"The Journey We Take Alone?"

NOTE to readers: Writer Alexander Prisant, a contributor to MyStoryLives, has a very difficult story to tell. In his email to me, he explained it this way: "Without being melodramatic, I just may be entering my final illness." He is determined to write his way through this ultimate of experiences, and he asked for my help and support.

By Alexander Prisant

Death is the one thing you cannot do too well on Facebook.

Trained “professionals” now sit with the terminally ill or the elderly, or the enfeebled and talk about the ancillaries to death—would you like a feeding tube, if need be? More chemo? Would you like to be revived after a massive heart attack that has messed up your brain? What does your family think (as if anyone really, really knew)?

But still, we mostly just dance around the edges when we discuss death. No one is talking about the essence of You. About your eradication. About the final, lonely, scary solitude of the absolute end of everything you ever were about. About the very, very last line on your resume. About extinguishing your soul, your being. A total, singular eclipse.

And how could they -- after all, we have damn little first-hand experience with death. So we avoid the true, Real Discussion of Death, or even the flip side of that coin—the Fight for Life.

Most of us don’t have a clue what to do with either topic, and so we run the other way. Most of us don’t know what really runs through the mind of someone fighting for life, or just waiting to die. It’s the raison d’etre for the axiom: Dying is something we each must do alone (after all, who would want to do it with you?)

Despite it all, I’m hoping your own mortality may be worth a pinch of effort here, America. Maybe before you have to confront it, possibly my journey can prove A) instructive, B) a distraction, C) a wake-up call, or D) just a moment of self-reflection.

Right now I’m on that fight-for-life---waiting-for-death continuum, depending on how you or the doctors want to look at it.

But I have a small idea that there may be a way to use this to shed a little light that may help us all, down the road. Me, included.

We’re a talkative people in a noisy nation, but for all the calls for “debate” and “transparency” and better listening, on a slew of urgent issues, there’s little of it. (Has any culture ever ranted on so much about “transparency,” to so little effect?) We can spend a year or two on health reform and 10 years on Afghanistan, but there’s never any actual debate outside some secret think tank under Pentagon contract, where you’re never invited.

Sound bytes? Yes. The lobbing of flashy partisan bomblets at the other side? Yes. Factually fraudulent one-liners? Yes. But honest-to-goodness, sleeves-rolled-up, open-minded listening and reflection? No. Never.

And why me? Because medically I seem to have compiled, against all odds, a story that has proven the exception to the rule.

Over decades.

Before you get anywhere near this continuum, I’m foolish enough to think my journey might help the debate that’s going on inside you about what you’re doing and how you hope to escape at the end.

It’s true that my life has already been saved more times by more medical teams than you could shake a stick at, over several decades. More times than the Dodgers have won the pennant in all baseball history. Being astonishingly ill at birth gave me a head start. So now, even one of those unflappable, by-the-book cardiologists volunteers that my story is “compelling.”

I should start by telling you there is no medical literature that can explain how I’m sitting here writing to you right now; how I’ve survived even the last few years, let alone all the years before, let alone the first day of my life.

The doctors say my body is not normal, but that’s too benign and casual a remark. This is never told to me boost spirits. It’s just another small fact for them. It’s also the reason they can run 100 tests on me or you and then ask: “How do you feel?”

Because ‘normal’ is a meaningless word and they’ll give your personal, unscientific opinion about your own body at a fleeting moment as much credence as any single test. What does that tell you?

So as someone who’s “not supposed to still be here,” I will try to write you through what I’ve faced all these years. And thereafter jot down a sort of diary -- stream of consciousness facts, developments and observations, as we move down yet another new road.

I intend to start tomorrow. Are you coming along?

Writer Alexander "Sandy" Prisant, formerly a Vice President of a large Silicon Valley company, keeps a blog called Wordsmith Wars. Stay tuned, as Sandy is committed to writing a diary that he is calling "his last writing project."