Briefly Perfectly Human (Alua Arthur)

OVERVIEW

Alua Arthur’s memoir Briefly Perfectly Human plucks the same wise thread as Evie King’s Ashes to Admin. The wisdom is this: what we desire from life and living, we also desire from death and dying. Someone to love us. Someone to let us be our authentic selves. Someone to hold our hand. Someone to care, to listen, to see, to remember. This memoir is full of insights, including that dying can act as a mirror for living, reflecting back to us what’s most important.

When Alua’s brother-in-law dies, her family is unprepared. No one knew he was dying, because no one on the healthcare team communicated that to them. No one explained the signs of active dying, the death rattle, or the death rally. No one knew how to check if he had probate. No one knew how to transfer the title of his car (and who wants to sit at the DMV while grieving?). That experience was transformative for Alua. She decided that she could be that person for dying people and their families… the one to take care of the “admin,” the one to prepare them, the one to answer questions and stand vigil. This led to her career as a death doula, someone who helps people plan for the end of their life, someone who is versed in the art of letting go.

This book is replete with humour and authenticity. Alua strikes you as someone who is ALIVE. Not just biologically, but also in an existential way. She is really, truly, genuinely, awake to the experience of living. And because she is, she can help people be awake when it matters most, when they are preparing for death. She can sit comfortably with uncertainty, and she can hold fear. Her role is part administrator, part family therapist, and part spiritual chaplain. And she has so, so much wisdom to share. Including: that if you have the privilege of loving someone, “one day your heart will break.” That time is our only real currency, and therefore the “true cost of anything is how much life we give in exchange for it.” That we’re often so focused on trying to extract big meaning out of life that we can miss the extraordinary experience of just being here at all. And that while we deny the reality of death, the truth is that “we don’t have forever to create the life we want.”

“ONE DAY YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. It is the simplest truth of them all, and yet it is the one we fight the hardest. We push it away. We procrastinate. Death is something that happens to other people, or else to us in a future so distant it’s the same thing as “never.” We prioritize all the things that matter the least at the expense of those that matter most.”

But,

“Life is now. It’s right here. This is it.  

The past is just a series of memories coded in the hippocampus. Tomorrow, forever a day away, is a myth and an illusion of our brain’s insistence on linear time. This moment is the only one that exists. In the very next moment, you could also be gone, a memory in someone else’s hippocampus.”

The advice is that we live now, here in the present, where life is actually lived; that we refuse to be asleep to the experience; and that we focus on what matters most now, while we still can. And to all the people who might stand in the way of a vibrant, authentic, and engaged existence that is truly yours?

“F*ck them. Do you, boo.”

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

Here’s some other actionable advice:

·         Craft a life that you “can feel comfortable dying from.”

·         Find your authentic self, then be your authentic self. You’ll need this for living and for dying.

·         On their deathbeds, everyone is concerned with three things: “Who did I love?” “How did I love?” and “Was I loved?” So, focus on love.

·         Learn to embrace uncertainty.

·         Learn to ask for help. If you practice now, it will be easier later.

·         Try to “make meaning out of the mundane.”

·         We can’t control death, but we can control how we engage with our mortality.

·         Lastly, you’ll die as the person you are now. Not as a distant, better prepared version of yourself. Dying will happen to you in the present, not in the future. If you’re not ready now, you’re not ready. Get ready.

“This is what I wish for all of us: a life that feels like the miracle it is and a death that serves as a period on a satisfying sentence. Because we live, we get to die. That is a gift.”

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? No.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? A memoir that’s really a guide to living your life and your death.

Who should read this book? Anyone interested in mortality and living with authenticity.