If a woman needs a colonoscopy before age 50 it’s over. Same goes for a man. Anybody having the sort of problems a doctor feels the need to “scope”. All done. Put your affairs in order. Why? Because either the doc is mistaken and it’s nothing or it’s cancer. They can’t really do anything if it’s cancer. Blood in your poop? Sorry. You’re NGMI. (Not Gonna Make It, as the kids say).
When someone tells me they’ve been diagnosed with cancer I hear the Super Mario music in my head. You know, the jingle that plays when you die. “Dum da dum, da da da da da da da-da-da….” It’s appropriate. Once I almost sang it out loud by accident. That would not have been appropriate.
It’s appropriate because cancer anywhere in the GI tract is Game Over. Even with all the supposed advances in medicine there’s not a lot to be done when your ass is bleeding. They can go in and try to cut pieces off maybe. Super unpleasant but it might buy you time. #ColostomyBagLife. Personally I’d rather just die. One of the problems with modern medicine is that it doesn’t know when to let go. Death is bad, and only bad, so we do all sorts of weird things to try and delay the inevitable. We chop pieces out of their gut. We cut off body parts. We shoot them with radiation or poison them, hoping to incidentally poison the cancer first.
Barbaric. And none of it really works either.
I don’t have any official numbers or anything but, anecdotally cancer always seems to come back. In my experience “remission” is always temporary. Surely I’m wrong on that. There probably are people out there who really and truly “beat” cancer and go on to live out a full life. Die at 80, you know. But it seems rarer than oncologists would like to admit. Least to me. Skin cancer’s not too bad I guess. You can just cut off a bad mole. That works. Catch it early enough and you can cut off a bad boob or a bad testicle too. But stuff on the inside? Behind the rib cage or in the stomach?
NGMI.
Sorry. Game over music.
It’s a shame because we don’t know how to die. A rift was made when the priest and the physician were divided into two separate occupations. Once upon a time they were the same. The medicine man would offer prayers to the gods for you and probably cook up some concoction in a pot. Herbs and so on. It might help or it might not but either way he could help you get ready to die. Anoint your head with oils. Burn sage. Hear your confessions. Doctors can’t do that. Instead they do something called “palliative care.” It sounds fancy but in practice it just means giving people heroin. Most of the time anyway. You know, something to ease the pain. The dying are too drugged to make confessions. Not how I want to go personally.
I say “supposed advances in medicine” because life expectancy is actually going down. Did you know that? It’s true. What are all the doctors doing? Where are the nurses? Hey, pharmaceutical sales reps, what gives!? I thought we were marching towards a brave new world of no diseases! Michio Kaku and the other “futurists” told me so. We’ve allegedly been ***this*** close to biological immortality for decades now. We’re gonna do it! You’ll see! I remember when I was in college they ran a series of television shows about how the first person to live to be a thousand had probably already been born. Modern medicine you see. We were gonna beat death. We were gonna beat death through science.
Meanwhile in the real world if somebody’s poop is black they call hospice.
Immortality. Long wait on a train don’t come.
The truth is people don’t live any longer today than they ever have. Just facts.
“The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.”
That’s from the Bible. Psalm 90:10. It was recorded in a collection of psalms probably sometime round the reign of King David (~1000 B.C.). The psalm itself though claims to be a “Song of Moses,” written far earlier. The average life expectancy in the United States is 78, so, you know, since 1000 BC or so we’ve gained nothing in terms of years. Medicine. “Supposed Advances in.”
Not a fan of doctors. Hospitals neither. I don’t like them because it’s a profession and an industry full of false hope. Fancy billboards of smiling patients. Expensive lobbies. Crisp clean lab coats. Just marketing. All of it is marketing. Marketing designed to convince you that something more than giving heroin to dying people is happening on the inside. It’s not. With death they’re doing nothing fancier than they did in Ancient Sumer. Except now there’s no priest. No prayers.
Antibiotics are nice though. Credit where credit’s due.
The truth is we’re all NGMI. I’m not sure how they ever convinced anybody that we were on the verge of conquering death. Or heck, even on the verge of beating cancer. Anyone familiar with the matter knows we aren’t. I guess, no longer believing in God, in an immortal soul, we had to off-load our desire for immortality elsewhere. We’re always running from death. Trying to pretend it isn’t real. That’s the other great evil of the hospital. It takes the dying off the streets and out of their homes and shuts them up behind closed doors where nobody can see. Tragic. Grandma ought to die at home. Kids need to see that. Grounds them in reality. Memento Mori. Remember Death. It’s the only thing you really have to do.
Monks used to keep skulls on their desks. Real skulls. Not the fake plastic ones doctors keep on theirs now. Sometimes they even made chandeliers out of bones. Pretty metal. Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath had nothing on the medievals. The tomb of the Black Prince (1330-1376) had this inscribed on it for visitors to read:
“Remember me as you pass by
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, you soon shall be.
Prepare for Death, and think of me.”
Or an early version of that anyway. Like I say. Pretty metal. Even the lyrics are more intense.
Sounds glum maybe but this is your way out. Your path to freedom. Everything is temporary. Everything is fading away. So why are you trapped? Why are you hanging on and trying to keep it all together. You’re spending all your life, all your time and energy, trying to prevent the inevitable. Let go.
There’s an old parable out of south-east Asia about monkeys. How do you catch one? Well, they’re quick but they’re greedy little bastards. Lot like us. So what you do is you put a treat inside a jar. A jar with an opening just big enough for a monkey’s hand to slip into. Open. Not closed. Then it grabs the treat at the bottom. Uh-oh. Now it can’t pull it’s hand out. Won’t let go. The hunter can run up on it now and the greedy monkey will try to sprint away without losing his treat. Too heavy though. Awkward to run. CLONK. Club to the head. Monkey brains for dinner.
If you want to be free all you have to do is let go and in this task Death is your great assistant. It is your savior. Because if you sit and think about it long enough you will see that you’d better let go because there’s no way in hell of holding on. You can’t win. Stop trying. All that time, all that energy, all that wasted effort spent on worrying about the future… ultimately spent on trying to escape death.
Let it go.
Now you have that energy back. That time. Now you can live.
The middle ages were a colorful time because the people weren’t afraid of dying. They accepted it. Our culture doesn’t and so we aren’t so colorful. We don’t make anything beautiful. We’re sterile. Trying always to make the entire world as pristine and germ-free as a hospital. Not today Death, we snicker beneath our mounds of hand sanitizer.
Death just smiles. He can wait. Hodl all you want.
You’re NGMI.
Lots of people talking about fear of death this week.
Wonderful.