Drowning
Sorry for the potential depressiveness of what's to follow. People who don't like thinking of their mortality shouldn't read on. I found this description of drowning while reading The Perfect Storm. I had to read the book again after subjecting myself to the sappy movie twice recently. Here goes:Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing 'voluntary apnea.' choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body--and the mind-- do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. 'So this is drowning,' a drowning person might think. 'So this is how my life finally ends.'
Along with the disbelief is an overwhelming sense of being wrenched from life at the most banal, inopportune moment imaginable. 'I can't die, I have tickets to next week's game,' is not an impossible thought to someone who is drowning. The drowning person may even feel embarrassed, as if he's squandered a great fortune. He has an image of people shaking their heads over his dying so senselessly. The drowning person may feel as if it's the last, greatest act of stupidity in his life.
These thoughts shriek through the mind during the minute or so that it takes a panicked person to run out of air... At this point something makes people breathe involuntarily (which means water for 90% of us) and Junger describes what also happens to the the other 10% until returning...
In the other ninety percent of people, water floods the lungs and ends any waning transfer of oxygen to the blood. The clock is running down now; half-conscious and enfeebled by oxygen depletion, the person is in no position to fight his way back up to the surface. The very process of drowning makes it harder and harder not to drown, an exponential disaster curve similar to that of a sinking boat.
What strikes me about this is the feeling of banality felt during this death. My own two brushes with death were similarly banal; just me waking up and wondering why people were screaming at me or why I was in the ER. What's different here is that the drowner knows he's dying, he's not allowed to immediately fall asleep like I was. After the water, though, he is allowed to slowly fall asleep while he dies. Why do our bodies make death so easy? I'm not sure myself, but perhaps the point here is that death isn't some kind of liberating moment, perhaps the liberation is in living. Why are moments of living so intense to our senses? Think of a wonderful smelling woman or a deciduous forest in October. There is one woman I remember vividly only because of her scent when she got in a truck with me on a rainy March day. That imprint is there, and I probably won't ever forget it. If I was a buddhist I would say all senses are illusory. My wonder is how this can be when perceptions are stamped all over our consciousness. Compare the lovely scented woman in the truck with me to the fading consciousness of the drowning man. Which moment will ripple through life? Perhaps death is the peace of sleep, and our lives a phantasmagoria of sense perception. But what then?
posted by moor-rambler @ 3:48 AM
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