
spirit might rise, but daunting hours of struggle to accomplish the most basic
tasks: capturing food on a fork and then raising it to my lips, turning the
pages of a book or magazine, scratching my nose or grasping a pencil,
pressing the button on my speakerphone or the joystick on my wheelchair. I
have found no way to describe the attentive effort these gestures require to
those who perform hundreds of them every day without notice. It used to feel
like moving under water; now, like moving through aspic; one day, like moving
through amber: like a prehistoric insect, not at all. Because my fatigue set in
more than forty years ago, well before other symptoms of MS appeared, I've
long since forgotten what unforced activity at the most mundane level feels
like. I've lost the ability to formulate any plan more elaborate than wheeling
from my studio to the house, retrieving my lunch from the refrigerator, and
eating it-unless I upend it during the transfer, in which case the dogs will eat
it while I rage. This ever-narrowing focus wears away my spirit, which feels
thinner now and more likely to tear than the page on which these words
appear.
My most arduous undertakings in recent years have involved the toilet, so
that much of my attention each day focused on rudimentary issues: Could I
transfer myself from my wheelchair to the toilet? Would I wet myself instead
or in the process? Would I void completely enough to prevent the antibiotic-
resistant bacteria that have colonized my bladder from proliferating into a full-
blown urinary tract infection? No such luck, and so I've wound up sporting a
drainage bag. Will it hold, or will it disgorge its yellow contents all over
someone's new wall-to-wall carpeting? Will my bowels move today? With
what kind of assistance? Because urination and defecation once formed the
site for a highly charged struggle between infant and mother, and since part
of mother's victory consisted in ensuring that one carried out these "duties"
while thinking and speaking of them as little as possible, attention devoted to
them is tainted in a way that hours spent coloring and styling one's hair or
polishing one's fingernails would not be, even though these too involve
managing waste matter. "Death with dignity," which has become a
catchphrase now that dying can be prolonged almost indefinitely, provides a
polite means of expressing what a student in a class on death and loss
recently listed as her greatest end-of-life fear: "having somebody wipe my
butt." The spirit eroded by effortful trivia is expended utterly in a waste of
shame at these infantile concerns. I'm ready to leave them behind.
On the morning my mother decided that the few weeks her highly aggressive
lung cancer could offer her would hold nothing of value to her, she mouthed to
her pulmonologist, "I'm ready." Shortly thereafter, the resident covering for her
primary-care physician came in. Fresh out of medical school and visibly
shaken, he began to protest her decision, listing various weapons that might
still be deployed. Prevented by a tracheostomy from uttering a sound, Mother
regarded him implacably.
"I know this is hard for you," I said to him. "I'm sure you went into medicine
to make people well, not to let them die. But you have to understand that for
some of us, death is not an enemy." He couldn't understand. He went away,
and we didn't see him again.
Fight or flight: a common enough response to an event that is literally
unfathomable, since it extinguishes the being who does the knowing, and
therefore dreadful, as any threat to our existence must be. For protection,
and for comfort when protection fails, we huddle together in social formations
that cope variously with the ineluctable and destabilizing fact that every
individual member, regardless of station or merit, will at some point cease to
be. Small wonder so many societies function as though perched on the brink
of dissolution: they are, from the perspective of those members engaged in
death and birth, dissolving and reforming at every instant. The corruption and
imminent demise so lamented by every age in relation to its golden past is
not the world's but our own. Pace the doomsayers, the cosmos seems likely
to putter along all but forever, not discernibly the worse for wear; even
humankind may prove surprisingly durable; but each one of us will not.
The whole of psychological development and cultural production occurs not
merely in the context of but in response to the certainty of individual death:
the sole absolute in the flux and welter of human experience. "Of all the
wonders that I yet have heard," Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ruminates as
his own end looms,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come .
At least until now, death remains the ultimate necessity.
'Twas ever thus, though it may not always be. The stunning scientific
advances of the twentieth century, if they continue in this one, may lead to
the fulfillment of humanity's (and, as far as we can tell, only humanity's)
dearest wish: to live forever. I'm not talking about the "everlasting life" of
an "immortal soul" or any other such myth constructed to allay anxiety about
What Comes Next (and indubitably, we reassure ourselves, something
always has and therefore something will come next). I mean living on just as
you live now-taking out the rubbish and the compost, changing the bedsheets
on Sundays, buying new flea collars for the dogs, toasting the new year with
champagne every January 1-forever. "Immortalists," people with such plans
sometimes call themselves. I once knew one, quite a famous one, but he
died some years back. Using nanotechnology to repair physical damage at
the molecular level; freezing the body until a cure has been developed for
whatever ails it, including mortality itself; downloading "personness" onto a
microchip: the schemes for self-perpetuation are many and mostly
fantastical. But then, a century ago, so was swooping through the air
between San Francisco and Boston, not to mention through the vacuum of
space .
I feel neither doubt about the ability of scientists to invent physical
immortality nor qualms about the propriety of their doing so. I've never seen
the point of bleating about violations of natural law, whether these involve
inserting fish genes into tomatoes to improve their shelf life or using fetal
stem cells to grow new organs. After all, we eat both fish and tomatoes in
some form or other. And in view of the difficulty we have dissuading
adolescent girls from keeping their babies instead of permitting them to be
adopted by mature infertile couples, the chance seems remote that we'll ever
see, queued up outside abortion clinics, hordes of women who got pregnant
solely to sell their fetuses to organ farms. New discoveries clearly and
continually demonstrate our feeble grasp of natural law, which may be in
itself inviolable (though certainly open to human discovery and interpretation)
or, on the contrary, subject to infinite revision. One way or the other-that is,
whether we've always been able to live forever but haven't learned how, or
whether we've never been able to live forever until we learned how-immortality,
if or when we achieve it, will be a thoroughly natural state .
What it will not be is a human state, not in any way that we might recognize
those living in it as human. Not merely our physical but our psychosocial
selves rest in the reality that we don't have all the time in the world. We mold
our fables into life's shape: beginning, middle, end (death for tragedy, death
deferred for comedy, but the reference point is the same). So too our music,
which bursts forth from silence and dies away into silence again. Our
paintings and photographs freeze moments out of time and suspend them
against the blank space of eternity. Our relationships gain much of their
piquancy from our awareness that every beloved is frail, imperfect, and
subject to loss. We rear children who will bear our essence forward into a
world we can never enter. Our gods differ from us in that they never die or,
dying, rise again. If we lived forever, we might well go on creating, loving,
worshiping, but the impetus for and the premises of these activities would be
wholly alien to the ones we have now. Death makes us who we are.
© 2001 by Nancy Mairs. All rights reserved.
more than quarter of a century on the issues that confront a person who,
because of physical and/or mental deviance(s) from the nondisabled norm,
tends to be viewed by society at large with the classical tragic emotions of
pity and terror and deemed to be stuck in a life not worth living. A logical next
step seemed to entail reflecting upon social attitudes toward the only
available alternative. Although many people are quick enough to sanction
death for others-in such forms as abortion, euthanasia, and capital
punishment-few seem capable of contemplating their own end, or that of
anyone with whom they are intimate, with anything like equanimity. I thought
I might try.
Beneath my interest in death, as in disability before it, lay my desire to
understand the role of affliction in perfecting human experience. Although
suffering is a state often considered scandalous in modern society, a mark of
illness to be cured or moral deviance to be corrected, from a spiritual
perspective it is simply an element in the human condition, to be neither
courted nor combated. To refuse to suffer is to refuse fully to live. Doing so
leads not only to risky behaviors (self-mutilation, anorexia nervosa, and
addiction all stem from an inauthentic relation to suffering) but also to an
anesthesia of the soul which renders play all but impossible. In short,
suffering needs to be redeemed and reincorporated into the framework we
use to ascribe meaning to otherwise chaotic experience. Without death to
round our little lives, they have neither shape nor sweetness nor significance.
When I was offered a contract to write a book about death, however, I replied
that I might just as soon do the dying itself. I wasn't speaking figuratively or
facetiously. I meant simply that I had reached the point in my crippled life
where, my losses hugely outweighing my gains, death seemed less like
subject matter than like an act to be got on with and out of the way. Then my
condition began to suggest that I might in fact get my half-heedless wish. I
might never complete such a book. I might never even get it fairly started.
And I discovered that I am perhaps nowhere near as scornful of my rubbishy
existence as I've often made myself out to be.
I'm willing enough to die. Some mornings I have waked weeping to find myself
still alive. I no longer face the challenge of living a new day well, to which my
spirit might rise, but daunting hours of struggle to accomplish the most basic
tasks: capturing food on a fork and then raising it to my lips, turning the
pages of a book or magazine, scratching my nose or grasping a pencil,
pressing the button on my speakerphone or the joystick on my wheelchair. I
have found no way to describe the attentive effort these gestures require to
those who perform hundreds of them every day without notice. It used to feel
like moving under water; now, like moving through aspic; one day, like moving
through amber: like a prehistoric insect, not at all. Because my fatigue set in
more than forty years ago, well before other symptoms of MS appeared, I've
long since forgotten what unforced activity at the most mundane level feels
like. I've lost the ability to formulate any plan more elaborate than wheeling
from my studio to the house, retrieving my lunch from the refrigerator, and
eating it-unless I upend it during the transfer, in which case the dogs will eat
it while I rage. This ever-narrowing focus wears away my spirit, which feels
thinner now and more likely to tear than the page on which these words
appear.
My most arduous undertakings in recent years have involved the toilet, so
that much of my attention each day focused on rudimentary issues: Could I
transfer myself from my wheelchair to the toilet? Would I wet myself instead
or in the process? Would I void completely enough to prevent the antibiotic-
resistant bacteria that have colonized my bladder from proliferating into a full-
blown urinary tract infection? No such luck, and so I've wound up sporting a
drainage bag. Will it hold, or will it disgorge its yellow contents all over
someone's new wall-to-wall carpeting? Will my bowels move today? With
what kind of assistance? Because urination and defecation once formed the
site for a highly charged struggle between infant and mother, and since part
of mother's victory consisted in ensuring that one carried out these "duties"
while thinking and speaking of them as little as possible, attention devoted to
them is tainted in a way that hours spent coloring and styling one's hair or
polishing one's fingernails would not be, even though these too involve
managing waste matter. "Death with dignity," which has become a
catchphrase now that dying can be prolonged almost indefinitely, provides a
polite means of expressing what a student in a class on death and loss
recently listed as her greatest end-of-life fear: "having somebody wipe my
butt." The spirit eroded by effortful trivia is expended utterly in a waste of
shame at these infantile concerns. I'm ready to leave them behind.
On the morning my mother decided that the few weeks her highly aggressive
lung cancer could offer her would hold nothing of value to her, she mouthed to
her pulmonologist, "I'm ready." Shortly thereafter, the resident covering for her
primary-care physician came in. Fresh out of medical school and visibly
shaken, he began to protest her decision, listing various weapons that might
still be deployed. Prevented by a tracheostomy from uttering a sound, Mother
regarded him implacably.
"I know this is hard for you," I said to him. "I'm sure you went into medicine
to make people well, not to let them die. But you have to understand that for
some of us, death is not an enemy." He couldn't understand. He went away,
and we didn't see him again.
Fight or flight: a common enough response to an event that is literally
unfathomable, since it extinguishes the being who does the knowing, and
therefore dreadful, as any threat to our existence must be. For protection,
and for comfort when protection fails, we huddle together in social formations
that cope variously with the ineluctable and destabilizing fact that every
individual member, regardless of station or merit, will at some point cease to
be. Small wonder so many societies function as though perched on the brink
of dissolution: they are, from the perspective of those members engaged in
death and birth, dissolving and reforming at every instant. The corruption and
imminent demise so lamented by every age in relation to its golden past is
not the world's but our own. Pace the doomsayers, the cosmos seems likely
to putter along all but forever, not discernibly the worse for wear; even
humankind may prove surprisingly durable; but each one of us will not.
The whole of psychological development and cultural production occurs not
merely in the context of but in response to the certainty of individual death:
the sole absolute in the flux and welter of human experience. "Of all the
wonders that I yet have heard," Shakespeare's Julius Caesar ruminates as
his own end looms,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come .
At least until now, death remains the ultimate necessity.
'Twas ever thus, though it may not always be. The stunning scientific
advances of the twentieth century, if they continue in this one, may lead to
the fulfillment of humanity's (and, as far as we can tell, only humanity's)
dearest wish: to live forever. I'm not talking about the "everlasting life" of
an "immortal soul" or any other such myth constructed to allay anxiety about
What Comes Next (and indubitably, we reassure ourselves, something
always has and therefore something will come next). I mean living on just as
you live now-taking out the rubbish and the compost, changing the bedsheets
on Sundays, buying new flea collars for the dogs, toasting the new year with
champagne every January 1-forever. "Immortalists," people with such plans
sometimes call themselves. I once knew one, quite a famous one, but he
died some years back. Using nanotechnology to repair physical damage at
the molecular level; freezing the body until a cure has been developed for
whatever ails it, including mortality itself; downloading "personness" onto a
microchip: the schemes for self-perpetuation are many and mostly
fantastical. But then, a century ago, so was swooping through the air
between San Francisco and Boston, not to mention through the vacuum of
space .
I feel neither doubt about the ability of scientists to invent physical
immortality nor qualms about the propriety of their doing so. I've never seen
the point of bleating about violations of natural law, whether these involve
inserting fish genes into tomatoes to improve their shelf life or using fetal
stem cells to grow new organs. After all, we eat both fish and tomatoes in
some form or other. And in view of the difficulty we have dissuading
adolescent girls from keeping their babies instead of permitting them to be
adopted by mature infertile couples, the chance seems remote that we'll ever
see, queued up outside abortion clinics, hordes of women who got pregnant
solely to sell their fetuses to organ farms. New discoveries clearly and
continually demonstrate our feeble grasp of natural law, which may be in
itself inviolable (though certainly open to human discovery and interpretation)
or, on the contrary, subject to infinite revision. One way or the other-that is,
whether we've always been able to live forever but haven't learned how, or
whether we've never been able to live forever until we learned how-immortality,
if or when we achieve it, will be a thoroughly natural state .
What it will not be is a human state, not in any way that we might recognize
those living in it as human. Not merely our physical but our psychosocial
selves rest in the reality that we don't have all the time in the world. We mold
our fables into life's shape: beginning, middle, end (death for tragedy, death
deferred for comedy, but the reference point is the same). So too our music,
which bursts forth from silence and dies away into silence again. Our
paintings and photographs freeze moments out of time and suspend them
against the blank space of eternity. Our relationships gain much of their
piquancy from our awareness that every beloved is frail, imperfect, and
subject to loss. We rear children who will bear our essence forward into a
world we can never enter. Our gods differ from us in that they never die or,
dying, rise again. If we lived forever, we might well go on creating, loving,
worshiping, but the impetus for and the premises of these activities would be
wholly alien to the ones we have now. Death makes us who we are.
© 2001 by Nancy Mairs. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBeacon Press
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0807062499
- ISBN 13 9780807062494
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages208
- Rating
Buy New
Learn more about this copy
US$ 21.19
Shipping:
US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace
Stock Image
A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
Published by
Beacon Press
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0807062499
ISBN 13: 9780807062494
New
Paperback
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0807062499
Buy New
US$ 21.19
Convert currency
Stock Image
A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
Published by
Beacon Press
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0807062499
ISBN 13: 9780807062494
New
Paperback
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks243422
Buy New
US$ 59.00
Convert currency
Stock Image
A TROUBLED GUEST: LIFE AND DEATH
Published by
Beacon Press
(2002)
ISBN 10: 0807062499
ISBN 13: 9780807062494
New
Softcover
Quantity: 1
Seller:
Rating
Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.6. Seller Inventory # Q-0807062499
Buy New
US$ 77.64
Convert currency