death denial

Stormin’ Out There OR I’ll Nap When I Want To!

~ Roger JG Albert

Wed. Jan. 18, 2023 -8:50 AM

Sky is blue this morning and it’s calm with no wind, but last night I swore the sky was falling. Sure felt that way. We sleep on the south-east side of the house, that’s the direction of the prevailing wind. 

If there’s going to be a tree fall on the house during a storm, it will be from that direction, from the south-east. We seldom get strong winds at our home in Cumberland, but when they happen, they aren’t shy. 

Last night the weather had no shame, no sense of propriety. It came banging on the side of the house, undeterred by the fact that we might be sleeping (or trying to sleep) inside. The rain aimed to engrave the windows with incessant beatings. There would be no sleep, at least not until the weather lost its angry edge. 

One thing about sleeplessness is that my brain has plenty of time to speculate on things transpiring in the midlin’ parts of my body. Normally my brain is in denial, but storms put a wrench into that. The storms seem to amplify the ‘discomfort’ I feel in my back. Most of the time I don’t think about it. It may be that atmospheric pressure has something to do with the pain in my midsection, but that’s only speculation on my brain’s part. The pain is real, though. 

I was supposed to get a visit today from my palliative care doctor, but she was called away to an emergency so we’re putting that off until next week. 

Thursday, January 19, 2023 – 8:00 AM

0.0˚C. Jeez. That’s cold in my books. Looks like winter is carrying on. It’s going to hang around for some time yet, whether we like it or not. There’s no denying that. It may be that we escape more serious dumps of snow, but there’s no guarantee of that either. Ski patrollers would like to see lots of snow fall and we do need as big a snowpack as we can get, but I don’t welcome snow. I’m decidedly not a cold weather person. I like to sit by our politically incorrect woodstove, especially when I just get up in the morning and Carolyn has got a fire going in our new, very efficient Pacific Energy woodstove (rated at 1.8 parts per million). Ah, a nice wood fire, warm and welcoming, along with a nice cup of coffee. Life is good, isn’t it? Well, there is that other thing. 

My back has been a challenge lately with constant ‘stitches’. The pain isn’t horrible, but it is a pain in the butt (a little higher, actually) and pushes me to take more hydromorphone. If I take 4 mgs of breakthrough hydromorphone on top of the 18 mgs of the slow-release flavour, I can usually fall asleep and stay that way for a while. Lately, I’ve taken to sleeping in my recliner. It’s much more restrictive than my usual bed because it’s so much narrower, but also much more flexible in terms of position. Actually, I find my recliner quite comfortable to sleep in. Come to think of it, I may want to use it tonight.

Now, enter the game-changer. The Home Care team has arranged to have a hospital bed delivered to the house next week for my pleasure and sleeping enjoyment. This bed is kindly provided by the Canadian Red Cross and is available to me for as long as I need it. That has me a little unnerved, but I need to accept it in the same spirit it was offered. Thank you, Red Cross. 

The problem is that all the people I’ve ever known to get a hospital bed delivered to their homes have not come out alive. I guess that’s to be expected, but I don’t feel as though I’m that close to the final frontier. So, I’m of two minds about the hospital bed. On the one hand, yes, I want it because I think it would increase my level of sleepy time comfort and probably reduce my dependence on opioids. On the other hand, anything that reminds me of hospitals leaves me a little cold. 

I suppose the best thing for me to do is relax. Not sure I can do that. I’ll work on it. 

Friday, January 20, 2023 ~7:30 AM

The menagerie awakens to growling tummies. The cats, Princess and Sunshine, are prancing around wary of each other, but impatient for breakfast. Sunshine is a guest, Arianne’s cat who is here waiting for the renovations to their house in Vancouver to be finished allowing him to finally go home and relax on his favourite perch on the back porch. 

Tilly is impatient. She has that big tummy to fill up and she’s quite convinced that she will starve to death given that Carolyn hasn’t fed her yet and it’s getting late. Cooper, the neighbour’s dog sits at the deck doors waiting for something. He’s not sure what, but he’s convinced that it’s in here whatever it is. Food, maybe? A spot in front of the woodstove, maybe? Making decisions is tough. Every once in a while he lets out a bark, not one with great conviction, and just loud enough to ensure that the residents of this place know that he’s out there and needs something. What? Who knows?

Tilly is on guard making sure Cooper doesn’t exceed his privilege. She charges him from this side of the door. 

I had a good sleep last night. It was one of those rare ones. The pain in my back wasn’t present enough to wake me up and I didn’t have to pee. I slept a solid seven hours straight. Miraculous! 

My back is still twitching but that should attenuate shortly because I just took my meds, and they will take care of the twitching. After that, I’ll take a nap. I probably don’t need a nap, but it’s my right as an old man to nap whenever I feel like it. 

ActualIy, I nap out of a sense of duty. If I don’t nap, the government might feel justified in removing that privilege from me. Governments are like that, you know, according to the CPC. Liberals and Trudeau are always waiting to pounce to revoke our privileges. Bad government! Be scared of bad government! Be scared of everything! LOL! Ha Ha! He! He!

How Long Does He Have?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 7 Comments

I don’t know, but I wonder if anyone has asked any of my family or friends that question about me. It’s a common question in movies or on television ‘medical’ dramas. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to answer that question unless the circumstances have been set up ahead of time to determine the time of anyone’s death. In most circumstances we just don’t know. In some we do. Maybe you have a gun and are about to shoot a hapless victim. In that circumstance, you would precisely know the day and time of your victim’s death. Somebody on death row in the U.S. would know when they were scheduled to die, but with all the appeals possible, some death row denizens have been there for sixteen years and more. Still, eventually appeals run out and off you go to the abattoir. Or you might get up in Toronto some dreary Monday morning expecting to spend the day dispensing cash and stamping statements as a teller in a bank downtown, only to be stabbed to death leaving a subway train at your usual stop.  

You might have come across the same story I did about the young woman (31) stabbed to death in the subway in Toronto on December 9that around 2 PM. I have no idea if she was a bank teller, that’s my invention, but it would be possible. The fact that she was stabbed at 2 PM is significant. There are many reasons why she would be out and about midday. Her killer, 52-year-old Neng Jia Jin, required a Mandarin translator for his court appearance and was given a list of people he was not to contact even though he was held in custody. He killed the victim, Vanessa Kurpiewska, randomly. Who expects to get up in the morning, get dressed, maybe make plans for the holidays, have a coffee, go off to work, take an afternoon break to do a little shopping, and end up dead on a subway train? On the same day the CBC reported a deadly shooting in Mississauga and every day the papers are happy to report on any number of random shootings and stabbings across the country and in the US. Regular, typical, unspectacular deaths generally appear under the radar, in the obituaries, not on the front pages. 

So, a significant number of people die randomly every day from any number of causes, some endemic, some violent, and all unpredictable. It may happen that I get surprised by my death, or at least by my dying. Probably not, but it’s not in the realm of the impossible. My palliative care team can track the deteriorations in my body, some of which are clear signs of impending death. Kidney failure is a sure sign of imminent death. When I came close to dying a month or so ago after my last chemo treatment, it was because my kidney was shutting down. That’s an indicator of major bodily shutdown. I remember clearly in the ER at the time that the docs asked us what we wanted to do if my kidney did shut down. We made it clear to them that no heroics were to be used to keep me alive. Palliative care doctors are really attuned to changes in the functions of major organs. I’m fortunate in that I have a strong heart and no indication of any cardio-vascular issues. 

We (Carolyn and I) drove to Campbell River last week to see an orthopaedic surgeon about the lytic lesion in my right femur. The palliative care docs flagged it as a potential major issue because it seemed to be growing. The orthopaedic surgeon, Deke Botsford, concluded that the changes that had occurred over the past few months in my femur would not likely cause a pathological break, that is one that would happen with no provocation (a fall, for instance). Anyway, we decided that I would get an X-ray in a month or so and that we would have another chat at that time. Fair enough. No problem for now.

I’m reading a book that was kindly given to me by a very thoughtful neighbour. It’s called: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix (2018). I’m almost finished it. Mannix is a physician and a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist (CBT). Her approach to death and dying is psychological and biological. My approach you will realize, if you’ve followed this blog at all, leans much more to the cultural, social, and anthropological side of things. Of course, I also inject lots of personal anecdotes and experiences. That’s where Mannix and I cross paths. Her book is a compendium of stories about the end-of-life experiences of a whole range of people of all ages in Britain. My blog is a mix of things, but it leans heavily on my experiences in hospitals, with medications, and with medical staff. Denial, for Mannix, refers to how individuals come to accept or reject the fact of their imminent death. For me, following Becker and others, denial is considered primarily a cultural phenomenon which rubs off on every one of us via religious or magical traditions and practices that we rely upon to convince us that we are immortal. Our traditions, practices, and protocols act as collective reinforcement of our beliefs in our immortality. Émile Durkheim, the first French sociologist and education theorist, wrote about the importance of what he called collective effervescence as an important structural component of social coherence. 

I guess if I have any institutional or cultural connections with denial mechanisms, they would be associated with science, especially physics and chemistry. If I have any belief about what happens to my body after I die, it’s that all the atoms and molecules that make up my body will return to the biosphere, to be taken up by organisms in their process of growth. My consciousness will evaporate to nothingness.  So, it goes. 

This Blog

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 7 Comments

November 30, 2022 (8:35 AM)

If you’ve been following this blog since the Fall of 2019, you will know that I was diagnosed with cancer (multiple myeloma) at that time and that ever since I’ve dedicated the blog to exploring my relationship with ‘my’ cancer and its treatment. Lately, I’ve been compiling my blog posts into a Word file. Word tells me that I now have close to 150,000 words in that file. I’m sure I have double that in the blog since I started publishing it in 2012, the year I retired from teaching at North Island College. That’s a lot of verbal regurgitation. 

It’s been a ride. 

Looking back over the years it’s obvious how much of a rollercoaster ride it’s been. The thing is the rollercoaster has two primary seats and a number of others that can also be involved. Of course, I’m in the lead seat. If I didn’t have myeloma there would be no rollercoaster, but since I do have myeloma, any rollercoaster rides I’m on also involve my family. Carolyn is my wife but also my primary caregiver. It has not been easy for her. My daughters who both live in Vancouver have made every effort to support Carolyn and I on our ride. They have come here which is highly disruptive of their lives, never a word of complaint. One of my brothers and one of my sisters who live on the Lower Mainland have come to visit and help out. I have a sister who lives in Nanaimo. She and her daughter, Janice, come as often as they can and bring meals for us to relieve some of the caregiving burden from Carolyn. We are very fortunate also in that we have fantastic, generous, kind, and supportive neighbours. 

I can only go by my own experience but living with myeloma for anyone (and its treatments) means that some days we feel fine (more or less) and other days we feel crappy. Not long ago, after my last disastrous treatment and hospital stay, I spoke with my oncologist at the BCCA in Victoria. I was determined to stop all treatment, chemotherapy, and radiation, which I did. It seemed that I would always get a high fever and some form of infection following treatment. Last month I wrote about how my last chemo treatment almost killed me. Of course, stopping all treatment has its consequences.

As I noted in a previous post, the upshot of ceasing treatments means that I now have to face myeloma head on without the help (or hindrance) of treatment. I am now considered palliative, meaning that any treatment I get now aims to deal with pain alone. So, tomorrow late afternoon I go to the hospital for a CT scan of my right femur. The palliative care doctors want to know what the state of that femur is to better decide on what to do about it. They may recommend surgery. When we know more, we’ll decide what to do. I’m not sure what to think at this point. 

December 1, 2022 (8:00 AM)

It’s probably the coldest day of the year here today at -5˚C. Snow is deep in the yard and we’re expecting more today and tonight. It’s quite bright out now but that can change quickly, just like how I feel. 

Yesterday I introduced the role of caregiver. Caregivers, family, volunteers, or paid members of palliative care organizations are essential for people who are sick or somehow disabled and who can’t always look after themselves, who can’t cook, feed themselves, do laundry, wash dishes, etcetera. Caregiving is tough, one of the toughest jobs around. Imagine going to work not knowing what will be expected of you when you get there. Never mind all the bum wiping and other physically related work that is expected of you. Some of us who need care are quite large and heavy. Caregivers risk injury to themselves as they care for their charges.

For some caregivers who provide in-home care the issue is mental illness or dementia. Imagine going to work and immediately getting verbally assaulted and insulted by the person you’ve come to help. It can be the same in the hospital. While I was there, I often heard caregivers, nurses, and aides, get yelled at and abused in a number of ways by patients. Or the issue can be that the patient may have had a stroke or are otherwise incapable of communicating verbally. Professional caregivers are normally prepared for all exigencies and requirements of the work, but there are certainly times when the work gets overwhelming and tiring.  There are several resources available through government and non-profit organizations that can help caregivers. I list some of the more obvious ones here along with their web links. This Island Health website contains a lot of links to other resources. I don’t feel the need to replicate all of them here. A principal non-profit is the Family Caregivers of British Columbia. It is funded by Island Health, United Way, and the Province of British Columbia. 

December 2, 2022 (12:20 PM)

There is a weather warning posted online by Environment Canada for our region indicating that there might be up to a 15 cm dump of snow today. So far, the snow has been light but it’s picking up now. I’m still expecting to go to the hospital for a CT scan at 5:15 PM, but we’ll see. We haven’t heard from the hospital yet. We’ll see. 

December 3, 2022 (10:00 AM)

Heavy snow out there. It snowed a lot last night. I did go to the hospital for a CT scan. It was snowing hard, but David did a stellar job driving the car, which is great in the snow. The hospital seemed deserted, but that’s an illusion, of course. The wards are full of people behind closed doors, and I’m sure the emerg was busy, but the reception was empty, suitable for bowling.  

December 4th, 2022 (9:22 AM)

So, I wrote on December 1st that it was the coldest day of the year. Well, today is even colder at -6˚C. It matters not to me, not in the slightest. I sit here in my recliner, nice and toasty. I can look out to the beautiful scene outside, but from the comfort of my living room. Works for me. I have good meds and it seems that I’ve been able to figure out how best to take them to minimize pain.

I’m still old and I’m still dying, but at least I have a lot of people supporting me. So many people die alone, violently, and/or in excruciating pain. I’m going to try very hard not to be one of those people. I aim to die peacefully with some good meds to deal with any pain issues I may have. When my ma was dying, the nurses came frequently to give her a shot of morphine. That seems like a good way to go although my mother wouldn’t have been able to tell you one way or another. From her bodily movements I don’t think that she was in a deep state of peace. She was agitated at times. It was almost like watching someone in REM sleep having involuntary limb movements. 

One of the generous neighbours I mentioned above gave me a book to read. Carolyn just finished reading it and found it delightful. Now, I’ll read it. It’s entitled: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial. It was published in 2018. The author, Kathryn Mannix, is a British palliative care physician. As you can tell from the title, this book is right up my alley. It’s not an academic book, so no references. You won’t be reading any quotes from Ernest Becker* in its pages, but Becker is everywhere in the book as the scholarly backdrop to a book like this. 

I’ll leave this post for now. It’s long enough and I need to get on with reading Mannix so that I can discuss her book in my next post. If you are so inclined and you want to read a little scholarly background material for a book like Mannix’s, check out the first couple of dozen posts in this blog, the ones specifically about Becker and The Denial of Death. 

Bye for now.

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*This is the first in a series of posts on Becker’s and related work. I published it in 2014: https://rogerjgalbert.com/2014/01/28/ernest-becker-1-of-mouths-digestive-tracts-and-anuses/.

Evolutionary Theory vs. Structural-Functionalism.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

[Don’t be too put off by the title of this post. It looks highfalutin. It may be, but the text isn’t.]

It’s a truism to say that our lives are finite and that we go through stages of development and change. But, it seems, sometimes we need to be reminded of obvious but possibly unwelcome realities. I’m sure we all understand that we follow a path of change starting at birth and ending at death. In between we move from infancy to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, and then to old age. Of course, not all of us get to go through every stage. For some of us, the stages get cut off and we die young or accidentally. We may contract a disease at any age that proves fatal. Governments document all of these things with vital statistics and publish all kinds of data on birth rates, types of mortality, morbidity*, et cetera. British Columbia offers a lot of this information online. Statistics Canada also gets into the act and publishes a lot of health related statistics. It’s not an exaggeration to note that we are obsessed with our health and wellness. How much of the internet is dedicated to health related websites? The woo flows freely and the sales of every magic potion, miracle diet, and supplement imaginable are on offer. And there is overwhelming evidence that at every turn we find ways to deny death. As I’ve often noted, one of Ernest Becker’s most salient observations is that the twin pillars of evil in our world are death and disease.

Our entire medical system is set up to discover and ‘fix’ any human organism that doesn’t conform to what we consider normal for any stage of development. It is often unsuccessful in that endeavour, but it doesn’t like to discuss its failures.

Pathology as I use it here describes a condition of abnormality (non-normality), a structural and functional situation wherein things have gone wrong in an organism. The underlying assumption of pathology is that organisms all have a normal condition, and if things cease to work as they are supposed to according to medical science, then they are considered pathological, or at least the cause of their malfunction is searched out and an attempt is made to restore the organism to normality. Medicine, and in fact, our whole culture, decided a long time ago what normal humans should look like and how they should behave. Yes, we all live and die, but pathology isn’t really interested in those realities. A pathological perspective is only interested in bringing a diseased organism back to normality.

Science and medicine have analyzed and dissected the human body in great detail especially over the past five hundred years. Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452 was adept at dissection, and he led the way for countless others who carried on the tradition. Later, biologists analyzed the human body from many perspectives, broadly using anatomy and physiology as major categories, but focusing on systems (cardio-vascular, endocrine, etc.), organs, cells, and their functioning. I’m no biologist so I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the investigation of human biological life. However, it’s clear that our organs (heart, liver, kidneys, et cetera) are of great interest to medicine, particularly if and when they cease to function the way they are supposed to.

As a quick aside, a major sociological school used (and still uses) what Emile Durkheim calls the organismic analogy. He suggests that society is much like the human body. He argues in his dissertation Rules of Sociological Method that there is no organic equivalence between human organs and social systems, but broadly, they share the same epistemological underpinnings. Human organs work in concert for the good and survival of the whole. That’s easy enough to understand. He then argues that human social systems, politics, family, economy, education, et cetera, must work in concert for the good of the whole society. Social pathology occurs when any one or other of the social systems that make up society fail to fulfill their function. The result is that the whole society is ‘sick’ or malfunctions. The problem with this perspective is that it’s not especially easy to find ‘a society’. From my point of view, societies are not be confused with countries or nation-states. They are not necessarily equivalent.

It’s easier to identify an individual human being than a society, or so it seems, until we ask the question: Is an individual human being a stand-alone organism? My answer is no. I could not and would not exist without air, food, water, et cetera. These elements are not necessarily a part of me, but they are essential for my life so excluding them from an analysis of what I am as a human is highly misleading. It suggests that we are somehow separate from the world that surrounds and sustains us. This is a foundational part of the individualism that characterizes our capitalistic world and it’s wrong.

So, broadly, we are captured by a world view that focusses on the structure and function of our organs in a biological sense and our social structures in a societal sense. This is why people often argue that what’s ‘wrong’ with our society is that the family isn’t doing its job, the economy is failing us, education is behind the times, and other simplistic criticisms. Figuring out how to fix it is another thing entirely.

In terms of the human body, if medicine finds that the heart is weak or not working properly, it tries to ‘fix’ it, that is to restore it to its presumed former state. It may conclude that a weak heart will have deleterious effects on the kidneys, and it may even find that a weak heart will threaten the organism as a whole. In contrast, an evolutionary perspective expects the heart to weaken as it ages. It expects that lungs will lose their ability to process oxygen. It expects that over time, muscles weaken, no matter what you do to counteract it. It expects death because death is built right into the model, unlike functionalism whereby death is left unconsidered or considered a clinical failure.

It’s true that an evolutionary perspective has made substantial inroads in science and even in medicine. It hasn’t in sociology, although it’s coming along**.

An evolutionary perspective follows the logic I present in my recent post: LIFE vs My Little Life. From this perspective, birth and death are normal human events. Death, especially, is not considered a defeat, it being an essential part of life. No death, no life. It’s as simple as that. That doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it. Just the amount of effort the human species has spent on denying death, on convincing itself that death is not the end of life, is testament to how unhappy we are with death and dying.

I don’t want to die, but I don’t have a say in the matter either.

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*morbidity refers to the incidence of ill-health in a population.

**see my (slightly outdated) dissertation on the topic published on this blog.

#78 LIFE vs My Little Life

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

[I posted this in February, 2021. I’m re-posting because I think it expresses how I’m feeling right now about life and death. I will follow up with another commentary in a couple of days if all goes well.]

LIFE in capital letters is life writ large. It governs all manifestations of individual life. It goes on merrily as individuals live and die generation after generation. Ironically LIFE needs death to make more life. After all, we eat dead things, don’t we? Of course all plants and animals follow the same pattern. They come and go, often by being consumed by other living things. It’s almost March and the property here is getting ready to burst into life after the long period of die-off and dormancy that is winter. Flowers are appearing even with freezing temperatures.

The early ones are aconites, snow drops, early crocuses, and maybe violets. They express life briefly then give way to the grasses, the ferns and the flowers of spring. The pear, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon display their flowers in preparation for the fruit that will follow as long as the pollinators do their thing. The birds are into mating season and we’ll soon have baby robins, finches, nuthatches, flickers, thrushes, jays, hummingbirds, and chickadees hassling their parents, fluttering their wings and demanding food.

The sun is shining right now. It wasn’t supposed to according to the weather forecasters, but there ya go. Living and dying under the sun. That’s what’s going on. My adult life has been informed by the scholarship of life and death, that is, of life and death as considered by philosophers and scientists. The thought of my own dying hasn’t occupied very much of my time except when my mother, father, and sister Denise died, and then only briefly. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that is incurable but treatable, changed all of that. Myeloma kind of sets the stage for end-of-life considerations. There’s no escaping myeloma’s trajectory. It will kill me eventually if I don’t die of something else first. Now, I have a hard time not thinking about my dying.

For most of my teaching career I used Ernest Becker’s work (The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil) to discuss the role of the fear of death on our cultural institutions. The fear of death and the promise of immortality and their overriding presence in institutions such as patriarchy and misogyny have shaped our social relations and created the conditions necessary for human contest and eventually homicide on a grand scale and war.*Related to our fear of death is our propensity to cut deals with deities. Humans have invented thousands of gods (and related semi-gods or supernatural entities) over the millennia. We assign responsibility to those deities for natural disasters, crop success or failure, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. We even put faith in God for winning a football game or a war. We barter with the gods. We make sacrifices. We tell the gods: “Look, we are sacrificing this young woman for you by throwing her into this volcano, now you must reciprocate by ensuring our crops grow well next year.” A life bartered for more life. That’s largely the story of countless religious (and political) invocations over the millennia. Priests and politicians constantly urge us to make sacrifices so that the future will be better.

Modern medicine is an elaborate institution for the denial of death. It’s all about ‘saving’ lives, and it’s willing to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal. Of course, ‘saving’ a life means little more than postponing a death. Obviously, I’m personally invested in modern medicine and pharmacology. I’m hoping that chemotherapy and radiation treatments will buy me time, effectively giving me more life and postponing my death. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are not cheap. Just one of the drugs I’m taking will cost over $100,000. One of the pharmacists at the pharmacy in Victoria that dispenses the drugs I use told me over the phone recently that they have some million dollar patients out there, patients that have used these drugs for many years. I attend the Cancer Care Centre at the local hospital and I’m impressed by the technology and the expertise of the many staff nurses and doctors that work in that facility. That can’t be cheap either.

Modern medicine will go to great lengths and expense to treat patients hoping to extend their lives. It must do so otherwise it fails in its sacred mission to safeguard life and battle death, the ultimate enemy. As Becker notes, in our culture death and disease are the twin pillars of evil. Disease prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of life while death cuts them off summarily.

So, we are willing to invest a great deal to save an individual life yet we are also willing to gleefully pile corpses in great heaps during war or in the context of ethnic cleansing, that vile excuse for murder, rape, and pillage as in Rwanda, 1994, or in any countless examples of such celebrated mass murders. We gladly kill for US, for our people because THEY(the enemy) are obviously responsible for our misfortune and distress. If we eliminate THEM our problems will be solved. That is the big lie. As Becker notes, we need a THEM with whom to enter into contests to show our prowess and to show our God (gods) how powerful and deserving of eternal life we are. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and money on organized sport? Sports reflect our constant need to show how deserving we are of life and more life. We win, we go to heaven. The gods are obviously on our side. We lose and we face shame and rejection. This analysis can easily be applied to American politics now too.

I’m rambling now. I guess I’m trying to avoid writing about the finitude of my life, my little life. In the face of LIFE and its overarching grip on the process of life and death, my little life doesn’t amount to much…but it’s all I’ve got really. Maybe I can celebrate my insignificance. Maybe I can celebrate the entirety of my life from beginning to end. In a way end is as necessary as beginning in the scheme of things. Let’s see what I can do with the little bit of life I have left.

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*The need for an opponent or an enemy (THEY) is based on our need to prove our worthiness in competition for the good things in life and for eternal life. The winner takes all! Very early on in human history, tribes split in two called moieties so that there would be contestants to beat proving the prowess of the winners and their qualifications for immortality.

I’ve struggled a lot lately about whether my glass is half full or half empty. I’ve lived seventy-five years. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing? 

~ Roger JG Albert

Whatever. 

Lately, I’ve often mused nostalgically about my past. My present is not what I would have it be, but I’ll write about that below.

For now, I want to write about moments in my past that were particularly instructive for me. You all know that I have cancer. That’s not news. However, some of you may not know that I was diagnosed with kidney cell cancer in 2002. From what I was told, I had what they call a lesion on my left kidney. In this case a ‘lesion’ means a fairly large growth protruding from my kidney. They were loathe to do a biopsy because any puncture of the lesion or any attempt to remove the growth by aspiration was going to spread the cancer far and wide. So, they scheduled me for surgery. I was fortunate to have a very good local urologist perform the surgery with my GP attending (he’s an internist as well as a family physician).

My Nephrectomy

When my time came for my nephrectomy (removal of my kidney) on February 17th, 2002, Carolyn drove me to the hospital early in the morning and left me there to find my way to the surgical unit. I wasn’t there long before they ushered me into the operating room. I was set at ease to see so many people I knew there, including a nurse who was a former student, my GP and the surgeon. I didn’t know the anesthetist although I had met him earlier in the hospital for a pre-surgical interview. 

So, taking my kidney out would be a straightforward affair if you knew what you were doing! Thankfully, the urologist knew what he was doing. In order not to spread the cancer far and wide, he opted to open me up using a 35 centimetre incision between my ribs on underside of my left arm to my midsection but lower on my body. They essentially cut me in half so they could gently lift my kidney out of my body without messing with the surrounding tissue and risking metastasis. I heard later that my GP was humbled by the process of cutting me in half and putting me back together. 

After the kidney was removed and they made sure they hadn’t left anything in there that shouldn’t have been there, they stapled me shut and sent me off to a room upstairs. I was there for a few days. I had a morphine pump to make sure I had no pain but it did have a governor on it so I didn’t overdose. That was kind of them, I think. 

I went home after six or seven days. We had just moved to Cumberland on an acre. There was lots of work to do. I couldn’t do any of it. Thankfully a number of my family members came over. There was lots of help and Carolyn was healthy, as she still is so I watched as my family and some friends helped us move in and get the yard together. 

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Visit to Cancer Care Centre 

We saw my local GP/oncologist this morning. These meetings are always interesting. I’ve been off chemo for a month and I’ll be off again for another month so that we can more properly assess how I react while not on the chemo meds. I’m also off hydromorphone (opioid), having gone through the nasty process of withdrawal over the past few days. I’ve never taken a very high dose of it, but I have been on it a long time. That makes it a bit of a challenge to stop taking it. I’ve also cut way back on gabapentin, which is a drug initially used for epilepsy, but has been used for all kinds of ailments since (maybe overused). I really have no idea how it’s affecting me because I have had such a mix of medications over the past couple of years that there’s no way I can tell what med is having what effect. It’s supposed to help with my peripheral neuropathy. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I really don’t know. It’s just a bit confusing and frustrating. 

I was in the Cancer Care Centre at the hospital this morning, as I said, to meet my GP/oncologist, and I saw a few of the usual suspects getting treatment. There was an older woman (probably a bit older than me) getting an infusion in Chair #4. I’ve seen her a number of times before. This time she was with her husband (I presume) who sat in a chair beside her. We nodded to each other. A young woman came by us as we waited to see the doctor. She was in Chair #3 I think. She was dragging her IV pole along beside her as she made her way to the bathroom close by, something I’ve done many times. IV poles, with bags of meds hanging from them with a line entering the arm somewhere, are on casters but they still rattle away as they are dragged along. I thought to myself: “This is my life. I share it with people I don’t know and some I do know, people who share my struggle to one extent or other. What we share is cancer.” But we also share the care and love that the staff gives us. Notwithstanding, every one of us will die. We may survive a year, two, ten, or twenty, but we must die. I’m not complaining about that. It is what it is.

I’ve spent a good part of my life studying life and death. I’m a sociologist, but I’ve not contained myself within that discipline. I’ve struggled to see the big picture of life on this planet and how life cannot exist without death. I know it’s something I’ve brought up before, but it’s always on my mind. 

We’re coming on to spring. My favourite season. Plants spring up everywhere. They count on the decay from previous years to fuel their growth. Life is not a cycle. It’s more like a spiral, with an inevitable end. To think of the seasons as cyclical is a mistake, a comforting mistake, I guess. I’m thinking we have a built-in biological aversion to death. From what I’ve observed, we share that aversion with most other animals. Life is the big draw, death and disease are the ultimate enemy. Our whole culture is built on that false premise. Silly us. 

This spring for me is not like the spring of my tenth year, nor of my fortieth year. I’m hoping this is not my last spring. I’m thinking it won’t be, but the future is promised to no one. 

Slowly Falling Apart

~ Roger JG Albert

For this post, I decided to create a collage of quotes and commentaries from books I’ve been reading lately. They range from comments on death and dying to philosophy, culture, and the future. So far in this blog, I’ve refrained from commenting on American Congressional politics, but I just may go there soon. I told my sociology students year after year throughout my college teaching career that the American empire would fall, as all empires fall, not from external conquest but from implosion due to unresolved, long standing conflict. The American empire, specifically, will fall because of commodity production that depends on longer and more complex supply chains and failing profits. America is falling on its own sword of profits. Supply chains and economic processing zones in a plethora of ‘developing’ parts of the world have been an issue for decades while only recently making it onto mainstream media commentary and news. I’ll explain in a future post.

US politics has to wait. It’s a mess down there but it’s a mess everywhere on the planet at the moment. Let’s move on.

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Robert Sapolsky is one of my all-time favourite guys. He has a number of his Stanford University lectures on YouTube. He’s a neuroscientist who specializes in stress. He worked in the field for many years with Olive baboons in Africa. I have a video in which his work with the baboons is featured. On the topic of the human condition he writes:

“we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart. The diseases that plague us now are ones of slow accumulation of damage—heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disorders.” (from “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping (Third Edition)” by Robert M. Sapolsky)

Now, ain’t that the truth! If you check out Stats Canada’s vital statistics you’ll find out that cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Actually, life is the leading cause of death everywhere, but as far as the observable evidence of bodily decay and death goes, cancer is determined to be the immediate major causes. Writing this makes me want to go back and binge watch Sapolsky on YouTube. Not only does he have a lot to say, but he says it in such an engaging way that binge watching is entirely feasible. I’ll be sharing more from Sapolsky later, but now on to another very different writer.

This is a quote from another book I’m reading that I want to share with you. Talk about falling apart! Robinson is a contemporary novelist writing in the sci-fi genre with dystopian tinges. He writes:

“Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all. 31 India” (from “The Ministry for the Future: A Novel” by Kim Stanley Robinson)

Most of this quote will be difficult for you to fathom because it’s out of context. It’s the last sentence that really matters. To help you out a little with the context of this quote, the ‘order of your time’, in the first sentence means that in the course of your life you feel out of control. You can’t go back, you can’t stay still. You can only go forward towards your death. This applies not only to us as biological entities but also to our cultural and social constructs which also are bound to come and go in a generally disorderly way. We cannot be ‘massively entrenched’ in life because daily existence makes a lie of any attempt to avoid moving toward death.

Now, more from Robinson in another of his sci-fi novels set far from Earth on a ship and a moon.

“Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured. Here in this meeting, it began to become clear, for many of those present, that extinction lay at the end of all their possible paths. This was not the same as individual death, but was instead something both more abstract and more profound.” (from “Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson)

Robinson is not a great writer in terms of composition, but he is a very perceptive commentator on the human condition. His novels are all about the fragility of humanity in the face of evolution and death, both on an individual and social level. Death denial is a consistent theme in human history and as a goal, has engendered a mass of immortality tales with “supernatural” characters as diverse as Zeus, Jesus, Shiva and a mess of lesser gods. These characters are our heroes who will save us from death if only we believe in them. But then we come face to face with evolution and biology which care not a wit whether we believe in them or not, and which just carry on.

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So, what about falling apart?

It’s clear that average death rates have risen consistently over the decades on the planet although in the US they’ve been falling for some demographics. Falling or not, on average we live well into our seventies. In fact, Stats Can tells me that if I live to be seventy-four I can expect to live another fourteen years. These are average life expectancies, of course. Millenia ago, living to thirty-seven years of age was considered average. People died of things then we seldom die of these days (such as appendicitis).

Sapolsky understands that the longer we live the more things can go wrong in our bodies. That’s self-evident the longer we live. If we get injured while young we can expect to heal and then just get on with things. As we (I) get older the healing process slows down.

There are a few very fortunate people, especially in the world’s richest parts, who suffer very little as they get old. I don’t think I know any of those people (well, maybe one or two). That said, there is an inevitable decline in capacity as we age. That doesn’t mean we should stop living and simply prepare for death because we know it’s going to happen. For me, I have much reduced capacity. At seventy-four I have maybe a quarter of the capacity I had at fifty. But a quarter is better than nothing. I still have shit to do! I’m falling apart, yes. In fact, I can’t fall much farther, but that’s fine, I still have a way to go.

Dexamethasone, Tooth-aches, Pig Kidneys, and Life.

~ Roger JG Albert

So, dexamethasone strikes again! I went to the hospital this past Thursday for my monthly infusion of the monoclonal antibody, Daratumumab. Along with the Dara, I get a number of other chemo meds among them dexamethasone. I only get fifteen milligrams of dex these days once a month and that’s probably a good thing because any steroid can be trouble in the long run. Of course my long run is getting palpably shorter, or to put it another way, dex can’t really hurt me in the long run if I don’t have much of a long run. What I can say, though, is that no matter how long my long run is, I’ll make the best of it. I’ve decided that that’s my goal. I’m thinking of my life now as a one mile marathon race. Getting closer to the finish line is no reason to slow up. In fact, it’s all the more reason to step up the effort. Of course, the closer to the finish line we get, the more tired we get so it’s a trade-off. Still, pushing to the end is my goal. But I digress.

What is interesting about dex is it’s effect on my tooth-ache. I mentioned before that I had a nasty tooth-ache that a dex shot in my neck attenuated rapidly and almost eliminated entirely. Well, that tooth-ache has persisted in a low rumble since it returned after a few days following my neck shot. Again, the dex that I took orally on Thursday killed the pain in my tooth right dead. It’s back now because as I’ve become well aware, the relief from dex is very short lived. Oh, I appreciate the pain relief whichever way I can get it, but dex has other side effects that aren’t as welcome as the pain relief. Check out this list of side effects. I’ve experienced many of them over the past couple of years.

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[As an aside, I’m writing this sitting in my new La-Z-Boy recliner (thanks to my very generous daughters) in my cozy, warm living room. Carolyn, my love of forty-eight years, while I sit warm and cozy in the living room, is out there walking on the trails in Cumberland in rain as thick as soup. She is accompanied by Tilly, our Bernese Mountain Dog/German Shepherd mix who loves her mom and also most other living things, and swimming too. I hope she gets home soon so we can have a cup of tea together. She did!]

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So, what about pig kidneys? Well, lots. This article explains what the experiment was all about. And it was an experiment, of course. Serious ethical issues aside, the experiment was a success. Researchers in New York attached a kidney from a specially raised pig, one that was genetically modified to not produce a certain sugar that caused immediate rejection in humans, to a cadaver. Yes, a cadaver. The objective was to see whether or not the pig kidney could reproduce the function of a normal human kidney, and apparently it did, and splendidly so. The cadaver was special too, of course. I suggest you read the article to get the story from a reputable source.

What’s the big deal, I ask? Researchers genetically modify pigs so that we humans can use their organs. How does that make you feel? The truth is that pig heart valves have been successfully implanted in humans for some time now and researchers have been experimenting with xenotransplantation since the 17th Century. We eat pigs all the time. They are one of our major sources of food. They are also intelligent, rivalling some humans I surmise.

The reason pigs are such a good fit for xenotransplantation is that they are so closely related to us genetically. In fact, we are related to all other living things, animal and plant but with varying degrees of fit in terms of the quantity of genes that we share with them. We are very closely related to chimpanzees sharing something like 99% of DNA with them. (I think that the reason we don’t raise chimps to eat is that they look too much like us.) We share DNA with ducks and cedar trees, snails, and puppy dogs.

From what I can gather from casual observation, we tend to think of all species as distinct from each other and, of course, that’s partially true. Sadly, we are generally ignorant of our place in the scheme of life on this planet. We have been convinced over millennia that we are special under the sun and that all life on the planet is there to serve us. That attitude will ultimately lead to our demise as we Bolsonaro the Amazon rain forest, empty the seas of fish and other life, and generally bulldoze our way through all life on the planet. We take up more and more of the biosphere every year. We, as a species, have no respect for life and from what I can see, have very few mechanisms that would allow us to gain respect for life. Our culture is designed to deny death and thus to ignore life.

Our political systems are geared to produce maximal growth and compete in absurd ways for greater and greater shares of planetary resources. It’s disconcerting to see China and the US embroiled in a chest-thumping match over Taiwan. How stupid. How short-sighted. How ignorant. What are they going to do, lob nuclear weapons at each other? It’s especially ridiculous knowing how closely tied manufacturing in the US is tied to production in China. It’s hard to see how Americans destroying American production in China will help anyone, anywhere. I suspect that the Chinese leadership is in need of a diversion to keep its population’s collective mind off of serious domestic problems. Focussing attention outward is a tried and true method of avoiding domestic conflict.

I could argue that the way we are increasingly economically interdependent through production of commodities in networks that span the globe is encouraging as a basis for concerted action. However, I’m not sure that we have the time to wait for economic interdependence to lead to political interdependence. Finally, I’m not convinced that as a species we are capable of doing what needs to be done to enable us to live in harmony with the rest of life on the planet. It may be that cockroaches will inherit the earth and if that’s the case, so be it.

#86. ???????

~ Roger JG Albert

I woke up this morning at seven twenty three and got out of bed at seven twenty eight. In that five minutes between seven twenty three and seven twenty eight I had a couple of thinks1. These were little thinks, nothing momentous or earth-shattering. They were thinks about what I would do today. I decided on a couple of things to work on, writing a blog post is one and the other is going down to my studio to continue a clean up I started some time ago in preparation for some work I want to do.

Today is the day after my Daratumumab infusion at the hospital. That’s a bi-monthly event for me. We get to the hospital for a nine o’clock appointment. I grab a coffee after being logged in at the Wellness Centre then make my way to the Cancer Care Centre. After getting settled in they hook me up to an IV drip and then call the pharmacy to tell them I’ve arrived and that they can prep the Dara. Yesterday it took over an hour for the pharmacy to get the Dara to the Cancer Care Centre. I waited patiently but with a little frustration, I must admit. After about ten fifteen they released the Dara starting the infusion. I read my book for a bit but soon fell asleep. I woke up at eleven forty five. Cool. The infusion was almost done. It generally takes about one and a half hours. At about twelve twenty, Carolyn picked me up and we came home.

Along with the Dara, as you well know, I take dexamethasone and lenalidomide. These are the chemo drugs. Dara is not a chemo drug, but a monoclonal antibody. Click on the word Daratumumab in the paragraph above for some good information about Dara. Dex and Lena are very different drugs that do different things in the blood. Dexamethasone is a steroid and has some annoying side effects like interfering with sleep. That it did last night. I slept in fits and starts and got maybe four hours of sleep total. I won’t get much sleep until Monday.

My life these days is organized around my chemotherapy. Of course, my Dara infusions predominate, but the dex has the most immediate and dramatic effects aside from the hydromorphone. I most often go to bed before nine o’clock in the evening. I rarely go to sleep right away, however. Yesterday, I did fall asleep after going to bed at eight thirty. I woke up about forty-five minutes later with a start. I had gone to sleep with the cat laying between my legs. I dreamt that the cat had been joined by my brother. I woke up with nobody on the bed with me. I was startled when I woke up but relieved too because I find it uncomfortable to have the cat sleep with me. I mean, I could easily get her off the bed, but I’m a sucker for the cat. She rules.

A preoccupation I have these days relates to the purpose of life and how to determine what to do with the time I have left to live. I have all kinds of time every day to think about things so off I go. Obviously there will be some physical restrictions that hamper the kinds of activities I can do; after all, I am seventy-four years old. One serious big think I’m having these days is coming to grips with the kinds of activities I am still capable of doing amongst the many I did during my younger years. I don’t want to simply lay back and avoid any activities that would require of me exertion that might tire me or leave me incapable of doing anything for a couple of days afterwards. I’m still strong enough, but I’m not as well coordinated as I used to be. I’m learning that I have to strike a balance between what I want to do and what I’m really capable of doing. There is a slew of activities I did when I was younger that are beyond me now. I have to be realistic about these things. I cranked up the chainsaw the other day and chopped a bit of wood. That was fine. I could do that. But what I want to do in terms of sculpture would require that I use saws and chisels for a sustained period of time. I don’t know if I have the sustainability to sculpt, but I know I can paint and draw. Whether I have the desire to do these things is another question.

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1 This is a verb being used as a noun, but it’s probably not original.

#78. LIFE vs My little life.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

[I posted this in February, 2021. I’m re-posting because I think it expresses how I’m feeling right now about life and death. I will follow up with another commentary in a couple of days if all goes well.]

LIFE in capital letters is life writ large. It governs all manifestations of individual life. It goes on merrily as individuals live and die generation after generation. Ironically LIFE needs death to make more life. After all, we eat dead things, don’t we? Of course all plants and animals follow the same pattern. They come and go, often by being consumed by other living things. It’s almost March and the property here is getting ready to burst into life after the long period of die-off and dormancy that is winter. Flowers are appearing even with freezing temperatures.

The early ones are aconites, snow drops, early crocuses, and maybe violets. They express life briefly then give way to the grasses, the ferns and the flowers of spring. The pear, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon display their flowers in preparation for the fruit that will follow as long as the pollinators do their thing. The birds are into mating season and we’ll soon have baby robins, finches, nuthatches, flickers, thrushes, jays, hummingbirds, and chickadees hassling their parents, fluttering their wings and demanding food.

The sun is shining right now. It wasn’t supposed to according to the weather forecasters, but there ya go. Living and dying under the sun. That’s what’s going on. My adult life has been informed by the scholarship of life and death, that is, of life and death as considered by philosophers and scientists. The thought of my own dying hasn’t occupied very much of my time except when my mother, father, and sister Denise died, and then only briefly. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that is incurable but treatable, changed all of that. Myeloma kind of sets the stage for end-of-life considerations. There’s no escaping myeloma’s trajectory. It will kill me eventually if I don’t die of something else first. Now, I have a hard time not thinking about my dying.

For most of my teaching career I used Ernest Becker’s work (The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil) to discuss the role of the fear of death on our cultural institutions. The fear of death and the promise of immortality and their overriding presence in institutions such as patriarchy and misogyny have shaped our social relations and created the conditions necessary for human contest and eventually homicide on a grand scale and war.*Related to our fear of death is our propensity to cut deals with deities. Humans have invented thousands of gods (and related semi-gods or supernatural entities) over the millennia. We assign responsibility to those deities for natural disasters, crop success or failure, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. We even put faith in God for winning a football game or a war. We barter with the gods. We make sacrifices. We tell the gods: “Look, we are sacrificing this young woman for you by throwing her into this volcano, now you must reciprocate by ensuring our crops grow well next year.” A life bartered for more life. That’s largely the story of countless religious (and political) invocations over the millennia. Priests and politicians constantly urge us to make sacrifices so that the future will be better.

Modern medicine is an elaborate institution for the denial of death. It’s all about ‘saving’ lives, and it’s willing to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal. Of course, ‘saving’ a life means little more than postponing a death. Obviously, I’m personally invested in modern medicine and pharmacology. I’m hoping that chemotherapy and radiation treatments will buy me time, effectively giving me more life and postponing my death. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are not cheap. Just one of the drugs I’m taking will cost over $100,000. One of the pharmacists at the pharmacy in Victoria that dispenses the drugs I use told me over the phone recently that they have some million dollar patients out there, patients that have used these drugs for many years. I attend the Cancer Care Centre at the local hospital and I’m impressed by the technology and the expertise of the many staff nurses and doctors that work in that facility. That can’t be cheap either.

Modern medicine will go to great lengths and expense to treat patients hoping to extend their lives. It must do so otherwise it fails in its sacred mission to safeguard life and battle death, the ultimate enemy. As Becker notes, in our culture death and disease are the twin pillars of evil. Disease prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of life while death cuts them off summarily. So, we are willing to invest a great deal to save an individual life yet we are also willing to gleefully pile corpses in great heaps during war or in the context of ethnic cleansing, that vile excuse for murder, rape, and pillage as in Rwanda, 1994 or in any countless examples of such celebrated mass murders. We gladly kill for US, for our people because THEY(the enemy) are obviously responsible for our misfortune and distress. If we eliminate THEM our problems will be solved. That is the big lie. As Becker notes, we need a THEM with whom to enter into contests to show our prowess and to show our God (gods) how powerful and deserving of eternal life we are. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and money on organized sport? Sports reflect our constant need to show how deserving we are of life and more life. We win, we go to heaven. The gods are obviously on our side. We lose and we face shame and rejection. This analysis can easily be applied to American politics now too.

I’m rambling now. I guess I’m trying to avoid writing about the finitude of my life, my little life. In the face of LIFE and its overarching grip on the process of life and death, my little life doesn’t amount to much…but it’s all I’ve got really. Maybe I can celebrate my insignificance. Maybe I can celebrate the entirety of my life from beginning to end. In a way end is as necessary as beginning in the scheme of things. Let’s see what I can do with the little bit of life I have left.

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*The need for an opponent or an enemy (THEY) is based on our need to prove our worthiness in competition for the good things in life and for eternal life. The winner takes all! Very early on in human history, tribes split in two called moieties so that there would be contestants to beat proving the prowess of the winners and their qualifications for immortality.