Ganz Tot

 A lot of my recent posts on this blog have been frenzied efforts to impose some sort of meaning and narrative coherence on my dad's ordeal of dying from brain cancer. 

Along the way, he has had lucid moments when he told me he loves me and is proud of me, and that he trusts our family will be okay when he's gone. 

Then he would just curl up peacefully and contentedly in his hospital bed and sleep, "looking so dear in sickness," as a character remarks in Thomas Lovell Beddoes. 

It's been heartbreaking, but cathartic at the same time. It had a kind of closure. 

But then there come more moments after that—moments when he is confused; frustrated; in pain. 

But at least in these moments, he has said things about being ready for death. He has said he wants to "click off from this planet" and "check out of this pop stand." 

And this too had a certain narrative completeness to it. It had a resolution. My dad was reaching the end of his life, and he was ready for the next voyage into that undiscovered country. 

One could bust out one's Swinburne, and mourn gently but sweetly: "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

But then today, 24 hours after saying he was ready to end his life—he is saying the opposite. 

A friend came to visit him. I wasn't there when it happened, but apparently dad told him that he didn't want to die. He said "I'm dying and I don't know how to stop it."

"I'm ganz tot," he also said. 

Earlier this morning, dad in his confusion was barely able to summon the words "yes" and "no." 

A few hours later, he was pulling up an apt phrase in a foreign language—one he hasn't spoken in decades, but which he must be retrieving somehow from the brief time in his boyhood when he lived in Germany. 

Ganz Tot. The phrase put a deeper chill through me than Swinburne ever could. That didn't sound like gentle mourning or the soft eddy of that "weary river" finally emptying into the ocean.

That sounded more like something out of Gottfried Benn's "Morgue." 

My dad telling us he loves us but welcomes the end—that he "sinks" and is "ready to depart" (as Savage Landor put it)—that I at least know how to fit into some sort of tolerable portrait of existence, some poetic unity of life, that leaves me space to go on. 

But dad saying that he knows he is dying and would stop it if he could—dad saying he is dying but does not want it to happen—that just takes this back to the level of a horror and an evil that there is no possible way to accept.

A tragedy for which there is no denouement or resolution. Something simply awful—something about which there is nothing to be said except that "it is intensely sad," to borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin. 

I am left saying, with Edna St. Vincent Millay: I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. 

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: [...] But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. 

Maybe there is no way to make sense of this. Maybe the hope for a narrative resolution and a sense of meaning is chimerical. 

"[I]t may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever," as William James once put it. And perhaps this is one of those instances. 

I don't want my dad to die. He doesn't want to die either. If it were not for a random freak of fate, he would still be alive for another twenty or thirty years. 

And strive as I do to write it all out in a way that resolves and coheres, maybe it just doesn't. Maybe it never will. 

I'm beginning to understand a bit better why B.S. Johnson wrote his cancer book, The Unfortunates, in the form of a collage of discrete sections that could be re-arranged at random. 

Cancer is all "chaos," Johnson insisted; all "disintegration"—and so, only a disintegrated book could do justice to it. 

The process of dying doesn't just happen with one beautiful catharsis and then "the rest is silence." It babbles; it meanders; it digresses.

It's not like a story or a drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

It doubles back on itself and retraces its steps.

It makes no sense. 

"[C]haos is the most likely explanation," Johnson wrote elsewhere; "while at the same time [....] even to seek an explanation represents a denial of chaos." 

"In general," Johnson slyly writes, at the end of The Unfortunates, "generalizing is to lie, to tell lies.

"Not how he died, not what he died of, even less why he died, are of concern, to me," he concludes: "only the fact that he did die, he is dead, is important: the loss to me, to us"

The loss to me, to us, indeed. 

Ganz Tot.