The First Noel - Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan’s gravel rasping really has no business being backed by a children’s choir, but here we are. These vocals remind me of my grandpa singing “The First No-wire” a nearly-tuneful parody of this song about his black labrador.
(Her name was La Belle Noir. I was maybe four when my grandparents adopted her. Her elegant name did not survive contact with my juvenile diction. Everyone ended up calling her “no-wire”.)
My grandpa was infamous for his wordplay. Not for clever verbiage, exactly; he created a lot of mixed parody-proverbs that were entertaining and basically nonsensical. I get my skill at puns from my dad’s side, but the lure of absurd parody seems to have come down the maternal line.
I thought about my grandpa when reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. The book catalogues the trend of North Americans choosing to die outside of medical institutions. This is a return to early 20th century form—before the 1950s, we had fewer techniques to medically prolong life and so the majority of people in the USA died at home. By the end of the 1990s, fewer than 20 percent did. I appreciate that, in 2010, my grandpa was able to decide that he’d had enough medicine and it was time to go back home.
I was a teenager when he was diagnosed with cancer, and wasn’t in any way tasked with caring for him, but my uninformed impression is that he was, in some ways, lucky. Chemotherapy was hard, but after he stopped treatment the cancer seemed to sap his appetite and send him to sleep. His illness never stole his mind. Gawande thinks it’s important for hospitals to allow patients the agency to risk fewer days of living to have more good ones. I think my grandpa had many good days towards his end.
Being Mortal covers a lot of ground, including some psychology research that I’d sort of forgotten about until I was writing this newsletter.
As we get older, people tend to be less focused on exploration and achievement and more on intimacy and meaning. Professor Laura Carstensen has observed the same motivational shifts in HIV-positive young people and after events like 9/11 and the SARS epidemic. She theorizes that the shifts aren’t caused by the passage of time, but by the subjective sense of how much time is left before death.
I’ve been pleasantly unhurried lately, at least by my standards. How much is the nearness of (a) death to blame?
With a desire to balance small satisfactions and grandiose progress,
- Tessa