Jenny Holzer—DYING SHOULD BE AS EASY AS FALLING OFF A LOG (1978)

[as jumping from a plane. easier—a bridge. as tripping on a shoelace. as blinking your eyes. as breathing. as talking to ghosts. as dreaming.

in the end, my grandfather would wake running after his brother who died in the war. later, his mother. he couldn’t walk anymore.

between jumping and falling is a shred of awareness.

maybe the easiest thing about dying is shedding gravity.

when you’re dying, a parade of platitudes overtakes you. god’s plan implies nobody’s death is an accident. or even manslaughter.

in the US, dying of cancer costs just over $100,000 a year, on average.

cancer at twenty-two was a mindfuck i’m still processing. i wasn’t dying, though everyone thought i was. it made them stand either closer to or further from me, depending on their upbringing.

when you die, your age will be the most reliable indicator of your family’s grief. the correlation is inverse, obviously.

when you tell people you’ve had cancer, they often look like they’ve just eaten something spoiled.

my dad cried when my sister told him i had cancer, which is why she was doing the telling. family was warned to not talk about it with me. i’ve spent my life looking for quiet exit strategies.

you may one day wonder if you should place a pillow over the face of a loved one struggling to die.

it’s primarily on religious grounds that assisted suicide is frowned upon. interference and whatnot. 

whose body is this? ALS patient Sue Rodriguez asked the Canadian parliament in the nineties. not hers, they decided. she found some pills anyway.

the US followed suit, leaving it to the states. it’s legal in ten, but none of the ones i’ve lived in. Florida calls it manslaughter.

here, much is said about the unborn’s rights, but the right to die is not a given.

once i got cancer, i stopped describing my depression as a kind of cancer. wanting specifically to live felt oddly new.

once i was asked what i would do with one day left to live and i said, sit. i would sit under a tree.

after surgery, you leave the hospital in a chair, sitting. after dying, you leave in a box, lying.

after i drank the radioactive poison they gave me, i walked out through the hospital lobby and down the street to my house. it felt like the strangest thing, walking.

if everyone thinks you’re dying, you must be.

when you’re dying, you look at your hands and find air between your fingers where there was previously nothing. you thought nothingness was hard—

when you’re dead, nothing is easy.]