Death and taxes

Imagining a politics worthy of our finitude

As always, your subscriptions—paid or unpaid, your comments, your shares, all mean so much to me. This Examined Family community is filthy rich with wisdom and I feel such a sense of abundance getting to write observations and essays, conduct meaningful interviews with people I admire, and do it all alongside you. Thank you thank you.

---

I have been witnessing my dad’s slow death, marking the steady loss of function week after week, making sure the hospice nurses know about new bruises and abrasions on his arms, holding his hand and telling him how much I love him and getting a small, but sacred smile most days in return. I have also been watching the political leadership of this country thrash and churn and cheer and surrender.

Me and my dad holding hands a couple weeks ago.

You would think the two have nothing to do with one another, but lately I’ve been noticing that they’re actually deeply intertwined. I have been wondering how our relationship with death in this country impacts our relationship with politics. I’ve been starting to believe that, on some deep level, our denial of death is actually definitional of our politics.

When you are accompanying someone through their death, as I am with my dad, you exist in what the Celtics call a “thin time” or a “thin place”—where the veil between life and death is palpably thin. In my case, this thin time and place are extended—not thicker, but longer. This is the cruel gift of a disease like dementia—you watch your loved one unbecoming themselves, and in so doing, you understand that we are all far less coherent, invulnerable, and permanent than we would like to think. All of this will be over. For my dad, in a matter of months. For you and me, who knows, but certainly in a matter of years. I have been learning this, integrating it into my body and my consciousness and my values, for an excruciating number of months now.

If you aren’t in a thin time and place, and/or you’ve never been there, if you’re part of a class of people who has been largely protected from death’s reality, as is the case for so many White, economically privileged Americans like me, then you are stripped of this understanding. You may comprehend it. You may visit this reality from time to time. You may read books on it or watch movies that explore the theme of death and finitude and legacy, but if you’ve never been up close and personal with death, it’s hard to really integrate it into your existential reality at more than an intellectual and passing level. Many people, and this was true for me in the before times, have a glancing relationship with death, a relationship of curiosity, of emotional catharsis. I used to experience death mostly through art, moving and containable; I remember crying my eyes out reading Paul Kalinithi’s beautiful When Breath Becomes Air, and then tucking the book into my backpack and moving on. This class of people don’t know death, and relatedly, limitation, disease, disintegration, aging, up close. They don’t, I didn’t, know it in our bones.

The beautiful hands of another resident in my dad’s memory care facility. She picked these flowers while I was sitting out in the garden with my dad and took such pleasure from them.

Other Americans, know death like a familiar song—the words and rhythm of which they can’t forget if they try. These Americans live in neighborhoods that are filled with people they love and also, sometimes, deadly violence. These Americans sometimes have death in their epigenetic, too—grandsons and granddaughters of enslaved and displaced people, migrants who have known war and genocide in other places and brought that knowing here. These Americans assemble artifacts on their grandparents’ ofrendas as little kids, make RIP shirts as teenagers for other teenagers, lose too many of their favorite aunties in their 30s and 40s because of heart disease, racism, heart disease, racism…

So on the one hand, we have a population of people who move through the country expecting to live, and expecting those they love to live, and we have another population of people expecting, if not to die, to certainly be hit by waves of death—preventable, early, unfair—at some point soon again.

So how does being in one country with people with very contrasting consciousnesses about the durability and value of human life, shape a politics?

I think being protected from death is more likely to make you feel like politics are about ideas and being intimate with death is more likely to make you feel like politics are about people. It is Ezra Klein trying to debate his way into a more strategic and disciplined understanding of our current polarized moment and Ta-nehisi Coates invoking a loyalty to the collective lineage of those who have shaped him—through books and acts of care—in generational time. Ezra is telling Ta-nehisi that he prays to remember he is not invincible (a noble effort, to be sure) and Ta-nehisi is integrating the specter of death and finitude into his every point.

It is also Donald Trump, a man who appears to believe he is invincible and/or be deeply invested in convincing everyone else of this fact, cutting USAID funding, Medicare and Medicaid, and freezing SNAP, with seemingly no regard for the way his choices endanger and even end life. I have a friend who runs an international NGO who had to literally ask her nonprofit board to help her keep the incubators running in rural clinics so that babies wouldn’t die, a result of a brushstroke of the pen of a man who is building a garish ballroom in order to attempt to live forever in American minds when he is already inarguably notorious. This is a man who doesn’t understand death.

Perhaps it is a leap, but I also see this consciousness in the historic election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. He seems to be trying to create a city where people, who are only on this earth for a limited amount of time, have a decent chance at working for a fair wage, affording a stable home, and enjoying one another and the beauty of the kind of art his mother and wife create. He seems like a man who does not consider himself invincible. He also seems like a man who understands that when some of us have less, all of us can have more, and that in the long run, that’s good sense since we can’t take any of our belongings or cash with us when our bodies stop breathing.

I’m reading a book called Hospicing Modernity in which Vanessa Machado de Oliveira argues that we need to “rescue hope from the cages of projections into the future.” People who do not understand death get very excited about imagining abstract futures. They become obsessed with scale, a close cousin of legacy. They want to fix the unfixable, chase solvability rather than acknowledge complexity. They deny natural limitations—ecological and human. They are more interested in strategy and predictability (algorithms, AI, impact data, polling) than real flesh and blood people (who are admittedly weird and messy and hard to measure and sometimes, actually, inevitably, disabled and unruly and are so so beautiful).

It’s all making me wonder: what does a politics that acknowledges death look like? I’m not sure, but I have some hunches. I think it is a politics filled with women leaders because many of us inhabit thin times and places through our own birth experiences. I think it would be a politics where care really was acknowledged as the infrastructure of our society, as organizer and visionary Ai-jen Poo has long been arguing. I think it is a politics where war would be an inconceivable choice. It think it is a politics where housing and health would be obvious human rights. I think it would be a politics where old White men would be more interested in unseeable horizons than grand ballrooms; my mentor Parker Palmer, 86-years-old now, once told me, “I feel like I’m standing somewhere down the curvature of the earth. I cannot see the horizon that you folks see where you’re standing higher on that curvature. I need your eyes, and I need your ears, and I need you to tell me what it is you’re seeing because that same horizon is coming at me, even though I don’t know it.”

A politics that honored death would have far less punditry and hot takes and far more poetry and silence.

Maybe I’m just a sad girl whose dad is dying a long, slow death, but what passes for politics these days so often feels like it’s missing the whole point. We all die. If we are lucky, we grow old and learn the frustration and beauty of limitations. Politics should be about the urgent prospect of being alive for a finite amount of time and wanting that experience to be as fair and beautiful as possible for as many people as possible for as long as possible. Until it’s over, and then honoring that universal fate, too.