Death Throes

Some years ago, and right about this time of year, my dad lay in the intensive care unit, never to regain consciousness. For all practical purposes, he’d died the day of the crisis but it took three weeks for the doctors and official next of kin to decide to turn off the respirator. I asked to be there with him as he died.

Now, I’m a farm girl. I’ve seen lots of things die in lots of different circumstances. I don’t know all the biology, but generally, things have a death throe they go in to, a convulsion. And it is different from anything else.

I do not know what drugs they gave my dad to suppress his death throes but I know they gave him something. They tried to talk me out of being there, and then waited a good while to disconnect him when they had said they were ready. When they first disconnected the respirator, his eyes got big but he calmed right back down and slowly died, just laying there with me holding his hand, with me insisting on looking at his face and not at the blasted machine tracking his heart and breathing.

Through my birth preparations I had learned that one hazard of a hospital birth is that attendants to the birthing woman tend to deal with the machines instead of her – if she allows herself to be hooked up to them. Never having been hooked to a machine, I’d never had to deal with that, but then I didn’t even allow any vaginal checks with my last one. I certainly was not going to let my dad die without the same sort of midwifery through the transition between the worlds that I’d had for the birth of our children.

My point is this: we don’t know what “normal” looks like in a whole lot of situations. Birth and death are conducted behind closed doors and attended to by specialists and feared by mere mortals until we do not know that birth is conducted with some moaning and some poop and that death is but another form of birth. Dead people are tucked and painted and stuffed to look “natural” and we’re willing to pay a lot of money to keep natural processes at arms length.

My point is this: we can’t name it while it is going on, especially not at the beginning. The Great Depression wasn’t the Great Depression right when it first started. Just 30 years ago, we could not have imagined in our wildest dreams how life with computers in every home and the internet connecting everyone would change every day life.

I don’t think we are in the death throes yet, but I do think the age of oil is now actively dying. It won’t be pretty, but there are things worse than death. There is no medicine anyone can give it to prevent the eventual death throes. One blog applies Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying to the oil age, and says we’ve pretty much been in denial but are now entering the bargaining stage. If you listen, you can hear that rather desperate bargaining going on just behind the roar of denial. I have friends I love who I am afraid for. But mostly it is exhilarating, being a witness and midwife to the death of the age of oil, and the birth of a new age of what we know not yet.

Those of us who survive will make it what it will be.

I think the age of oil will die like my Uncle Virgil, smoking to the end.

And we don’t know what an age not fueled by oil looks like except on a homestead level.