In honor of the seven (or eight) days of Passover, which began on Saturday night, we will continue reading the work of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, whose novel Jacob’s Ladder was featured two weeks ago for its reference to Palm Sunday.
This week features the essay “To Die a Modern Death,” which is often used as a text on bereavement in Israeli nursing schools. It is not an easy text, but it is a very important one for those caring for aging family members, especially during the holidays.
Text: “To Die a Modern Death” by Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff. Translated by Hannah Schlit. In Keys to the Garden. New Israeli Writing, ed. Ammiel Alcalay. City Lights Books, 1006.
Photo: Uri Lenz/FLASH90
I agree totally, that modern medicine and society don’t offer any real advancement in the treatment of chronically ill elderly and terminally ill patients. Your description of the daily suffering involved is accurate, and all too familiar to me.
But there don’t seem to be many (or any) reasonable or acceptable alternatives available, except, to some extent, being wealthy enough to afford full time care by well-trained professionals, usually from foreign third world countries. As I write this, we all know that even that poses only partial relief from the modern affliction of inhumane dying processes.
Among the many reasons for modernity’s failure to care well for elderly and dying people, are the tendencies to avoid the topics involved. Neither laymen nor medical professionals are willing to devote the time and energy needed to commit to finding solutions.
These are some of the signs of the failures of modernity to address humanity as much as it addresses technology and finance. Money has replaced family as the central focus of our lives. The rest is all left unattended to sufficiently.
I am surprised, listening to this selection, how many associations came to mind. The first, the thought of my mother, aging very comfortably in an assisted-living facility in the community where we grew up. Both of my parents owe their lives to the Kindertransport program. It is thanks to the efforts of my father, who had virtually worked himself to death almost 20 years ago, that she is able to spend her last months in comfort, surrounded by full-time caregivers who keep her clean, safe, and content. All my mother’s children live in distant cities, but we and our children visit frequently, usually weekly, though, in her dementia, she is unlikely to remember our visits. But she is always “happily surprised” (her phrase) to see us and enjoys the time we spend with her. She has survived long enough to witness the births of 2 great-granddaughters. The end of my mother’s life contrasts sharply with that of her own mother’s, in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Her father somehow ended up in Shanghai, dying alone from pluerisy. Her only sibling, an older brother, drowned at sea, the ship bringing him to unite with my mother torpedoed by the Japanese. Then I thought of our son, who died, unexpectedly and suddenly of an acute asthma attack. He had become bar mitzvah just months earlier. The efforts of those at the scene to save him, though futile in his case, enabled Daniel to donate many organs, thus saving strangers from premature death. Today, the five children of the liver recipient call me “Grandma.” Our daughter rescues homeless cats in Brooklyn. She has held so many tiny kittens in their last hours, consoling herself that, even though they were unable to survive the circumstances of their births, at least they died warm, fed, and held by loving hands. My own career has been spent as a NICU nurse, first briefly while living in Israel, then, for several decades, in an American medical center. Most of these little babies have been born long before their due dates, nearly always due not to any inadequate prenatal efforts of their mothers, but instead to an unfeeling, arbitrary universe. Other babies have been born with significant defects, some incompatible with life, again with no apparent cause. The anguished parents must deal with the thought that, while usually these unexpected and unwanted births happen to “someone else”, now they have become another’s “someone else”. Sooner or later, all of us will be faced with the ends of our own lives. We may not be able choose the circumstances of our death. All we can do is hope that, during our time spent on earth, we have managed to make the lives of others more bearable and peaceful, and by so doing, have given meaning to our own.
I’m very grateful for this conversation. SK and Opal Rosenfeld. And for your attentive listening to this podcast.