Do this Thing for Me (the idea of the last request)
When I almost died last summer, my thoughts were entirely for my spouse. In a deliberate manner, my final request to her was that she carry on, take up her promotion in a new city, and move there with or without me. She assented to this demand, for that is what it was in the end, and only later, given my survival, did I realize that this had constituted my last request. I had no thought for myself or my own ‘fate’, and had been compelled to come to terms with my existence as lived. Never necessarily a pretty sight, nevertheless, one feels in turn a demand that the arc of life imposes upon each of us; life has itself of us a last request.
Famous or no, the idea of ‘last words’ is an intriguing one, implying a number of related assumptions. Mostly this is taken to mean that after death, one can no longer issue ‘earthly’ requests or demands, commands or beggary; all are now abruptly moot. But it might also imply that there is no afterlife at all, and one’s final requests are indeed final for one’s consciousness entire, and not merely its passing embodiment. But if indeed an afterlife is held to be at least a possibility, the phrase itself might also suggest that once present ‘in’ this other realm of being, no further requests can be made of anyone or anything. And cross-cultural ideas of paradise, first arising in the archaic agrarian period and coming to a discursive end with the Enlightenment and the beginning of our own time, do tend to vouchsafe this third interpretation; that once in heaven there are allowed no further demands simply because none are necessary.
Our shared world is of course very different from such a communitarian ideal. In the here and now, the ‘by and by’ of higher worlds and altered forms of being occurs rarely. In wage-labor societies, retirement, if possible at all, can be seen as a dress-rehearsal for a further life in paradise. Recused from work, all such demands issued by or upon me have now also been removed. Most direct obligations are, for those advanced in age, absent. Children are long grown and out of the premises, one’s own predecessors are already dead, and grandchildren, if present, provide no serious burden, at least in the folklore of the family, as ultimately, they are not my kids, not my problem. One’s failing health does present new challenges, issue new demands upon us, pending our druthers regarding quality of life and longevity, but this is seen as part of the ultimate democracy of species-essence, a signage of the fuller presence of finitude and a sign of oncoming finiteness. For Dasein, nearing its second solstice, mine ownmost death may be of growing concern, and even though yet abstract, yet I find that this unknown moment with its unknowable outcome can speak to me ‘ahead of time’, as it were, and thus as well ahead of its time.
I was not at all ready to die at age 58, with my wife just turned 40. To be a widow at that age seemed ludicrous, absurd, and even tragic, not that I was ever the hero I so planned to be. But such an experience, my first brush with death since I was 32 – then still too young to understand it as an ‘event’, or believe in its irruptive non-presence – gave me a fresh perspective on what it meant to live on in the day to day. At first, this kind of reaction can be summarily rejected as trite, yet upon a more patient examination, I found myself comparing the days I live now with those deemed as final. The contrast is stark, those few days staring at me with vacant sockets into which no corrective tool will fit. Indeed, the empty skull of inward cast, casts rather a wrench into one’s future plans, as it were. These days, now back to their indefinite and even repetitive status, pull one back from the precipice only to land one in a uniform meadow of mostly grass. The villains of the day, weeds them all, or the heroines, beautiful flowers ever in Spring, are both unlikely and indeed, might the both even be welcome for their very rarity. The key to the day-to-day is, however, its absence of any ultimate demand, any last requests.
There are other rehearsals, other practices, a goodnight kiss as surrogate mortuary ritual, a ‘now I lay me down to sleep’ a child’s shield against death’s subito, possible, if highly unlikely, even for the young. The habits are worn, with intent, not to pretend that life is itself, and as already stated, immortal and in touch with infinite doings all on its own, but rather as part of the ongoing if mostly tacit acknowledgement that we are present only insofar as we are unaware of our coming absence, to borrow from Gadamer. This odd awareness-of-being-unaware could be seen as the basic motive of life itself, akin to an instinct perhaps, or at least, a necessary evolutionary development that cloaks, with a Promethean proprioception and profundity, a consciousness intelligent enough to become all too aware of its finite character. It is well known that in one’s final days, all plans must be abandoned, given over to one’s successors, however indirectly, and thus the very idea of a singular future begins to slip away. It is an error of culture to conflate this personal future, which must end at some point, with the wider conception of the future, which is part of the being-aheadedness of Dasein and as such is an existential fact.
And yet, in flirting with disaster at many a turn, from warfare to climate to plague to dictatorship, our global society seems to desire more realism in its theatre than the drama of human history can allow; that is, if history is itself to continue. The feigning of death might be referred to as a kind of ‘hyperdrama’, at once hyperbole in its mockery of finitude, hypostasy in its attempt to short-circuit finiteness. It certainly retains the human drama while at the same time aspiring toward the dramatis deus of the epic or the mythical. This rhetorical presence of the larger-than-life brought into the ever-worldly sphere of human doings does us, however, a disservice. For human life cannot be larger than itself. This is another perspective which is presented by the ‘near death’ experience: that we should live on, if we will in fact do so, with less of a demand upon the very day given to us; serially, consecutively, but not automatically, not perpetually. This experienced ethic can also be applied to a number of other ‘sacred’ aspects of social life where we tend to hyperbolize our demands in the day to day, giving others a sense that we are always already euthanizing ourselves as leverage to simply attain our desires.
This is the entanglement of manipulation; how much can I get away with because I am either ill, close to death or dying, or worse, returned from a premature burial by chance and timely health care? It is worse that curiosity or tarrying along, for its malingering quality entangles others in a skein of fraudulent theatre. By this I simply mean that the drama of existence is never actually lived larger than its quotidian demands. There are no last requests in the mundane sphere, in which the vast bulk of life is lived and within which we ourselves humanly dwell. And thus, there are no final expectations of the other to be possessed. I give the other her chance but she must take it up; it is only a gift and nothing more. But in the last request, made upon a closing-off of Dasein’s daily rounds, the sense of expectation becomes more like an anticipation; that one can be confident that the other will acceded to my demand, whatever it might be. The leverage of dying is applied to living in a moment of dramatic presence which touches upon the mythic. Just as sleep is the brother of death, so too my last request is the sibling of my now absent presence. The corpse displays by a lurid twilight the corpus of its past life, acting now only as a memento mori to the final demand which its just then living breath issued forth.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.