Category: Dying

He needs me, I know that. He cannot die his own death, I know that. But who is he, who is never the same as himself, or who knows the same only as the fire of self-transformation? I am dying, he says. But I cannot find him, he who dies where I cannot see.

Shadow, why do you ask me to die for you? Patient one, do you intend to wait the entire span of my life? But you know I will always be unequal to what I am; that my life appears in place of itself. Sometimes I think you would disappear, if ever I could coincide with you; if ever we could inhabit the same instant in time.

I will accompany you, that I vow. The pledge: to accompany the dying one, and all the way to death. To sleep on the floor, beside the bed. I will be with you, then when you die. How could it be otherwise? How could I be elsewhere?

I come upon you sleeping. You are asleep, not, I know, already dead. Asleep: I see you breathing, and know with relief, that you are still here. Here: but are you here? Yes: there is something of you left. Something, though you are starved to nothing. Something – but what of you is left? What – of you – that is not already death?

Dying, to die: there’s still enough of you. You wake up; I saw your eyes moving behind your eyelids, and now – you’ve woken up; I can see you. I see – and those are still your eyes. Still them, your eyes. One day, I worry, they will not be your eyes, and death will look at me. I worry: one day, it will be death that regards me, death itself that sees death in me.

To die: will I die away from myself? Will I die as you die, away, away from what you are? Because I see death creeping over your body. Death is nearly here. Your chest rises and falls. You breathe, but death is close. And I know, at this moment, that my death is not mine. My death – not mine. I will die like you, one day. One day – dying, and death will open in my eyes.

Gift of death: the animal waits for you until it dies. So too with those who die in a hospice. ‘I would like your permission to die’. ‘I would like to give my death to you’. Last gift: death as release, relief. Not to die alone, but with others, the ones who love you. Yes, but isn’t it that same love – on your side, now, your love for them – which makes you cling to life?

‘I do not want to die, for you will be alone with dying. I, who am dying, do not want to die, and to leave you with death. What of you, who will outlive me? How will I protect you when I am on the other side of death? This is why I cling to life – it is why I am not dead yet. I am thinking of you, who will survive me. You, whom I will not be able to protect. And if I let myself die now, what then? If I relax into death, what of you?’

Last gift: stay as long as you can. Stay with them, wait for them. Your life is over. That was it – life. But now, in dying, a new life, the life of all things that struggle against death. The hospice is the place where you came to die. Outside trees and plants and a fountain. Outside, life – and inside? Dying is everywhere. A dying patient to each bed. The stench of death, and the antiseptic to keep death away. And nurses, who are angels among the dead. And your visitors, the living among the dying, who are with you at the threshold.

Last gift: die, after the struggle to live. Die: you could do no more, and those that live must do so without you. Die – and they will know you greatest concern was for them, the ones who live. Until your death is testament to your love, and that is what you give, last gift.

‘I waited for you until I died. I struggle, and now I must die. Watch over me. Watch over me, who would watch over you. Watch over my watching; draw it into yourself. I give you this, my death, as the testament of my love.’

Is it your finitude I also touch, when I touch your skin? Vulnerable one, you are exposed to dying on all sides. Dying is close, dying is coming, and isn’t it a miracle that you are alive, that your life is the greatest of risks, a living adventure? But my adventure, too. Mine – because I am exposed in your exposure, vulnerable in all that exposes you to dying.

Am I fearful of myself in you? But your vulnerability is not an analogue of mine; it came first; I learnt of what I was not through you, by way of you. To touch you is not to touch myself, but to be touched, to feel the pressure of risk, and the closeness of dying. I am afraid not for myself, but for you.

How is it you survive from day to day? How is it I’ve never received a visit from the police to tell me you are dead? Protection: holding you, it is not that I would hold myself in my own arms. Holding you, I am also held; I know my own vulnerability by way of yours; know that I will always be too vulnerable to protect you.

Held – but also held out into dying, into the remorselessness of dying. How is it you have survived this long? How is it you live so close to dying?

Accompany the dying one all the way to death. All the way? Where death is, you are not. But there you are, before the death of the Other. Before you one you knew in life, and the one you will not know in death.

Dying: how is it that it lets appear what is dissimulated in life, what always disappears? Sacred one, separate from us, the survivors, what do you know of your disappearance – of the gift of dying you give to each of us? Dying is there, in person. Which is to say, what is most unknown is given by way of that dying, the absolutely other comes via the relation to the Other.

Relation? A wearing away of relation. Or the relation as the wearing away, for we do not know him anymore, the one who dies. Separate from us, separating himself from us, and by way of dying, which is not his to die. The terms of the relation – each of us, him – are infinitely separated. And it is as though the relation came first – this strangeness that happens between us. Came first – and its terms (each of us, the dying one) after.

‘Are you dying?’ – ‘I don’t know.’ – ‘Are you dying?’ – ‘I don’t know what it means to die.’ It is dying that speaks, not him. Accompany him; do not let him pass alone into death. Alone – but he is already alone, separated from us by a distance greater than anything in the world.

Separate – and what can he know of us, who still belong to life? We speak a different language. Rather, we speak, and a kind of murmuring has claimed him. Not silence, yet. Alive, still alive – but now so that it is as though death has arrived amidst us. Death is here, in person.

‘Are you dying?’ – ‘There’s no one here to die.’ – ‘Are you dying?’ – ‘There’s no one here.’

He is dying, he is claimed by dying. And then, who is he, there where death is coming? Death is not yet there, that is true. Death has not come, but it is coming, and by way of dying. And now death shares itself with those who are close to the one who dies. Death, in this moment, needs us – needs dying, the body of the dying one which falls into itself, and those around him who, if they do not die with him, share their own deaths as it is mediated by his dying. Their own deaths – or what is not their own in their deaths; their own, not their own, as life and death no longer exclude one another.

Where you are, death is not; but this not-death is still not life. Dying: relation to oneself without determinacy. Dying: errancy without end, detour without term. He is dying, and you, too are dying. Relief when his death comes. Relief as the world is restored to itself.

You know, in the Ice Storm, he is going to die – the film stays with him; he walks down an icy road – the only question is how? Fated to die, he must die; death is waiting for him – death is patient because it knows death is inevitable. And we know that, too, as viewers: we have entered the realm of necessity; death is close, and there is silence around the one who is about to die.

He has been separated from us; he half-knows this, half-knows his fate; but as he becomes the sacred one, homo sacer, it is also that we come closer to him – too close, in the claustrophobia of those who now know their own end by a kind of substitution. It’s not that he dies for us, but dies in our place, there where we will die.

There – but he is not there. Or it is that fate claims him in some strange way before he is himself? His body knows, something in him knows, but he half-knows, that is all. And when the end comes, he is not surprised. It is just. Death comes at a stroke – it is determinacy, blessed relief after that period of wandering on the icy road. And what do we know, as viewers? That it will be relief, too, when the end comes, and that after death – after our own deaths – silence will fall momentarily over the world.

And before our knowing? Before the relief of his death which comes by way of electric shock? He draws dying forward in us, in each of us. Dying comes forward; dying is apportioned. But what is shared? A kind of dying set free from relief. Dying unbound – dying untied from death, from the determinacy of the end. Who dies? Not you. Who is dying?

The first ‘no’ from which all negation comes. The first ‘absence’ from which absence arrives. Speak, and you can lift the world from the world. But now you have words, rather than the world – words, which can function in the absence of this or any other world. Words: there will always be someone there to read them.

Still, for all that, something is lost. The price of mediation is the immediate, and how can you buy it back, you whose very being it is to lift the world from the world? Impossible to speak of the first ‘no’, the first ‘absence’, when we are condemned to speak, to write, to know the world via those symbols which have already lifted it from itself.

Unless there is an experience – impossible experience – in which this ‘no’ returns. Experience of the condition of experience, as it reveals the possibility of negation, of absence, which allows language to speak. No return – no reaching upstream to a world before language. But an interruption of language in language – an interruption of the power and possibility of speech.

Is this what happens before the dying one? Absence in person. Death in person: who are you, before the dying? What is left of you? Impossible one, dying has left something of itself in you. Impossible one, death has left its sting inside you. Death will die. But in you, who are so stung, death is joined to life.

Strange this substitution, in which dying crosses from one body to another. To speak of language, of the operation of language, is always to metaphorise, to leave the figure, the immediate behind. But such substitution is the return of the immediate, the most close, the most distant, the death that is impossible to die.

Now metaphor is crushed by what they cannot bear.  Relieve me from this burden, this dying that affirms the ‘no’ in my place. Relieve me, death, from this dying in life, from a burden greater than my death, which would only be a blessed relief.

Death becomes human in the dying one. Human? But there’s nothing of him left, he who is being separated from us, he who is being carried across the river. Nothing – but enough. He is nothing for himself, not anymore. But for you, who are with him? To what are you brought into relation?

The other is experienced from through the Other. Death comes by way of the Other. Receive the gift of the mortality of the Other. Receive it – but you will not keep it, this gift. You are not there to receive it, to keep it. It is kept in you, blazing torch. Death, like the blue flame of the Bavarian Gentian in Lawrence’s poem.

‘Where there is death, you are not; where you are, death is not’: very well, but when death is there before you? When death is there, in person, before you? Death becomes human. But the human now, is scarcely human. That is why the body must be burnt. Cremate it, return death to death; pity it – do not let death be caught above the surface of the world. Death has come. But it can only come by way of what the world is not. Presence joined to absence, and for you, who are with him. Death has doubled itself. Life, withdrawing through the body, has let death give itself.

Return death’s favour. Cremate the body and break the bones. Cremate it, and return it to the elements. The river, the sea: these are, for a moment, the body of death, the body death gives itself as it figures what slips from all bodies. The body burns at the ghats. The body burns by the river: all of the world is burning here. The flames of life and the flames of death. Dead one, you are the opposite of the salamander, who lives in death. Death in life: and aren’t we, too, these reversed salamanders who die in life?

‘Where there is death, you are not; where you are, death is not’. And when the Other is dying? There is death – where? And when the Other is dead? Where is death, then? Is it there, in person? Does it present itself, there, in the body where there was once life? But what of your relation to the dead one? Relation broken, and broken where now death burns in his place. Burns – as though dying had allowed death to double itself. As though death needs dying in order to gain a relation to itself. As though death needed a burning intermediary.

Or it can be seen in a different way. Luria: where God departed, the universe opened. Where death departed, fleeing into itself, away, dying opened. Dying as the passage of death to itself. Dying as the fleeing of death. Death flees through the bodies of the dying. Then death is betrayed in the bodies of the dead. Death, which wants to retreat, to drain back to itself, is caught there. But is it caught? Isn’t it life and the living world that is caught by death as it appears in its midst? So does death’s disappearance draw after it all of life. And where death departs, life blazes into a trail of dying.

Do not seek to keep death; do not detain it. Give it back to itself, death – release it, let it turn back to itself – that it appeared in life is no reason to keep it there. Let it fall back to wherever death goes. And doesn’t it fall back in you, too – don’t you know death’s retreat in your own body and in the struggle of your body against death?

Your own body – but in that moment, it is not yours. That’s how you know it, death: in the body that turns against you and will not do as it is required. But that is also how you do not know it – for in this turning, it also turns itself from memory, from the power of recollection. Death keeps itself, but it does not keep memory of itself.

Death is forgetting; death forgets. Nothing lasts of it, it has no legacy. Who is present to remember? Who remembers in your tirednesses, your exhaustions? Who keeps death’s place? And yet dying leaves traces of itself. Traces, remnants, so does death indicate itself in life and non-knowing in what is known. But what is left will not be kept; what is remembered must be given to forgetting. It gives itself thus – it is given as it withdraws, as that giving-withdrawal whose face is never met.

Forgetting will not face us – this is sadness. Death is without death; it has no hold on itself. Death is not yet itself – first of all, it wanders. First of all, errancy in life, and it is thus that it seems to call for mercy.

Pity it. Keep a place at the table for the one who cannot come. Keep it for the one who comes as dispersal. Keep a place in your soul for what is without place – keep it in your tirednesses and your exhaustions. Your body knows as you do not. It is known, even as you do not know.

Dying – is that a name for the soul? Forgetting: is that the soul’s name?