Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [112]
Odysseus and his men flee the Cyclopes
Once sated, Teiresias does indeed prophesy a safe route back to Ithaca and, looking far ahead in the hero’s journey, adds, “Death will come to you far away from the sea, a gentle Death. When he takes you, you will die peacefully of old age.” With that, the prophet withdraws and Odysseus is free to leave this wretched place, to return to his ship and head for home, where his beloved awaits. And yet, in what I’ve always seen as an act of great kindness, he lingers and allows a number of the other souls to taste the remaining blood. Whereas the vital fluid had restored the prophet’s ability to see the future, for these souls it has the opposite effect: Blood restores memory. One by one, they come, drink of it hungrily, and share their recollections of life on earth.
In time Odysseus does make it back to the land of the living, although his return is not met with cheers. “What audacity,” the goddess Circe barks at him, “to descend alive into the house of Hades! Other men die once; you will now die twice.” She makes this sound like a curse, which has always struck me as odd. But then, I remind myself, what flows through Circe’s veins—ichor, the blood of the gods—gives her immortality. To her, death is but an abstraction. To a mortal, however, twice dead would mean twice alive.
A series of conversations Steve and I had not long ago with a good friend on the East Coast centered on a similar theme. At age seventy-one, Maurice confided one afternoon that he didn’t expect to reach his next birthday. True, he wasn’t in robust health—he’d had a major heart attack some years earlier and had recently been hospitalized with a dangerous blood clot—but his prediction had less to do with a particular diagnosis than a gut feeling. His father and his older brother had never reached seventy-two, both having died just shy of that age. Why should he be spared? As the day approached, his weakening health seemed to portend that he was indeed on schedule to expire. But the Fates decided otherwise, choosing not to snip his life’s thread. Tuesday followed Monday, and, wonder of wonders, Wednesday showed up, too. Maurice woke up and found himself in blue-skied Elysium, somehow relocated to northern Connecticut.
“I’m living my afterlife,” he told us a few days later, sounding healthier and more joyful than he had in years, “and I’m going to treat it with great respect.” Steve was on the exact same page. He, too, had never expected to reach a milestone, forty, yet he celebrated his fortieth birthday in relatively good health last April. I just quietly listened in on these two survivors—one young for his years, the other old beyond his—as they laughed at their windfall. Then a wonderful realization came to me: As a couple, Steve and I have only just started living our afterlife. We may not even be halfway through our story.
Insomniac that I am, when death does come to take me, chances are I will not be asleep. I’m okay with that. I’d prefer to be alert to the last, conscious of every footfall.
If I should die of natural causes, I will actually undergo two deaths, I’ve come to understand. As clinical death nears, your breathing becomes shallower, you fade into unconsciousness, and, finally, your heart, blood, and respiration come to a stop. Is your last clear thought one of terror as your inner motion slows? Or is it of ultimate peace, the sense that, in stillness, the soul can burst free?
Despite the seeming unambiguousness of the term, clinical death is a reversible state, a transition between life and death. But if circulation and breathing are not quickly restored, you progress to brain death, from which no return is possible. By this point, blood has already begun to settle, prey to gravity.
With both hands, I make tight fists, impeding