2 Cents: Pairs

Death is all around, an essential condition of our lives. Yet studiously we avoid it, the greatest of the feared unknowns.

I have been urged to think about death recently, so the current exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London of photographs by Walters Schels (text by Beate Lakotta) seemed particularly relevant. The photos are portraits of people in hospice care, and the images exist in pairs -- one taken shortly before the person died and the other shortly after death.

The photographs are arresting, and the text -- which describes the person depicted and includes as well the person's own words regarding the impending end -- is just as affecting. I won't be able to go to London, but there are some good on-line sources. I found the following from Lens Culture. The Guardian has a few more here.

Here are a few that I liked.

This is Heiner Schmitz, an advertising exec who learned through an MRI that he had an inoperable brain tumor at age 52:

He described how he felt about the many visitors -- co-workers, friends, and family -- he received in his hospice room: "No one asks me how I feel. Because they're all shit scared. I find it really upsetting the way they desperately avoid the subject, talking about all sorts of other things. Don't they get it? I'm going to die! That's all I think about, every second when I'm own my own."

This is Edelgard Clavey, an administrative assistant who died at age 67. She divorced in the 1980s and has no children:

This is what Edelgard said: "Death is a test of one's maturity. Everyone has to get through it on their own. I want so very much to die. I want to become part of that vast extraordinary light.

But dying is hard work. Death is in control of the process, I cannot influence its course. All I can do is wait. I was given my life, I had to live it, and now I am giving it back."

Finally, this is Wolfgang Kotzahn, who learned he had inoperable lung cancer at age 57. He was an accountant, and was told he had six months to live:

In his words: "It came as a real shock. I had not contemplated death at all, only life.

I'm surprised that I have come to terms with it fairly easily. Now I'm lying here waiting to die. But each day that I have I savour, experiencing life to the full. I never paid attention to clouds before. Now I see everything from a totally different perspective: every cloud outside my window, every flower in the vase. Suddenly, everything matters."

This reminds me of something I read in a Carlos Castenada book a long, long time ago, during freshman year of college -- that one should live every moment of life as if Death is just lurking over the left shoulder. I clung to this bit of New Age wisdom for a few months, then forgot it. And when I did think about it, I dismissed it.

Maybe Castenada and Wolfgang are right. The mysteries of the Universe lie far beyond our comprehension. But it still seems a good idea to do it right this time, just in case we don't get to do it again.