After a funeral, a friend remarked how our recently buried friend’s body is sitting in a box underground and I realized I had never truly considered that the body still exists after death (that my body will exist after I die). Even in states of decay or cremation, the body still has a physical presence and we constantly encounter these bodies and objects that act as transubstantiated or surrogate bodies. Whether it’s a song, a book, or a place, there are all sorts of things that can instantly evoke a memory of a person. This is true for memories of people both living and dead. The trouble is that while you can message a friend about something you saw that reminds you of them, when you can’t contact the person evoked, that memory burrows and becomes suppressed in the body. Eventually the body becomes so full of tunnels and pockets where memories are buried it begins to distort, visibly turning in on itself and hiding, becoming sunken, and invisibly creating a web of fear, anxiety, and depression. The living body starts a process of decay similar to the deceased, full of embalming fluids that slow down this process. There is also the very real and typically slow decay of the body that starts from conception and is evident when organs and joints stop working and the physical demands of life become more difficult.
“When we lose the ones we love, we mourn them, in part, by continuing to feel the vitality of this intervening space as the dilation of our body schema, and we know terrible confusion when the space turns out to be not between two bodies but only around the edges of ours. Why do the grief stricken yearn for the beloved’s touch? … the actual topography of the life we lived with our lost loved one, the halls and rooms and beds, remains with us, and so the lost bodies seem also to remain, not encrypted within us but pressing against and moving past our bodies’ edges.” - James Krasner p.225 (emphasis my own) Why do the grief stricken yearn for the beloved’s touch? How does that touch exist in this new digital age where relationships are able to be maintained without physical contact? Do we remember or imagine what the beloved’s touch would feel like? Or do we yearn for the simple digital gestures of sharing a photo or sending a text? What happens when there is a false possibility of contact that comes from media accounts continuing to exist or from a contact still being saved in a phone?
Let us first begin by acknowledging that is impossible to “save a person’s life.” Death comes to all of us sooner or later. The most that we can hope to do through providing health care or treatment is to prolong a person’s life long enough to become comfortable with death. Death is a reality. To deny death, to be afraid of death is to deny and be afraid of life itself. It is only in the confrontation of our fear of death and our ultimate acceptance of the reality of death that we can begin to see life with clarity and acceptance. This is true of all people, whether they are directly confronted with a “life-threatening” disease or not. It is simply that people with AIDS, people whose death appears to be a little closer, are forced into a confrontation with death sooner than they had expected. Lessons, however, tend to come when we need and are ready for them, not necessarily when we want them. Jon M Greenberg
Could disease itself be seen as a function of the body’s inability to incorporate the foreign elements, not as a function of the foreign elements desire to take over the body. In other words, the “undesirable consequences of disease could be handled by teaching the body how to co-exist with the disease rather than by trying to eliminate the cause of the disease. Just as, in society, the violence and destruction which are often a consequence of the presence of a “foreign” or “alien” element are not necessarily due to the presence of the alien element but rather due to the reluctance of the host state to integrate the “different” element and validate its existence. In other words, it might be possible that the solution to living with AIDS could lie not in preventing or aggressively treating O.I.s but rather in teaching the body (and the infection) how to co-exist and become one. Jon M Greenberg (emphasis my own)
The body’s inability to incorporate the foreign elements. The body’s inability. The body’s failure. The body and its failures. When the body becomes reluctant to change and reluctant to adapt to new elements is when the body begins to break and distort itself around these elements. As the (my) body is being distorted, is distorting itself around feelings of grief and depression, it begins to break down both physically and emotionally to a point where it can’t be trusted to ‘work’ and each day brings reminders of the causes for such distortion. While living with these reminders of my (most likely slow) demise, new ways of ‘work’ing have developed. While my body itself is unable to adapt, the rest of my life is forced to in order to ‘keep up’ and present in a ‘healthy’ and undistorted way.