Death and Industry
Yesterday I wrote an obituary.
It was for my Uncle Larry, who died on Thursday, a few weeks short of his 88th birthday.
He’d been sick for a long time, and his death wasn’t a surprise. I spent much of the day with him, as he was dying, with my Aunt Tanya.
Being with a person who is dying is a very specific experience. This is not the first time I’ve done it. The labored breathing, referred to by most people as a death rattle, and by medical workers as Cheyne-Stokes respiration is one of those sounds you recognize when you hear it, viscerally, in your animal brain, like the sound of a big earthquake.
A friend in California told me once you can hear an earthquake coming. I couldn’t imagine what the sound would be like, until I heard it, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. I knew exactly what it was, in my body, the sound like a train boring through the earth at impossible speed from my right, just before everything started pitching like a ship in a storm. The death rattle is like that, you know it when you hear it, it echoes through our collective memory.
I write and think and talk about how we work, how we can work better. I work. But being that close to death is a bracing reminder of the realities we hide from. Life ends. No one, on their deathbed, wishes they spent more time at the office.
Tanya is my mother’s sister. Tanya and Larry were together over three decades, so I’ve known him most of my adult life. He was a good man. He helped me out quite a bit after my son was disabled in a car accident. Larry was sitting with me as my son died. Larry was thin and wiry, he used to be a long-distance runner, and he had a sweet tooth. He liked my key lime pie, and I told him I’d make it for him all the time because I was so grateful for his help with my son. I must have made key lime pie for him hundreds of times.
Tanya and I sat at her kitchen table yesterday, writing the obituary. Larry was a Huskies alum and fan. He worked as a city planner. I remember he was good at his job, because cities kept trying to hire him to come back after he retired. And he did a couple of times.
I talk about the grief closet, how one grief is like opening the door on a jumble of metal folding chairs of other griefs and they can fall on your head, with random sharp edges. The grief closet is open for me now.
I distracted myself by watching television. I watched the season finale of a show called Industry, a story about rich people, and people who want to be rich, behaving badly in banking. Some of the characters got very wealthy. And almost all of them had bad relationships with their spouses, children, friends, colleagues, all people they ignored, abused, drove away or used like pawns.
It’s a television show, but I thought about all the people I’ve known who have spent most of their energy and attention on a job that was just turning the wheels of capitalism. Not real jobs like saving lives, or teaching children, or planning cities or making things people use and need. No, I was thinking of jobs where people make money by moving money around, often with reckless disregard for the impact of their machinations on other humans or animals or the world.
I’ve had jobs like that. I needed them to support my kids. I spent too many years in advertising to be on some moral high horse. Years ago, I made an intentional shift in how I work and what I do. But I won’t pretend that I never feel a swift wave of envy when I see the financial stability of others who make the kind of money you get when you go all in on the capitalism game.
So, it was a good reminder for me, that at the end, around that bed, when your breath starts getting ragged and hard to get out, work doesn’t matter anymore. When you have days or hours left, are there people around you who care about you? Will there be a handful of people who never get over your death, who always remember you, and think of you at certain moments for the rest of their lives?
Of course, obituaries talk about work, especially for an artist or activist, a politician or anyone else in the public eye. Leaving a legacy of accomplishment is a worthy goal, if it’s worthy work. But I like the list of loved ones in obituaries, the “survived by”, the people you were friends with, married, raised, brought into your family as spouses of your children, the grandchildren and nieces and nephews. That is what is of value, the people who, if we’re lucky, will be there when they hear death in our breath, and lean close, hold our hands, and cry.