133
140 134
141 135
142 160
143 161
144 162
145 163
146 164
147 165
148 166
149 167
150 168
151 169
152 170
153 171
154 172
155 173
156 174
157 175
158 176
159 177
160 178
161 179
162 180
One Beat More
Existentialism and the Gift of Mortality
Kevin Aho
polity
Copyright © Kevin Aho 2022
The right of Kevin Aho to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4691-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945096
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
Die while you’re alive, and be absolutely dead. Then do whatever you want: it’s all good.
Shidō Bunan (1603–1676)
Acknowledgments
First off, I want to express my gratitude to the doctors and nurses who saved my life and took care of me as I recovered at the Gulf Coast Medical Center in Fort Myers, Florida. I am singularly grateful to my cardiologist, Nemalan Selveraj, and to my primary care physician, Shaila Hegde, both of whom embody a rare dedication to the healing arts and an extraordinary capacity for empathy. I also want to pay tribute to the amazing group of nurses at the Institute for Hermeneutic Phenomenology at the University of Buffalo’s College of Nursing. Among this group, I am especially thankful to Annie Vandermause and Suzanne Dickerson, whose friendship and support have been invaluable to me. And there are a number of philosophers, medical humanists, and scholars whose work inspired me and helped guide this project along, including Havi Carel, Arthur Frank, Joseph Davis, Gordon Marino, Drew Leder, Nicole Piemonte, Richard Polt, Fredrik Svenaeus, and the late Charles Guignon.
The initial ideas for this book came about in the weeks and months that followed my heart attack in December 2017. In an effort to make sense of my collapsing world, I worked on a couple of essays. The first was a short narrative of the experience, “Notes from a Heart Attack: A Phenomenology of an Altered Body,” later published in the collection Phenomenology of the Broken Body, edited by Espen Dahl, Cassandra Falke, and Thor Eirik Eriksen (London: Routledge, 2019). At around the same time, the sociologist Joseph Davis reached out and invited me to a conference on the ethics of aging held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. I was too anxious and weak to travel at the time but managed to write a paper for the event: “The Contraction of Time and Existential Awakening: A Phenomenology of Authentic Aging.” The conference papers were published in the collection The Evening of Life: The Challenges of Aging and Dying Well (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020). I am grateful to the editors of these two collections and to Routledge and the University of Notre Dame Press for permission to reprint portions of these chapters.
The excellent editorial team at Polity has once again exceeded all my expectations. I am deeply grateful to my commissioning editor, Pascal Porcheron, who was an early champion of the project and encouraged me to make the book more personal, in an effort to disclose more of my own emotional and philosophical struggles. He went through the entire manuscript line by line, offering valuable feedback and commentary throughout. And Manuela Tecusan’s masterful copyediting greatly improved the writing and corrected countless syntactical blunders. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback and recommendations.
I also want to thank my loving partner, Jane Kayser, who was with me for the entire journey and offered unwavering support and encouragement as she listened to me read aloud from early chapters of the book. But, more than anyone, I am thankful to my parents, Jim and Margaret Aho. In the autumn of their own lives, they have taught me what it means to face up to mortality and to live with a sense of awe, gratitude, and joy. This book is dedicated to them.
Introduction To Learn How to Die
It was a beautiful, sun-dappled December morning in south Florida. The sky was blue, the humidity low, and there was not a breath of wind as I began my bike ride through leafy neighborhoods in Naples, Bonita Springs, and Fort Myers. Three-and-a-half hours and sixty miles later, I was pedaling over the Estero Bridge toward my house and was suddenly overcome with nausea and lightheadedness. I squeezed the brakes, threw my bike to the ground, and vomited all over the street. Confused and thinking I had food poisoning or simply overdid it on the ride, I slowly rode back home. Then the chest pain came as a dull, persistent ache. I called my girlfriend, telling her that I was having some trouble. She said it sounded like I was having a heart attack. I dismissed it. “No, I’m just hungry and dehydrated and need to take a shower.” She raced to my house and convinced me to go to the hospital as the dizziness deepened. After a quick ECG in the emergency room, I was ushered into a suite of scurrying doctors and nurses who were already preparing the surgery. All I heard above the din was, “Massive heart attack … Widowmaker