After Reading Something- Dying: A memoir by Cory Taylor (1)
It might be a moment for me to think about “Dying” or “Death.” “Dying” came to my mind before my 30’s or even much earlier in the year I got two cats. How can that be possible if Dying is just around the corner and I have no idea to deal with it?
I have to face the dying of my mother, my pets or me, myself during the next 20 years. However, we learn nothing about Dying from school. “In hospital we don’t talk about death, we talk about treatment “as Cory Taylor stated, death is considered as failure in hospital or any institute of education and becoming a forbidden word in oriental family.
How should we learn anything FOR death? Death is a professor standing outside and it won’t be easy for you to find and open that door.
I am the one who are still being frustrated about exploring that door. I know the death is around the corner and the only thing I could do is moving on by my step with nothing but my fear. What is Death? How should I face it? Being ignorant with knowing nothing of your big boss professor in life construed a Great Wall between this issue and me myself.
The only way I can do is read. Reading the story of people are dying. Reading those stories about people have ever gotten a chance being interviewed by THE BOSS. It is much easier compared with being a funeral director or a hospice nurse which I am not qualified so far.
I read these stories in a way of preparing my thesis defense and drafting a dramatic speech for presentation. Death never asks. All you prepared are crushed and flooded away at the first glimpse with her. However, there is one character called Susan Addison caught my attention in Dying: A memoir. Susan is a biographer who visit patients and record their story to present to the family of dying.
“ And I think Susan knew that. I think she understood that she wasn’t just my chronicler, but my guide, my travel adviser to that bitter country she had already number of times before me.”
Susan faced the death of her loving son and closed family. What she suffered had published memoir Mother Lode and make her becoming an expert in grief. Susan and Cory were becoming closer to each other with a strength which is more powered than religion in the last mile. But the time flies too fast with their expectation.
Susan was gone suddenly as so called “Someday” moment in cinemas. She turned to the way of Nirvana and being absent in Cory’s journey. Having not enough time to farewell is part of lesson of dying.
But I do think Cory is lucky enough to being with biographer like Susan. In a comparison of a man facing his own death and a man facing a person who is dying, I believe the latter one needs a strong heartbeat to bear the collapse of mental defense.
Susan survived from this kind of torture then make her strong enough of being a biographer to record the story of the dying patient. I am just a nobody who never thinks somebody would write something for my life when I am dying. Maybe being remembered by fragments through the eyes of different friends and nurse in hospice has been just enough to comfort those who will still be living.
