Yippie Memento Mori, Motherfucker

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your death closest.

Depending on who you ask, along with numerous factors I could never totally account for should the need arise, I’m roughly one month away from death at all times. You see, I’m a Type 1 diabetic. Without regular insulin injections, I have nothing to look forward to but a painful end. I know this, intimately, because I am one of the extraordinarily unlucky people who develop this condition later in life. There’s no fog of time or youth marring the recollection of memory. I will never not remember what it was like before, before Death was my constant companion, riding close behind on the dusty trail.

If you’re familiar with the community surrounding Type 1 diabetics, the introduction above might seem a little strange. Should this be a new subject to you, the overwhelmingly saccharine positivity of modern popular culture might cause you to consider my attitude with some discomfort. Before you worry further, it’s OK. It’s good for you, in fact. I choose to see my life this way, and I want to explain why.

This April will mark five years since my diagnosis. Five years since I found myself falling apart, staring at the ceiling from a hospital bed, accepting the reality of my own mortality. I was dying. It was the kind of dying where the only relief available on the path was morphine.

In a previous age, it would’ve been hospice, wouldn’t it? Shit, that’s weird to realize.

In any case, thanks to the work of two men named Frederick Banting and Charles Best we learned to isolate the hormone insulin and create a treatment for people like me. I mean, sure, lying in that hospital bed I knew, logically, I wasn’t going to die. I’m not a doctor by any means, but I’m a relatively smart guy and know things. Insulin is one of the most common medicines in the world and easily available. It wouldn’t be simple, but my life would go on and I have to say it’s turned out pretty good. But that’s the thing. I can already feel the anger rising up at that cursed phrase, just now dancing at the edge of my awareness.

A long and healthy life.

I saw and heard this sentiment early and often. Smiling faces of doctors, nurses, and dietitians explaining how with proper medication, diet, and exercise I could reach the promised land. Almost. Always with the almost. You could hear it in their tone of voice, if not expressed explicitly.

Thing is, when your immune system attacks the beta cells in your pancreas they stop making insulin and your body gets fucked seven ways from Sunday. First there’s the blood sugar levels, which the vast majority of you will know something about. That’s just a symptom of the thing itself and not all that interesting on its own. You see, when you eat food your body turns it into energy which is delivered to your body’s cells by insulin. When you don’t have that critical insulin hormone, the energy just builds up in your blood with nowhere to go. Blood sugar levels over 300 m/dl are an emergency. That night I checked into the hospital, I was at 400 m/dl. Above 700 m/dl, your blood turns to syrup, you slip into a coma, and you die.

But that’s the easy part. Human bodies are survival machines. They don’t want to die. When your beta cells go, you get very hungry and very thirsty. You can eat and eat and keep losing weight, which sounds nice, until you realize the horror of what’s actually happening. All that energy getting stuck in your blood means you’re starving to goddamn death (so, a normal weight loss program these days?) and the hunger is your body trying to fix that.

Drinking water is your flesh’s idea to flush all that energy out through your kidneys, but it’s way too much so you just end up nuking the organs before long (this is why ancient Greeks called diabetes the sweet urine disease). Kidney’s don’t heal, by the way, but not that it’ll matter. The syrup blood kills you long before organ failure does.

Your nervous system gets smoked too, first in the extremities. All that energy isn’t great for delicate stuff like neurons. That’s why doctors always tickle my feet to make sure I still feel.

I think you get the picture. It’s a trash fire featuring you in the leading role for a very limited engagement. I say all this to provide for you, such as I can, the foundation that leads to this core piece of my life’s spiritual journey.

Meditate on the day of your death.

I originally read these words in high school. I don’t remember who wrote them, just that it was a Christian monk of some persuasion. They’ve obviously stuck. Putting aside how strange it is for a teenage boy coming of age in the 1990s to take such exhortations deeply into his soul, I’m glad I did. It made the time in that hospital bed bearable.

Which is the point. Meditate on the day of your death so when it comes you are prepared. More importantly, and this is what I learned slogging through the molasses of modern positivity, double down on that meditation because our culture will do everything it can to steal that power from you. They will see you beaten down, demoralized, and spending your final days lashed to tubes in some hospital room long after your conciousness has ceased. They will feed your body, clean up its shit, and keep your soul from release for mere profane profit.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not my fate.

Knowing that someday I will die, to have that lesson not just logically or emotionally realized but slammed into my gut by brutal experience gives me a vitality of spirit I simply would not have otherwise. This is why I bristle at the phrase “long and healthy life” and the false hope of “support groups” and the like. They would steal from me, and you, a most important realization of self for the sake of mere comfort and safety. As if we can somehow rent paradise. I will not sell my soul so cheaply. I will embrace my reality, draw close the truth of my mortality, and leave this world with eyes and soul wide open and aware.

And until my time comes, do something great.

In closing, I leave you with the words of the great Voltairine de Cleyre, from her essay The Making of an Anarchist. May they touch you as they did me.

Good-natured satirists often remark that “the best way to cure an Anarchist is to give him a fortune.” Substituting “corrupt” for “cure,” I would subscribe to this; and believing myself to be no better than the rest of men, I earnestly hope that as so far it has been my lot to work, and work hard, and for no fortune, so I may continue to the end; for let me keep the intensity of my soul, with all the limitations of my material conditions, rather than become the spineless and ideal-less creation of material needs. My reward is that I live with the young; I keep step with my comrades; I shall die in the harness with my face to the east — the East and the Light.

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