Randy Pausch Posts

On “Dying” and “In Gratitude”

jenni-diski51hmou4betl-_sx311_bo1204203200_I’m writing a memoir, a form that in my mind plays hide-and-seek with the truth. It contains what I imagine and what I remember being told. Absolute veracity is what I am after. 

Jenni Diski In Gratitude 

Two women writers, Jenni Diski and Cory Taylor, are diagnosed with cancer and its inoperable. Trying to come to terms with the doctor’s grim prognosis is not easy. Suddenly time takes on a different meaning. Jenni Diski began a column for the London Review of Books once her cancer was diagnosed. It was a series a essays that were published reflecting on her life, her birth family, her writing, her school and most significantly her complicated relationship with the Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, who took fifteen-year-old Jennifer Simmonds under her wing. The Australian writer Cory Taylor too spends a while in her memoir, Dying, remembering her mother and the choices she made. In both the memoirs what comes across clearly is that the two dying writers are reflecting upon their past but are also hugely influenced by and acknowledge the presence of the women who made the writers what they are. Jenni Diski had always nursed a desire to be a writer but had not been very focused about it till she met Doris Lessing and was introduced to her world of writers and other creative minds who always made interesting conversation and had ideas to offer. Cory Taylor discovered that her mother had had a dream to be a writer but never achieved it. She writes in Dying : “Writing, even if most of the time you are only doing it in your head, shapes the world, and makes it bearable. …I’m never happier than when I’m writing, or thinking about writing, or watching the world as a writer, and it has been this way from the start.” Three Australian writers including Benjamin Law wrote a beautiful obituary for Cory Taylor in the Guardian terming Dying as a “remarkable gift” for providing a vocabulary and invitation to speak about that “unmentionable thing”, a “monstrous silence” — death. ( 6 July 2016, http://bit.ly/2dPq0Mx ) These sentiments on writing and the gift of the memoir can probably be extended to Jenni Diski and In Gratitude too.

Apart from Jenni Diski’s and Cory Taylor’s preoccupation with writing and their evolution as writers what comes 41vdphgesjlthrough strongly in both memoirs is the tussle between secular and religious modes of coping with death and its rituals. Also how ill-prepared a secular upbringing makes an individual in understanding burial rites or managing one’s grief once a loved one departs. How does one mourn? The structures of religious rituals seem to take care of the moments of sorrow. There is much to do. Yet the challenge of speaking of death and the process of dying is not easy. Cory Taylor had even contemplated euthanasia and ultimately passed away in hospice care.

In Gratitude and Dying: A memoir put the spotlight on the magnificent leaps medicine and technology have made, in many cases it has prolonged life but with it is the baggage of ethics — whether it is possible to go through the agony of pain while dying a slow death or to end it all swiftly by assisted suicide or euthanasia. These are critical issues not necessarily the focus areas of both books although Cory Taylor confesses in having contemplated euthanasia. While reading the memoirs innumerable questions inevitably arise in a reader’s mind.

Some of the literature  published recently has been seminal in contributing to the growing awareness and need to discuss death increasingly in modern times when advancement in medical technology seems to prolong human suffering. Also in an increasingly polarised world between the secular and religious domains bring to the fore the disturbed confusion that reigns in every individual on how to deal with the dying, the finality of death, disposal of the mortal remains and the despair it leaves the distraught survivors in. Some links are:

  1. “Daughters of Australian scientists who took their own lives reflect on their parents’ plan” http://bit.ly/2dDfvc8 ( Jan 2016)
  2. Amitava Kumar’s essay “Pyre” published in Granta ( https://granta.com/pyre/ ) and recently republished in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen.
  3. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal ( 2015)
  4. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air ( 2016)
  5. Aleksander Hemon’s moving essay on his infant daughter’s brain cancer ( “The Aquarium: A Child’s Isolating Illness” JUNE 13 & 20, 2011 ISSUE http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-aquarium )
  6. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture  ( 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo )
  7. Andrew Solomon’s essay on his mother’s decision to opt for euthanasia ( “A  Death of One’s Own” 22 May 1995 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/05/22/a-death-of-ones-own )

In Gratitude and Dying are strangely comforting while being thought provoking in raising uncomfortable questions about mortality, importance of time, maintenance of familial ties and doing that which pleases or gives the individual peace. Both the memoirs have a confident writing style as if by capturing memories in words the writers are involved a therapeutic process of facing their mortality while the urgency to their writing has an unmistakable strength to its tenor as if no one will have the time to dispute their published words.

Read these books.

Jenni Diski In Gratitude Bloomsbury, London, 2016. Pb. pp. 250 £12.99 

Cory Taylor Dying: A Memoir Canongate, London, 2016. Pb. pp. £12.99 

24 Oct 2016 

 

 

On caregiving, review of Jai Pausch’s “dreams new dreams: reimagining my life after loss”

On caregiving, review of Jai Pausch’s “dreams new dreams: reimagining my life after loss”

Jai Pausch, dreams new dreams: reimagining my life after loss (Two Roads Books, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette UK, 2012. Pb, Rs. 295. pp. 224)

In September 2007 Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture: really achieving your childhood dreams”. ( ) It went viral and within a short space of time had over 10 million views. It resulted in a media buzz and the professor being invited to talk shows across America. In 2006 he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By the time he delivered his speech, he was terminally ill, having been given only 3-6 months to live by the oncologist. (He was to defy the prognosis by a few months. He died on 25 July 2008.)

His wife Jai Pausch published a memoir dreams new dreams: reimagining my life after loss ( documenting her time as Randy’s primary caregiver and how she learnt come to terms with his death and move on. It is a very moving account of how she learned to balance mothering, housekeeping and being primary caregiver to her husband. Their children were Dylan (four-and-a-half), Logan (twenty-two months) and Chloe (three months whom Jai was nursing) when Randy’s cancer was discovered. It was tough for her. But she writes movingly about learning how to take on more responsibility as Randy’s condition deteriorated. Very quickly she learnt that self-preservation is as important as caregiving. So she learnt to rely on help from family, friends, neighbours to the extent that they helped her unpack her belongings and settle into a new home.

Caregiving at the best of times is a very difficult responsibility and there is no respite, especially if you are the primary caregiver. Schedules of the caregiver, the daily humdrum (which are equally important) can easily go for a toss if not monitored equally diligently, but it becomes quite challenging if it also involves looking after small children. The mother is torn between her responsibilities. And this is something that comes through in Jai’s memoir. When Randy was being given chemotherapy in a different city, she would spend the week with him only to return home to spend the weekend with her children and do everything with and for them, including cooking a regular meal.

A big concern for a caregiver is the looming fear of death. It is a numbing feeling that makes thinking or doing any normal chore nearly impossible since the mind is always worried about losing the loved one to death. It is only when the caregiver faces the reality that some sense of peace begins to creep in. A similar feeling is expressed by Jai when Randy tells her that he saw his dead father in his room. “After months of worry and fear, after living in the shadow of death and witnessing the pain of letting go of life, Randy’s death came as somewhat of a relief to me. I could let go of Randy or at least the role of caring for him. I could stop trying to save my husband by running him to experimental treatments. I could quit obsessing over every change in his health status, stop worrying that even the smallest symptom, like bloating, could be a sign of something more serious, such as kidney failure. The strain of keeping him alive each day, which weighed terribly on me, was now gone.”

The pressure of being a caregiver is exhausting, but it is worsened by being unable to share one’s experiences or even let off some steam once in a while. It is quite normal to want to vent one’s emotions. Jai was fortunate enough to have “had a friend to whom I could talk about my feelings without fear of being misunderstood.” This recognition of reaching out to other people in a similar position like herself had prompted her to write this memoir. She writes, “Their grief and guilt they felt for mistakes they perceived they had made echoed some of my own feelings. I asked myself, Where is the help for folks like us who tirelessly give to our dying loved ones? Why wasn’t the medical community concerned about the people who struggle to carry the medical burden while also meeting normal everyday demands?” With this book she hopes that “my dream is that my story will legitimize what caregivers undergo willingly and bravely as they care for the person they love. Patients need and deserve support, but it’s time for us as a community to understand that suffering that is shouldered, sometimes silently, by our family members, neighbours, friends and coworkers. We need to offer help to these people, to develop and implement programmes at cancer centres and other organisations. We need to empathize with that person taking on the duty of overseeing the patient’s care and well-being. Finally, we need to care for the caregiver.”

dreams new dreams is a must read for all caregivers. Without being dull or voyeuristic, it is sensitively told — it is honest, frank and a useful aid on caregiving.

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