My Life as a Thanatologist

somandric: pertaining to the human body

“You have an E. coli infection in your bladder,” my doctor says over the phone, after receiving the lab report. He prescribes Macrobid. Two tablets a day. Seven days.

I sink onto the top step of stairs in my house in Grand Haven. As good a place as any to die. I consider tossing myself down the steps but that would only result in quadriplegia. I prefer dying of a bladder infection, allowing E. coli to spread to my kidneys—and organ-ic points beyond—rather than swallow the antibiotic to cure it.

I glance out the small window across from where I sit. Winter sun glazes the pane transparent white. My soul hovers outside the window. I close my eyes. Silence whispers against my lashes: like ash, like smoke. I press my forehead to my knees.

Infections = antibiotics. Antibiotics = death.

Because of those two c-difficile infections caused by antibiotics, I’m now at risk for another whenever I take almost any antibiotic. The only hope to avoid a reoccurrence is to take the one “good” antibiotic, Vancomycin, designed to combat c-difficile, in conjunction with the “bad” ones that cause it.

It’s a battle between Good and Evil—Life and Death—of epic proportions.

It might work. It might not. Additionally I take Florastor, a probiotic designed to prevent c-difficile. It might work. It might not.

My mind spinning, I slam into my car and drive the five minutes to my doctor’s office. I don’t know why. He has already handed down my sentence. His medical practice, attached to the hospital, probably has a morgue. Rather than take the elevator to the second floor, to Internal Medicine, I should press “B” for basement, an obvious location for a morgue. Better yet, an “M” option should be available on the elevator panel. Go directly to the morgue; skip the preliminaries. I should check in as if it’s a motel. Forgo the turning-the-body-inside-out steps to keep the body alive once c-difficile rampages through organs, muscles, tissue, sinews.

I will not relate the embarrassing meltdown in my doctor’s waiting room. I refuse to describe my sobs at the receptionist’s counter. I refuse to mention how I grab off my glasses with such force they break. I am out-of-control pure plasma sloshing around inside my skin. I repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat: I must see Dr. A immediately. I must see him because then I will decipher a secret meaning in his message. The message will withdraw the E. coli from my system. It will prove the diagnosis a mistake. It will commute the death sentence.

“He doesn’t have any openings this afternoon.”

I sit in the lobby anyway. Waiting.

Across the room a woman huddles on a chair, her winter cap pulled low over her forehead. A man in shirtsleeves, as if it’s summer, stares at the ceiling. I want to throw myself at their mercy and beg for them to give me their appointments. I assume my emergency is more important than theirs. Can I bribe them? I stare at the same spot on the ceiling as the man as if it’s a sign.

I search for evidence of things unseen: E. coli, my bladder. My soul. Maybe I don’t have E. coli. I want proof. I can’t see a swallowed antibiotic careening through my system. My interior world is invisible, only logical in its own illogical state of (non) being. In the past when I had those c-difficile infections, my body emptied itself. I felt weightless.

This incident is happening now on February 13, 2015. Today, a week after I collapsed in my doctor’s waiting room, I finish the seven-day supply of Macrobid. For seven additional days, four times a day, I’ll continue with Vancomycin. 5:00 p.m., 11:00 p.m., 5:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m. Then I wait . . . I will wait for one week, two weeks, a typical amount of time during which the c-difficile infection might still invade and trample my system. Right now I don’t know what will happen.

And because this is ongoing, as I write this, how to select the voice to best present this episode? If I know I won’t get the infection, I’ll be ironic. I’ll step outside the moment and observe it from a slight distance. A historical self, a self that knows the outcome, will filter the drama calmly, more insightfully.

If I get ill, however, irony is the wrong tone. Death, or near-death, deserves nothing less than full-blown melodrama. Like a lurid red-and-orange sunset in a bad velvet painting. Like a clown with lipstick smeared across his face. Like strands of garlic, Stars of David, and crucifixes dangling from the ceiling, strung around my bed. Like I’m levitating, my body limp and vibrating.

Words defining death sound harsh, cold as marble, definitive, final: “gravestone,” “ashes,” “plot,” “inter,” “exhume,” “mausoleum,” “casket,” “formaldehyde,” “bury,” “cremation,” “fossilizing,” “crypt.”

Vault: A burial chamber, especially when underground.

But “vault” has positive connotations, too: a room for safekeeping documents, jewelry, anything precious. If all the words describing life are protected, will they be safe for eternity? If I lock myself in a vault will death lose track of me?

As a child I played in the vault in my father’s bank in St. Thomas, the West Indies Bank and Trust Company. That Danish colonial building had thick stucco walls built to withstand hurricanes and pirate attacks. The vault had an impenetrable round steel door. Entering it was like being swallowed by a sea creature, as if I had wandered into distant realms of Ultima Thule—yet not scary—rather, hidden and shadowy. I sat on the floor inhaling moist limestone, parchment paper, a coppery scent of history. Vaulted away in luxurious solitude, I felt safe in case a long-banished pirate materialized from a distant century.

Years later, in the 1980s, I lived in Galveston, where I worked with my first husband who directed a historical preservation project. The organization’s headquarters was housed in a Victorian building, originally a bank. A small room, once a vault, was my office. Even though its steel door was removed, I felt sheltered entering its arched passageway. The inside walls were covered in a substance similar to aluminum foil—I have no idea why. All day as I worked, I glimpsed vague shadows, flashes of light, distorted yet oddly comforting images of myself. I wanted to live there, take up permanent residence, protected from disaster, disease, contamination. Death would never see me, would most certainly bypass this hidden enclosure. If The Fates came lurking, I would be camouflaged as a thin beam of light.

A vault seems a perfect place to be locked away from time and mortality.

Or, sadly, if captured by Death, I could still live there but in a different, much reduced, bodily form.

Over the centuries, places of burial have varied since, to date (only to date), no one has yet to survive death. In the Middle Ages, in London, the dead were buried, literally, in walls and vaults of the church. It was considered a “distinguished form of interment.” But interment was first used during the Neolithic period (4000–2500 BC) and “consisted of long barrows. These were vast walk-in burial chambers covered by mounds of earth.” By the Bronze Age, cremation was mainly used; “bodies were burned in pits, and the cremated remains buried in collared urns beneath smaller, rounded burial mounds.”1

In medieval times people were buried in pits. When one pit was filled, it was covered in earth and “a previous one reopened. The bones were dug up and taken to the charnel house for safekeeping. The term derives from the French charnier: flesh. In France and Italy, skeletal remains were used to create artistic displays, including chandeliers, which were exhibited in the ossuary—a gallery above a charnel house.”2

Maybe, if worse comes to worse, I can be reincarnated as a chandelier, always burning bright. Better yet, I could add my bones to the approximately 40,000–70,000 skeletons decorating the 1870 Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Also known as the Bone Church, it, too, has a “splendid chandelier composed of almost every bone in a human body. The ossuary displays two large bone chalices, four baroque bone candelabras, six enormous bone pyramids, two bone monstrances, and skull candle holders.” There is also a chain of bones hung like “crepe paper at a birthday party.”3

A few years ago, drafting my will, my attorney asked if I wanted to be cremated or buried in a cemetery. The word “cemetery” is from Greek koimeterion or “dormitory.” I don’t want to live into eternity lined up with other skeletons. Nor do I want to be reduced to rubble. For starters, I’m offended by the boring unoriginality of these options, given the fact that death, if it comes, is a once-in-a-lifetime, superextraordinary, over-the-moon event, to which no one, nonetheless, is lining up for tickets. If, however, I must list something in my Last Will and Testament and assuming, for example, that the Czech ossuary is no longer accepting donations, my next choice is to be mummified and interred in a pyramid.

In 2011 Alan Billis, a British taxi driver who died from lung cancer, became the first person to be mummified in 3,000 years. Dr. Stephen Buckley of York University conducted the procedure based on decades of research, which actually improved upon ancient Egyptian techniques. “Buckley first coated the body in pine resin, beeswax and sesame oil, before lowering Billis into a natron salt bath. Left to dry in the water bath for a month, Billis was subsequently wrapped in linen bandages coated in oils, resins and spices.” Speaking prior to his death, Billis said he supposed his legacy would be that of a pharaoh.4 And in several thousand years he’ll probably resemble one from the 18th Dynasty.

I wonder how much real estate remains available in the Valley of the Kings. Pine resin, beeswax, sesame oil: readily available substances. In my bathroom is an antique, claw-foot bathtub. I could fill it with natron salt in preparation.

Or I could replicate Jeremy Bentham’s disposition of his body. In the late 1700s he requested that his skeleton “be put together in such a manner as that the whole figure may be seated in a chair usually occupied by me when living. . . . I direct that the skeleton be clad in one of the suits of black occasionally worn by me. The body so clothed, together with the chair . . . will be prepared in an appropriate box or case and will cause to be engraved in conspicuous characters on a plate to be affixed . . . on the glass cases in which the preparations of the soft parts of my body shall be contained.”5

A fallback position, Plan C, is a lifelong pass at Window of the World Amusement Park in Shenzen, China, which features a ride whereby people, packed into a coffin situated on a track, enter a faux morgue. As the ride commences, you roll into a brick structure resembling a giant fireplace or furnace. Once inside, machines, set at 40 degrees Celsius, blast hot air at your body. Afterwards, “volunteers see a womb projected on the ceiling and must crawl until they reach a large, white padded area . . . where they are ‘reborn’.”6

An even better option, and closer to home, is Pharoh’s Fury. Shaped like a funerary boat, it un-furiously sways back and forth on the midway, a featured carnival ride during Grand Haven’s Coast Guard Festival. I imagine floating down the Nile before suddenly veering into the Grand River. I’ll sail across Lake Michigan in an ancient papyrus funeral barge that transmogrifies into a ship of pure unadulterated Egyptian plastic. The ship’s prow swells into the shape of an enormous pharaoh’s head.

A sign by the ticket booth, on the midway, states: “You have to be this tall to ride.” It should say “this dead to ride.” But don’t pharaohs live forever, albeit mummified, in pyramids?

At night the plastic jewels on Pharoh’s Fury flash red, green, gold like a neon promise. This could be ancient Egypt or at least a real-enough facsimile. Me . . . sailing in a jeweled boat toward the Afterlife. The perfect compromise between life and death. Neither life nor death—neither underground burial nor cremation—and much more elegant than “surviving” as a display of bones. My body, encased in faux gold, shimmers in an indestructible plastic ship floating down the Grand River.

In short, I’m resurrected for an all-expense-paid vacation on a Pharoh’s Fury cruise to the Afterlife. I’ll star forever in a reproduction of my life with the Sun God rising over a frozen field of Michigan blueberries. Me, sailing, sailing—ropes of pearls around my neck, turquoise eyes, a garnet heart—outdistancing the Curse of the Pharaohs, the Desires of the Furies, the Inevitability of the Fates.

Or, another promising option: I’ll return as Miss Route 17, back in the gold Plymouth, gripping not the Book of the Dead but Book of the Forever Un-Dead.

Rilke writes, “In those days people knew (or suspected) that they had death inside them like the stone inside a fruit.”

Maybe the best medical procedure is to remove the stone at birth, leaving the fruit intact.

Still I wait for a c-difficile infection.

After I left the doctor’s waiting room that afternoon, followed by days lying in bed assuming catastrophe, on February 22, at 10:23 p.m., I snap. My body feels encased in a blister containing bacteria, viruses, death. I’m convinced the bladder infection has returned, which would mean another regimen of antibiotics. At the same time, I’m convinced c-difficile rampages through my intestinal track. I drive immediately to the emergency room.

I know the drill. I enumerate the existing and/or possible nonexistent symptoms. Hospital gown. Bed. Blood pressure. Pulse. Temperature.

A nurse draws blood. Vial after vial fills with mysterious red liquid. Another nurse asks whether I smoke, drink alcohol, what’s my marital status, race, religion. I want to ask if there’s a box labeled “vampire.” Who wouldn’t want to feed on such warm, luscious nectar?

Another nurse inserts an IV for fluids, though what’s the point of nutrition if I’m dying?

The ER doctor pulls back the curtain. He’s the same one who treated me for the non-symptomatic faux heart attack, who kindly suggested the attack might have occurred in my mind, not my heart. He stares as if he might recognize me, but I don’t flinch or remind him of our past relationship. He shuffles through the papers handing me the results of my tests. I expect the worst. He provides the best.

As much as there is a language for dying, there is also a vocabulary that covers every molecule of blood and urine.

Blood: White blood count, red blood count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, corpuscular volume, platelet count, segmented neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, anion gap, glucose level. All normal.

Urine: protein, glucose, bilirubin, nitrite, leukocyte esterase, specific gravity, epithelial cells, hyaline casts, granular casts, amorphous crystals, bacteria. All normal.

“I know you think the bladder infection returned,” the doctor says, “and that you have c-difficile, but no tests show this.”

“Well, that’s good,” I say, relieved, stunned. I believe him; I don’t believe him. I want to say that I’m okay for now at 11:57 p.m. But I’m convinced if they run the tests again after midnight the results will reveal a different story altogether.

“Sometimes, when we’re scared, we think maybe we’re sick, but . . .” He shrugs.

Hospital sounds fade. I no longer hear the doctor probably still telling me it’s all in my mind. But maybe it’s in my DNA. Maybe I inherited hypochondria from my mother. My mother’s sister died from cancer, young. Subsequently, my mother “contracted” every single form of cancer that lasted an hour, a day, a month—until she miraculously recovered—or a new cancer staged a coup superseding the previous one.

Again I glance at the test results. Amorphous crystals. I don’t know what it means. I don’t want to know what it means, at least literally. Un-literally, amorphous crystals sound like a necklace, jewelry to ward off disease and infection. Maybe my various body parts, if not the whole thing, can be reincarnated into a jewelry display.

Or . . .

Even if I die, I want my DNA always safe and sound just waiting for a hint of moisture, a drop of dew, a vial of blood to bloom back into being, those double helixes spiraling into eternity.

Eternity at Tiffany’s. Except I will not, of course, go lightly.