Man. Myth. Morland.: Man. Myth. Morbid.

Slate is posting daily installments this week of a journal by Rosemary Quigley which chronicles the events just preceding, and then recovery from, her double-lung transplant. Quite gripping. It coincides strangely with the uneasy slumber I had last night.

The kind of mortal transience so rife in this journal never fails to shake me. We're beings built for the finite, and that's a good thing, I often tell myself in the rational halogen light of my office. Death gives us perspective. It allows cycles of renewal and variation. It provides rich heiresses with their only source of wealth. But we are also built to rage against it, for it just so happens that natural selection favors creatures with a strong survival instinct over those willing to kowtow early to the reaper, noble as their embrace of the inevitable might be (martyrdom gets you nowhere suckers! Didn't you read the bible?).

So we're left with that stunning gulf between our intellect and our instinct. Not to be Clashist, but one might reduce the debate to their 1982 hit: should I stay or should I go? Head votes in favor of the latter, heart, the former. As laughably futile as this deadlock might be (for in the end the choice is made for you, and the heart, as usual, gets shafted) it doesn't mean that nothing's at stake. Sanity has some benefits.

Some people bridge the gap with faith, that lovely (safety) blanket term. I don't have it. Well, that's not true, faith is a very ambiguous word. I have faith that the garbage man will come this Tuesday as he always has, and I have faith that America will one day tire of reality television, but I don't have capital-eff Faith, the kind of belief that allows you to set yourself on fire in protest or gives you the confidence to tell the real dauphin from an imposter (J D'A in the house!). Thanks for playing, turns out you're not capable of transcendent certainty, enjoy this lovely consolation prize of tense immutable dissonance. Which means once every couple of months, you won't be able to fall asleep because of anxiety attacks.

I always loathed the idea of panicking about the petty things: why the Jones' have a bigger car, what I'll wear to the debutant ball, how to explain the presence of four dead prostitutes and a bathtub half-full of sangria to my roommate. Now I envy it wholeheartedly, because, however far-fetched it may be, there's a slim avenue of recourse. You can always slash tires, put down the fellow debutants with passive-aggressive jibes, or buy your roommate's silence. How the hell am I supposed to conquer mortality?

And this isn't cool coffee-house angst either, that kind of tobacco-smooth existential malaise / adolescent-marketing cash-cow of philosophers and writers everywhere. This is the kind of sweaty, shivering, feels-like-you're-being-held-underwater primal freak-out that people alleviate with intensive drug regimens. Were it to occur more than two or three times a year, I'd also consider medicating into oblivion.

Is it related to diet? The sporadic dreams I had after tossing and turning for hours involved anxiety as well, though less grandiose (typical "showing up to a job interview stoned" stuff - the twentysomething gen-y equivalent of "showing up to school naked") and I can't tell whether the night's collective fear came from a central source (high sodium?) or if the dreams were ripples of the earlier wiggage.

My senior year in high school my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.* She would spend hours lying in bed, frail, nauseated. The one time I mentioned it casually to a group of acquaintances, everyone got uncomfortably quiet (I learned not to do that again, even in answer to "She's sick? With what?"). In retrospect, it was functionally similar to having a non-violent but serious alcoholic for a mother, minus the social stigma and Faulkerian overtones of decay**.

I tried not to cry in front of her, though once, just hours after her mastectomy, she tried to say something and the voice that came out was so weak and unrecognizable I failed utterly. But those emotions were different. There was no lack of fear, but it wasn't for my own well-being. For some reason, despite the awful range and severity of temperaments, I never considered and dealt with the fairly obvious implication staring me in the face. There was a surreal disconnect between what my mother was going through and what might happen to me. Maybe that's natural for a 17 year-old.

Likewise when my grandfather had a stroke four years ago I didn't think about it. I flew back home and commiserated with my family. When I visit him now, as he lies in a permanent state of near-death, I experience that same surreal disconnect I felt with my mother. I don't exactly sleep like a baby afterwards, but it's not the same primal fight-or-flight terror either. Maybe there's not much room in grief to worry about your own unavoidable fate.

So it's when I have the least to worry about that it seems to hit me. When I'm in good health, when things are relatively tragedy-free, that's when I feel it cresting like a wave. It's almost always at night, lying in bed like my mother with cancer and my grandfather without motor control. That's when it takes discipline to keep my mind at ease. Enough concentration in fact that as I drift off to sleep my guard drops and... bang. There I am back awake, trying irrationally to comprehend non-existence, things suddenly not seeming surreal or disconnected in the slightest.

I have to wonder about Rosemary Quigley. Does she have the same problem? Does she even have time in the midst of the grief? Does dealing with death as a practical day-to-day matter dull its fangs a little? Is the only way I can get rid of the anxiety to contract a terminal illness? And if you eliminate the fear, what kind of collateral damage do you inflict?

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' five psychological stages of dying (from On Death and Dying) are commonly quoted, despite rather fierce academic debate over their validity. The final "stage" is acceptance. It sounds abysmal.

If a patient has had enough time, and has been given some help in working through the previously described stages, he will reach a stage during which he is neither depressed nor angry about his “fate.” He will have been able to express his previous feelings, his envy for the living and the healthy, his anger at those who do not have to face their end so soon. He will have mourned the impending loss of so many meaningful people and places and he will contemplate his coming with a certain degrees of quiet expectation. ... He will also have a need to doze off to sleep often and in brief intervals, which is different from the need to sleep during the times of depression. this is not a sleep of avoidance or a period of rest to get relief from pain, discomfort, or itching. It is a gradually increasing need to extend the hours of sleep very similar to that of the newborn child but in reverse order. .... Acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage. It is almost void of feelings.

On an entirely different note, if you're having a celebration of any sort, consider inviting me. I'm a blast at parties! Guaranteed not to bring anyone down!

*This is always how people introduce subjects like this. I find it almost offensively blunt and calculating, like you're trying to seem frank about things but your real objective is to blindside the reader. So... apologies. She's fine now, going on seven years.

**My mom had cancer for chrisakes, I get to make one poor-taste/pretensions analogy.

i dont think you're alone in your feelings mike. Many nights i've been kept awake by thoughts of my own death or those of loved ones. A high sodium diet may be the catalyst to not sleeping at first, but once those eery thoughts enter---forget about it. Sleep will not come until you've either grown exhausted and pass out or you rub another one off.

I'll be honest, this post was just way too long for my ADD addled brain to digest. Maybe if you cut it up into smaller pieces, much like parents do for their children and like I do when I'm enjoying a good steak so as to make it last longer. But I would like to nominate the title as this year's best. That is all. As always, your wit and clever play on words astound me. If only I could be you. Except for the brillo hair part.

i spoke to one agonreps tonight, and he reminded me that you are, in fact, slated to die this year. in fact, you're not going to make it through the spring. we're going to have to make sure you really enjoy your final weeks in this realm.

let me know what i can do to help. especially if it involves drinking. cuz i'm all over that. right now.