Tag: indie thesis

The best thesis since Xena

sarah

I helped my granny pick her peach tree on the weekend, so I took the opportunity to explain my new thesis project to her and ask for her input about mortality and dying.

She’s 86; she grew up on a farm; she’s had her funeral and burial plans pre-paid for years; she tells a story about her experience speaking with the spirit of her recently deceased sister; and we often have conversations about my grandpa’s advanced Alzheimer’s dementia and the merits of burning out versus fading away (elder nursing home version). I thought she’d have lots to contribute.

The first thing out of her mouth?

“Oh darling, there’s a book I’ll have to give you when I’m finished. It’s about one of those… those men who never die? (Well he could die in a fight, but not of old age.) And he’s supposed to hunt evil? It goes back centuries. Just centuries.”

(The name she’s looking for is Dark Hunter, and he surely owes his existence to Boris Vallejo.)

Dark Hunter novel cover

I know that I need to start narrowing my topic as soon as possible— at the moment I’m reminded of my aunt’s high school independent research project on the entire history of ancient China— but for now, while I scope out the lay of the land, it’s pretty cool to just ask everyone I know if they have any tips or resources about dying, to see all the different angles that pop up. I would not have thought to examine sexualized immortality in post Buffy pulp fiction if granny hadn’t suggested it.

A start: normal dying processes

sarah1 Comment

I’ve heard a lot of stories of dying people needing to get a good sleep before they have enough energy to die, or of dying at contrived times like right before an annoying doctor is due to show up, or right after seeing a new baby relative.

I’m sure a lot of those stories are coincidence, but I’m intrigued by the idea that dying is an action the body takes, rather than an event that just happens when the body fails. Zoe pointed out the other day that many people think of death as a failure of medicine, rather than as a normal event in everyone’s life. To me, thinking of death as an active, biological process makes it seem more like a normal function (which I’m interested in, for now).

This morning I’ve been hunting for information about the normal dying process, and how it varies, and whether there are conflicting models for “normal” death responses the way I’m familiar with different, biased models of sexual response from working on my vagina website (and indeed, Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief seem to draw similar controversy to Masters and Johnson’s model of the human sexual response cycle).

Zen Hospice has a great overview of the physical changes a person goes through as they die, from a hospice perspective. I recognize all of those symptoms from the few people I’ve known at the end of their lives. I can see immediately why there are so many comparisons between giving birth, having orgasms, and dying: all involve extreme physical responses that start to seem normal when you know what to expect. Learning about the physical symptoms of dying feels a little like getting to know the birds in your neighbourhood or something: gaining context.

Graceful Exits:How Great Beings Die apparently deals with conscious dying and dying on purpose, such as the idea of elders wandering off alone into the woods to die. It sounds a bit flaky (i.e., possible use of ambiguous generalizations like “aboriginal cultures”), but still really compelling to me. I’m all for special skills, and this intro sort of makes dying sound like a superpower:

Then the person is left alone. He or she sits down, and within a matter of minutes is able to intentionally close down the body and die.

That would be both more and less useful than being able to cry on command.

But, from my scattered reading this morning, I gather that I should do some searching for literature about “deathing” and “timing of death” rather than the process of dying. It’s a bit weird that “dying” gets used more as adjective than as a form of the verb “to die.” When a person “dies” that describes the moment of death fairly precisely, but when a person “is dying” that could refer to almost any stage of life or illness or injury.

This is the kind of jargon I should figure out soon— it’s hard to organize notes when you don’t know the names for things (and stuff).