Posted in Death & Mortality Series

Everyone’s death belongs to them alone: What octopuses and hospice can have in common…

A sculpture of a skull with an octopus sitting on it.
Death and octopuses, who knew there was a cool sculpture that combined them?



There’s a problem I’ve seen over and over in people like hospice workers (and this post is gonna focus on hospice, but it can be applied more broadly).  And it’s one of the things that made me reluctant to out myself as a Deathling.  Because there’s so many people with this problem, in Deathling-type communities, that I didn’t want to associate myself with it.  Because this problem can kill people.  And no matter how you feel about death personally, that’s not okay.

To describe it, though, I’m gonna start somewhere weird.  I’ve been reading a book about octopuses.  Or more about the author and her experiences with octopuses and thoughts about them.  I’ve been struggling to find a way to articulate the problem here.  And a passage from her book really helped, even though it has nothing whatsoever to do with either hospice or death.

It has to do with wild-caught octopuses captured for aquariums. But understand that I didn’t choose this passage because of my own views on octopuses.  Nor about Ken’s views.  Rather, because of the way Ken approaches his views on the matter.  Ken is an aquarium worker who, among many other aspects to his job, helps with transporting new octopuses to the aquarium.  The author asked him his opinions on catching wild octopuses, and the following is what he said (bolding in this and any other quote on this page is my own, added for emphasis):

How does he feel about capturing animals in the wild and sending them to a life in captivity? He has no regrets. “They’re ambassadors from the wild,” he said. “Unless people know about and see these animals, there will be no stewardship for octopuses in the wild. So knowing they are going to accredited institutions, where they are going to be loved, where people will see the animal in its glory—that’s good, and it makes me happy. She’ll live a long, good life—longer than in the wild.”

Montgomery, Sy. The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (pp. 188-189). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

He might be right that he’s doing the right thing.  He might be wrong.  I’m not even going to go there.  That’s not why I brought this up.

He’s come to a conclusion about why it’s okay with him for this to happen.  It may be a good conclusion.  A reasonable conclusion.  A justifiable conclusion.  A right conclusion.  He might be making the right decision.  That’s still not the point.

The point is, it’s his conclusion that, for instance, the octopus is an ambassador.

The thing about ambassadors.  Real life ambassadors.  The literal kind who exist and do work that’s mysterious to me but has something to do with representing their countries to other countries.  Is they choose to be ambassadors.

It’s not the octopus deciding to be an ambassador for her species.

The author, Sy Montgomery, a volunteer at the aquarium, does not explore this matter any further or deeper.

But it’s an exact illustration of something that happens with many hospice workers and other people in the death industry.  And I’ve never heard anyone discuss this in public.  But I’ve seen it enough times to know what I’m looking at when I do.  And I know it’s horribly dangerous in a context where you’re working with dying people.

Deathlings like to think and talk about our relationships with death.  Most of us feel that we fear death less than we used to.  Or don’t fear it at all.  Most of us see death as embedded in life itself, as a necessary part of the cycle of life, even as potentially quite beautiful.

Those of us who’ve spent much time around actual death and dying, whether our own or other people’s, might also notice the power of Death.  The sacredness of it.  A depth and beauty and meaning that can’t be put into words or fit into blog posts.  When Death is near, either for you or someone else, the world can become transparent to love, transparent to light.  There is power and meaning there, on a level that even many atheists and agnostics will acknowledge as sacred on some level, for lack of a better term.

And there’s probably at least one blog post on what happens when you notice all that but forget to give Death the respect She deserves.  But I’m not gonna go there right now.  Right now, I want to talk about what happens to a lot of people who work in hospice or similar industries, who are exposed to a lot of death and develop something close to this understanding of it.  An understanding that I largely share — but as with the aquarium, that’s not the point.

The point is… there’s a level on which your personal revelations about death don’t matter.  The realizations you’ve come to.  The way they’ve altered your entire life for the better.  The way you see your job differently, as a sacred duty of sorts, now.  How you’ve accepted the deaths of your patients or clients, how that’s changed you, and them, and your relationshp to future patients.  All of these things that matter deeply to you.

They also don’t matter one whit on another level.

Just like octopuses don’t choose to be ambassadors.  People don’t choose to develop a terminal illness.  Most wild octopuses will never face the possibility of being caught and put in aquariums.  Everyone will die one day.  But these situations share one important thing in common.

The octopus’s viewpoint on captivity will have fuck-all to do with Ken’s reasons, or rationalizations, for participating in her capture.  The octopus has her own viewpoint.  And nobody stops much to consider her viewpoint in all of this.  They’re too busy with their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

That’s my main point.  I’m gonna go off on a very long tangent.  But I do have a main point.  So I’m gonna repeat it, in bold, a LOT:

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Everyone’s death is their own.  Everyone’s death belongs to them.  Everyone’s relationship to death, and to Death, is theirs.  Theirs.  Not yours.  Theirs.

That means it is not your job to bring their views of death more into alignment with yours.

That means it is not your job to sit there accepting and reveling in the beauty of their death for them when that may not be how they feel, or want to feel, at all.

And it is not your job to teach them that death is wonderful and beautiful and a part of life and everything else that Deathlings often believe.

That sacredness associated with Death… a lot of people don’t seem to realize this, or realize it fully enough to put it into practice, but coming into contact with that on a regular basis comes with responsibilities.  One of which is a deep respect for Death.  But there’s too many to count.  One, though, is not to mess with someone else’s experience of Death, even if their experience is not the one you want them to be having.

I don’t mean you should never talk about your viewpoint.

But sick and dying people can be very vulnerable.  This includes having reduced defenses against unwanted outside ideas.  Which includes your ideas.  Which means you have to approach any job involving death with the utmost caution and care.

And you have to stay on the other side of a firm line in the sand. And you have to be the one drawing that line.  Your patient may not be capable of drawing it, or aware that it needs to be drawn.  It’s not like terminal illness comes with an automatic manual given to you that tells you you’re vulnerable to accidentally absorbing the opinions of hospice workers.  Or what to do if you do notice.

Thsi may seem like a weird thing for me to have such an adamant opinion about.  It’s because no matter how it feels to you, this can lead to situations that are downright sinister.

Talking someone into accepting death sounds so wonderful, especially to Deathlings who usually have a particular view on death acceptance.  It sounds like the right thing to do.

But you could be talking someone into making a different decision about their medical treatment than they would’ve decided otherwise.

They may decide against a medical treatment that would give them a little more time in the world, time they really very much want.  The hospice system is already structured to discourage life-sustaining medical treatment, so it wouldn’t take much to tip someone over the edge into making a decision that’s against what they want at the end of their life.

They may decide against a medical treatment that would not make them live longer, but might help them live more the way they want to in their time left.

They may accept a medical treatment that they know is likely to result in them dying sooner.

They may accept the idea that they need to die on a certain schedule.  (I know that sounds weird, but this happens in hospice a lot when deaths are treated as  lot more planned than actual death tends to work.  And when you’re barely hanging onto life to begin with, you can end up having more conscious control over your time of death than you’d imagine someone would.)

They may make decisions that have more to do with the convenience of their hospice institution, than with their own desires and choices.  And these decisions may end up justified in the name of accepting and coming to terms with one’s own death.

They may start receiving a lot of praise and encouragement for adopting views similar to yours, with all kinds of consequences for all kinds of decisions they may make.

You might not understand their viewpoint.  You might decide that all decisions to prolong life in situations you wouldn’t want your life prolonged, are actually because of an irrational fear of death that must be overcome in order to be at peace.  And then you might persuade them and wear them down.  Until they are making very different decisions than the ones in their own best interest by their own values.

Just because you can’t fathom a reason someone would want to see Alzheimer’s through to the end and be kept alive at all costs, doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons for this that have nothing to do with fearing death.

And.  Even if it does have to do with an irrational fear of death.  That is part of their relationship with death.  It’s not your place to decide why they ought to be making their decisions, any more than it’s your place to decide what decisions they ought to be making.

And no, I’m not saying nobody should share their opinions, or persuade anyone of anything, or try to change other people’s minds, ever.  But if you’re a hospice worker or healthcare professional, you’re in a position of great authority and power over your patients.  And that power comes with a responsibility to do your level best not to misuse it.  Which includes learning to guard against accidental misuses of power.

And when you’re dealing with the end of someone’s life, the potential for great harm from the misuse of that power is only amplified.  The more that potential is there, the harder you have to work not to misuse it.  And believe me, if you’re working on the end of the death industry where you’re dealing with the last days of the living, you’ve got more power than you are probably even aware of.

Michelle storms by with the crash cart. “They want everything done. She used the wrong language; she gave them an alternative. She said we can keep going.” She means Shreya, the resident. Shreya is in Michelle’s room. She comes out and goes up to the Pulmonary fellow. She looks concerned that she has done the wrong thing. I can hear her say, “Lactate’s seventeen, bicarb drip.” She opened a door she’s trying to close. They don’t know how to talk to families. They don’t know how to tell them it’s okay to stop. Doctors will almost never tell the family the patient is dying. Nurses will. Nurses have little phrases. Dana says, “actively dying.” Lori will say, “it’s irreversible.” When they ask me how the patient is doing and it’s bad, I’ll say, “You should prepare yourself for the worst.” Some nurses will try and sell DNR orders. They’ll ask, “Would you want to have chest compressions?” and they’ll clasp their fingers together and move their upper body like a jackhammer, or, “Would you want to be shocked?” and pretend they’re holding paddles onto a chest and then jerk their body like they got Tasered.

Kelly, James. Where Night Is Day: The World of the ICU (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work) (pp. 76-77). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

The above passage was written by an ICU nurse who has no problem with the practice of ‘guiding’ families in the direction of DNR/DNI (Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate) orders.

It’s a relatively common point of view that runs like this: It’s cruel to prolong life when the only thing a person is doing is suffering.  Quality of life is more important than quantity of life.  Patients and families who don’t choose DNR/DNI are either:

  • irrationally afraid of death
  • driven by strict religious beliefs (and religious beliefs that contradict the medical consensus are treated as a bad thing in this kind of context)
  • unaware how severely disabled a person often is after a resuscitation
  • unaware they’re “allowed to let go”
  • unaware of what a resuscitation actually looks like (pretty brutal, often)
  • unaware of the low success rates of resuscitation (because on TV shows resuscitation almost always works, whereas in real life it almost always doesn’t, or doesn’t work the way people expect it to)

So they genuinely believe they are sparing a person needless suffering by using the above tactics talk to people into DNR/DNI orders.  They think people who “want everything done” are simply ignorant of the medical realities.

My mother, who has coded before and probably will again (we have an inherited neuromuscular condition, hers is more severe at this point in our lives), does not have a DNR.

Doctors and nurses are always surprised, because she was a respiratory therapist for decades.  They say they’d expect any former medical professional to want a DNR order.

She says it’s because she’s a former medical professional that she does not have a DNR order.  She wants to live, is in her seventies, and knows firsthand the extreme bias in the medical professioin against both elderly and disabled people.  She’s had doctors refuse to treat her because of her age.  She knows we already have things stacked against us and that a DNR would be dangerous.

Laura Hershey, an activist from the Independent Living Movement (a branch of disability rights mostly made up of physically disabled people), had a friend in the movement who got talked into a DNR in this manner.  This is Laura’s account of what happened, written November 2, 1999:

Attitudes Towards Disability Prove Almost Lethal

A doctor entered, on his rounds.  […]  Becky and I both jumped in to tell him that Ginny wanted to talk to him about the DNR, that we thought she wants it revoked.

For the next fifteen minutes, the four of us engaged in a conversation that was difficult, both mechanically and emotionally. Through a painstaking exchange of yes-no questions, nods, scratchy notes, and lip-reading, Ginny conveyed her desire for every effort to save her life.

The doctor heard this message, was willing to hear it; but his obvious biases made him subtly resistant. Here’s how he posed one question to Ginny: “Would you want to be put on a respirator?” Ginny responded with a fearful, uncertain look. I instantly insisted on rephrasing the question like this: “If you couldn’t breathe on your own, would you want them to use a respirator to save your life, rather than letting you die?” Still with an apprehensive expression, Ginny nevertheless nodded, yes.

By the end of the conversation, Ginny had indicated unequivocally that she would want ventilation if necessary to save her life; and that she would want attempts made to start her heart if it stopped beating. The doctor agreed to remove the DNR order immediately.

Ginny had been weak with pneumonia, and with a trach making communication difficult, and they talked her into signing a DNR she didn’t want to sign.

I can say from firsthand experience that being sick and weak really does make it hard to fight off other people’s opinions of what is best for you.  This is even true when you’re 100% sure you disagree.  When I was hospitalized for aspiration pneumonia (and was also weak from malnutrition) and they were trying hard to talk me out of a feeding tube — I knew I wanted the feeding tube.  And without having had a lot of people in my corner, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to hold out for survival much longer.  Being weak even simply on a physical level makes it very hard to fight these things.

Ginny’s story continues, by the way.  This happens:

That was about a month ago. A lot has changed since then, mostly for the better. Ginny regained her voice, and began growing stronger once the infection left her lungs. She has repeatedly stated her intention to go on living, in front of a variety of witnesses. Her friends have stayed in touch with her, and her situation.

About three weeks after my visit with her, I heard that Ginny’s gradual recovery was abruptly interrupted when she went into respiratory failure. Emergency measures saved her life, and her recovery now continues.

Ginny would not have survived this if the DNR she was coerced into signing had stayed in place.

If you ever doubt the power your opinions might have, think of Ginny.  Pneumonia made her weak enough to have trouble fending off other people’s opinions.  It’s very likely that whatever nurse or doctor talked her into signing the DNR, used subtle persuasion of the sort described in that book by the ICU nurse.  It doesn’t take much persuasion or pressure when you’re already vulnerable.

I was simply walking down the hall of the hospital last time I was there, and there was a group of residents speaking to an attending.  The conversation I overheard was alarming.  They’d saved the life of a cardiac patient.  He was set to go home soon, without major complications.  The patient was extremely happy about this.  The attending was very unhappy about this and wanted to tell the residents why.

So the attending explained that while the man was going home without complications, that wasn’t the only possible outcome. And he didn’t think the man’s family should’ve chosen to tell the doctors to save his life.  He said it was possible the man could’ve ended up with a severe disability.  And therefore, it would’ve been a better decision to let the man die even though his life was saved and he was extremely happy with this outcome.

Medical professionals frequently believe this stuff is morally neutral information.  That in trying to persuade people to choose death over life, they are simply giving people the facts.  The thing is, you can choose which facts to give people, and what manner to present those facts in, and “giving someone the facts” turns into an act of persuasion.  And you don’t even have to mean to do so, for this to happen.

If You’re Interested In Power & Control…

Power Tools by Dave Hingsburger
Power Tools by Dave Hingsburger

Anyone interested in the use and misuse of power in human services professions, could do a lot worse than reading Dave Hingsburger’s book, Power Tools.  I always plug this book.  It’s extremely short and easy to read, but contains a lot of important information on how to recognize your power over other people and how to do your best to avoid misusing it.  It’s available from Diverse City Press. Or Amazon.

He also wrote another book of the same size, shape, and potency, called First Contact.  It’s about communicating with people with (presumed) profound cognitive impairments.  And it’s also well within the topic of this post, given that this level of cognitive impairment is often the fate that medical professionals are trying to save us from when they push DNRs at us.  You might want to pick that one up at the same time you get Power Tools.  They go well together, and both of them contain real-world wisdom that applies to a lot of everyday life situations beyond the ones explicitly described in the book.

First Contact: Charting Inner Space (Thoughts about establishing contact with people who have significant developmental disabilities) by Dave Hingsburger
First Contact by Dave Hingsburger

While I’m shamelessly plugging Hingsburger’s work, he has a blog called Of Battered Aspect.  And there’s a longer review of both Power Tools and First Contact on the website of the old disability rights magazine, Ragged Edge, called Same, Different, Human.  A quote from the review that mirrors my thoughts on these books:

The subject matter may appear limited to the service systems concerned with people with intellectual impairments, and Hingsburger’s focus is the individual rather than society. Nonetheless, I commend these books to you.

I read Dave Hingsburger as an ethicist. Not an ivory-tower Ivy League ethicist, mind you, but rather one who worries how to live well amid the blood, the shit, and the chains that surround him. Instead of offering moral axioms from some fake-objective standpoint and then applying them to whitewashed situations, he acknowledges the ways in which the commitments he has made and the messy situations in which he finds himself shape his moral development and his moral outlook.

Many of the other writers on my shelf take a political approach to the problems of power and powerlessness, to the problem of disability, asking how communities, organizations, nations should act. What does justice demand? they ask. How can we address injustice?

Hingsburger’s stance is more ethical than political, though it is also concerned with disability. How, he asks, should I, an individual, respond to the people around me? Very often, the people around him, the people to whom he is responding, are disabled people. It’s not that he pretends injustice away, or that he treats it as irrelevant; it’s just that even when he addresses injustice, he confronts it in an ethical sense, as an individual. Even when he addresses the politics of disability — the self-advocacy movement — he is concerned with his relationship to it.

His primary ethical concern is interpersonal, and his rule is awareness: awareness of the moral risk in any important action and awareness of one another. “People don’t hurt people. People hurt things,” he quotes Dick Sobsey as saying (First Contact, p. 20). And he acknowledges that such awareness, such self-knowledge, is much more difficult than it looks.

Like Cal Montgomery, the author of the review, I can’t stop recommending these books.  To the point I keep a supply of multiple copies each because people walk off with them and forget to return them.

Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post on death and octopuses…

When I was writing this post, I tried to Google statistics on resuscitation. I found a news article alarmed me.  Not because of the statistics, but because of the way it was  point of the article was to inform people that resuscitation in real life is not like in the movies, either in terms of statistics, outcomes, or the level of violence it does to the person’s body.  But the article made it impossible for me to understand the statistics.

See, every time it mentioned death, it mentioned severe disability in the same breath.  I was trying to look up survival rates.  But it was so ambiguously worded that I couldn’t tell whether survival with a severe neurological impairment requiring lifelong care counted as survival for the purposes of the article.  And no matter what you think of the “quality of life” issues involved (I, like Laura Hershey and many other disability rights activists, am extremely wary of that phrase), being alive and unconscious is still being alive.  And there’s plenty of new evidence that people presumed unconscious based on outward responsiveness are not always unconscious at all.  Which may horrify you in completely different ways, but it’s still being alive.  And I never did figure out what the statistics in the article meant.

Disability is often considered a fate worse than death.  And while I consider the fear of death and the fear of disabiliy deeply intertwined, many Deathlings, and many hospice workers, have conquered one without touching the other at all.  An extreme fear of disability, combined with a lack of fear of death, can make people view death as the answer to a type of disability they greatly fear.

This is an extremely common perspective among medical professionals, including hospice workers.  And it’s the entire point behind DNRs, living wills, and the like.  These are not documents that were created to offer a neutral set of choices to people.  They were created to make it easier to say “This is the level of disability at which I would rather die.”  You can use them to say other things, but there’s pressure not to, and it’s harder to get such wishes upheld in any circumstances where someone disputes your wish to stay alive.  It’s much easier to use a living will to die than to use it to live.

Anyway, medical professionals have been shown to rate disabled people’s quality of life lower than we rate it ourselves.  There’s a very jargon-heavy paper called Quality of Life, Disability, and Hedonic Psychology (that’s a PDF link) that deals with the topic of disability and quality of life (abbreviated QOL in the article) in a fair bit of depth.

One belief about QOL has been very widely demonstrated. Nondisabled people believe that the QOL of people who live with disabilities is extremely low. This belief will be termed the standard view of the QOL of disabled people.  The standard view is faced by an apparent falsification: When disabled people report about their own QOL, they rate it only slightly lower than when nondisabled people self-report their own QOL. This produces the anomaly of the QOL of disabled people (Amundson 2005). The anomaly is the pair of conflicting assertions: the standard view on the one hand, and the conflicting self-reports ofdisabled people on the other.


In fact, nondisabled health care professionals judge the QOL of disabled people to be even lower than the judgments made by nondisabled people who are not health care professionals (Duckworth 1988; Brillhart, Jay, and Wyers 1990; Bach and Tilton 1994; Gerhart et al. 1994; Albrecht and Devlieger 1999).


If hedonics researchers believed that disabled people were kidding themselves about their own QOL, nothing would stop them from saying it. I therefore propose that we ask them who’s right about the QOL of disabled people. Does hedonic research support the standard view that disabled people have an intrinsically low QOL? Or is there evidence that the standard view is mistaken, and the disabled people who report a high QOL are correct when they do so? Hedonic psychologists may not have the last word in the debate, but their contribution must be considered. The results are these: according to the experimental results of hedonic psychology, the judgments of nondisabled commentators about the QOL of disabled people are far more likely to be mistaken than are the self-reports of disabled people.  

So basically, nondisabled people in general assume that disabled people are much unhappier than we are and have very little in the way of ‘quality of life’.  And medical professionals judge our quality of life to be even lower than your average nondisabled person judges our quality of life to be.  Meanwhile, disabled people are roughly as happy or unhappy as nondisabled people (there’s many possible reasons for our quality of life to rate slightly lower that don’t actually reflect disability as much as the way it’s tested, but I don’t have the time or space to get into all the details), and certainly much happier than either nondisabled people in general, or medical professionals, assume we are.

So if you’re a medical or hospice professional, advising dying people on life and death decisions involving disability, you’re also likely to be judging our quality of life much lower than it actually is.  And as a medical professional, you’re more likely to be biased in that area than someone who isn’t a medical professional.  The presence of a known bias, like the presence of power, requires much more increased carefulness to be taken with how you wield power around people.

And the above is just one major way this can go wrong.  It’s a way I and many other disability right activists are highly familiar with, which is why I was able to go into so much depth.  I could really go on all day.  But hopefully it’s enough to show you there are dangers you might not even be aware of.

So now that I’ve tried to get way too much information crammed into one blog post, the basic point I want to make?

Everyone’s death is their own.

Being accepting of death is a wonderful thing, in my eyes.  But there are many different ways of accepting death.  And no matter how valuable it is to you that you have accepted death, you have to be really careful as a healthcare worker, not to impose your own ideas about death on people who might not want them.  However an octopus feels about captivity is the business of the octopus, and how a dying person feels about their own death is the business of the dying person.

Everyone’s death is their own.

Given the biases of healthcare professionals around disability, and the power they have over disabled people (and dying people are generally either disabled or about to become disabled), it’s especially important for them to keep this in mind.  It’s very easy for death acceptance in these circumstances to become something much more sinister.

Everyone’s death is their own.

But it’s also a matter of respect:  People’s death is deeply personal and for lack of a better word, sacred.  And people’s own death belongs to them.  It’s not yours to mold into a shape you find more fitting.  No matter how appealing your own beliefs about death are to you.  The other person might have very good reasons for beliefs that mean something to them.  

Everyone’s death is their own.

There really is an idealized death, or an idealized set of deaths, that is pushed wholesale on hospice patients.  People who work in hospice often come to absorb this view of death, and of how death should happen.  But actual patients of hospice may have very different experiences.  Experiences they are afraid to even bring up out loud, because of the power relationships inolved.

Everyone’s death is their own.

And if you care about a person, you want to meet them where they’re at.  It’s impossible to truly know another person, to even begin to understand them, if all you can do when you see them is look in the mirror.  And when you get too wrapped up in your own reflection, you can’t see anyone else, you can’t know anyone else, you can’t connect with anyone else.  And if you can’t see who someone is even a little, you certainly can’t accurately perceive their relationship with death.  Nor can you respond to it in a way that’s even halfway adequate.

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Dave Hingsburger’s First Contact:

When considering making contact with people who have multiple disabilities – those who are considered to be so significantly mentally disabled that they are in a “vegetative” (that’s what it’s called) state – there is a huge obstacle. Prejudice. Yours. Mine. Ours. Against them. The difficulty here is that prejudice will feel like pity. You may be overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness first, and then, if you examine the feeling long enough, terror.

They can’t be “like us” because then the logical extension of that is that they must be “feeling in there” and what they are feeling in there is what we’d be feeling in there – desperation, hopelessness, isolation, loneliness. The misuse of your sense of identification with the person inside that body will lead you to think horrible thoughts.

Dangerous even.

“I’d rather be dead than be like that.”

“If I was like that I’d like to be smothered.”

Well, back off. This isn’t about you. Catching a first glimpse of a soul inside a body that is so different from your own can be frightening, true. But it can, if you work hard enough, be exhilarating. I know, I know, I know, you have to “walk a mile in their moccasins.” The temptation is to engage in an incredible waste of time and psychological energy – spending time imagining what it would be like to be you inside them. How egocentric is that?

The issue is coming to understand and to get to know what it’s like to be them, in them. That’s the joy of contact, of connection. It allows us other perspectives. The placing of ourselves inside someone else and then imagining what it would be like, is not learning – it’s like masturbation but without the stickiness. And while it’s fun, and it is fun, it’s not particularly valuable.

And it gets in the way.

How can you make contact with someone when all you see reflected in their eyes is your sad face? Get out of the way. Understand that you are you. You are only you. Now look again, look past your own reflection and what do you see?

The answer?

Some one else.

Cool, huh? Even cooler is to discover who that person is. To do this you need to step by prejudice. Please, please, please, don’t delude yourself into thinking that you don’t harbour anti-disability sentiments inside your heart. Please don’t say, “but my child…” “but my best friend is…” or even “but I’m…” We everyone of us is prejudiced against those who are different. Awareness is the first step.

And that is why obtaining a copy of those two books is so very worth it.

And remember — everyone’s death is their own.  If you work with dying people, don’t stare at your own reflection.  Get out of your own way and deal with them, and their relationship with death, on their own terms, not yours.  And whatever you do, don’t use their death as a vehicle for your own desire to be close to the beautiful side of death.  I promise it will be better for you, and more importantly, for them.

Everyone’s death is their own.


Posted in Being human, cats, language

I used to volunteer to socialize with the cats at the local shelter.

I loved just sitting in a room with them.

We didn’t need to play.

We sat.

Little messages passed between us barely seen by most people.

The flick of an ear.  A tail.  An eye.  Just for a second.  The posture we sat in.  The direction we were pointed.  It all meant something.

I don’t pretend to have grasped all the communication going on in that room.  Some was by smell, or otherwise inaccessible to the average human, or any human.  Some was cat things only cats know.

But you could get a feel for things.

Sometimes.  Like right now.  Right exactly now.  I wish that I could show things indirectly, with ear and tail and whisker and eye movements, and be understood.

Sometimes.  Like right now.  I know where my ears would be if I was a cat.  (Cat ear muscles and human ear muscles — same muscles, very different ear positions.  :-/   Doesn’t translate well across species lines.)

But as much as I know I am not a cat, I sometimes feel a lot like a cat, sitting in a room with cats, my best communication being in Cat, and feeling helpless to do it in Human.   😦

This applies right now.  This also applies a hell of a lot of the time.

Photo on 8-27-18 at 12.36 AM
No ears, no whiskers, no tail, limits communication greatly.
Posted in Speech

New blog topic: Speech

I am going to be starting another blog topic series of posts, probably. This one is about speech. I haven’t really written a lot about my experiences of speech in recent years, but things have changed in two major ways.

One is that I’ve unintentionally developed a small amount of speech that actually works.

This is not enough for me to consider myself a speaking person. But it’s more than I’ve ever had in my life. By which I mean, even when I sounded much more fluent than I do now, I never had a consistent set of words that would communicate my thoughts. I didn’t have consistent anything. I now have kind of a consistent baseline that’s communicative. As usual with these things, I’m discussing what’s really happening for me, not what appears on the surface.

The range is very limited though. I’ll get into what it is later because I think that’s important information for other people with speech problems. But for instance, it started out with just cuss words and words that were highly emotive. That’s still my strongest set of speech. Also things you would say to a cat. And what I call ‘corner words’, which will probably require a lot of explanation. But this is all highly limited and narrow areas with high walls around them. This is not something where I can substitute it for typing and have it work. Instead it sort of enhances the typing.

Most people I know who type to communicate and are considered non-speaking actually have some amount of this kind of speech, by the way. It’s just not enough to use as your main way of communicating. Very few people are 100% speaking or 100% nonspeaking, and which one you’re considered seems to vary a lot. And depend on far more than what speech you have.

So… the other thing that’s happened, and that I’m more interested in discussing in some ways, is what I call emergency speech.

It is not voluntary. I can’t turn it on and off at will. It is not frequent. It has happened a handful of times in the huge amount of years I’ve spent not speaking. It does not always happen even when it could be very useful or even life-saving. But it does happen sometimes.

And that is where i gain fluent speech for anything from seconds to weeks, always in the context of a medical emergency of some kind.

Again I can’t emphasize enough, this has happened a handful of times. This is not something I can turn on and off at will. And it doesn’t even happen every time it’d be useful.

And it does something horrible to my brain — well lots of horrible things — that I really want to discuss, because it’s clear that fluency of that level only happens by cannibalizing large parts of my brain functioning. In ways that are spectacular and potentially dangerous.

And I think that’s important to document.

I think it’s important to show what happens when someone’s brain forces the issue of doing something that it really has no business doing.

Because it’s ugly as fuck.

I used to just go with it and figure my instincts knew best, but at this point I am doing my best to shut it down whenever it happens, because the results are pretty terrifying.

And I think that’s important for people to know.

Also, this is not an unheard-of phenomenon. I have spoken to researchers about it. And I’ve noticed it in both official literature, and in accounts by parents.

One of the most terrifying — especially now that I know the consequences of emergency speech long-term, but even before that its as terrifying — is these parents who’ve discovered that their children who can’t normally speak, speak more fluently and are more social when they have high fevers.

What’s terrifying is that given the world of disability parenting and autism parenting in particular, instead of seeing this for what it is, there’s a group of parents who see this emergency functioning mode as a good thing. And therefore attempt to do things to give their children high fevers.

Like. Not only is that abusive and unethical and medically dangerous. But also forcing a child to function in emergency mode — especially while sick — will do terrible things to them, especially over the long term. And nobody will connect the dots because nobody really gives a shit about the effects of overtaxing people’s limits. And emergency mode is all about going beyond your limits for a short time — like a mother lifting a car off a child despite not normally having the strength. You couldn’t and shouldn’t do things like that every day, they happen only in emergencies for a reason.

Anyway I have a lot to say about speech. And I haven’t really written a lot on the topic and on the changes I’ve been through in recent years with baseline speech. And I haven’t written about emergency speech either. So these are both broad topics that I want out there mostly for the benefit of other people experiencing them. I’ve always benefited from other people describing their experiences of things, so my intent in writing about this is to possibly benefit other people in this same way. And also to warn people of the dangers, because there are actual dangers here. I didn’t realize how dangerous emergency speech is until I got stuck in a cycle where it kept popping up long after it was sustainable to continue.

Posted in Being human, Developmental disability service system




Jim Sinclair, Cultural Commentary: Being Autistic Together



Example of something that had absolutely nothing to do with anxiety:




Mel attempting to look calm.
















It’s really not that hard to be respectful.

But it’s very easy not to be respectful.

















































