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Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass on Netflix is a show I completely didn't expect. Like any amazing horror story, this limited series is about so much more than jump-scares. It's about death and rebirth, the fallacy of religion, isolation and loneliness, moral and spiritual redemption, the psychology of cults, and group-think. And boy does it take its time getting there.

In what might be considered the heart of the show, the characters Erin and Riley exchange their ideas of what they think happens when you die. Erin's version is heavily influenced by religion and the idea of an afterlife while Riley's version is reductive, reducing the experience to biochemistry and synaptic impulses. Both stories are extremely beautiful.

This duality is resolved at the end of the movie when Erin finds herself on the verge of death and describes what she actually experiences (posted here). It is one of the most beautiful monologues I can imagine. It perfectly captures a model of reality that so many of us intuitively feel. Erin's experience is one of remembering—a common feeling experienced by so many people who have had near death experiences, or transformative psychedelic experiences. She sees the energy of her consciousness as one with all the energy of universe, like a drop of water returning to the ocean of which it's always been a part.

“We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams.”

I truly suspect that being conscious and alive (in the way that humans mean it) means entering a cosmology of contrasts—light and dark, up and down, yes and no. But before and after we live, we are a singularity. We are all things. Forgetting this may be necessary for our human existence, but I wish we could all catch occasional glimpses of it. Our world could use a little less division.

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A friend of mine commented on my most recent comic (Strip #219: “Baggage”) that it reminded her of a recent Radiolab episode about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the five stages. After listening to it, I revisited this post-it note on my office wall. A couple years ago I stumbled across this two-axis diagram of the journey through the five stages. I put it on a post-it and drew a blue X where I think Mom's journey ended. (My handwriting is just atrocious, so I whipped together a cleaner digital version.) In the early stages of this project I had hoped to use the five stages of grieving (and the various coping mechanisms we employ) as some sort of narrative framing device (like: "Chapter 2: Anger, Chapter 3: Bargaining, etc.), but I got derailed on this idea because Mom didn't seem to follow the Kübler-Ross trajectory. Strip #219 may have been an attempt to close the loop on those ideas by leaving them open-ended. Anyway that episode of Radiolab (listen here) gave me a lot to think about. Not everybody grieves the same and not everybody dies the same. Mom lived her entire life in that lower left hand quadrant, so why would dying be any different for her? This was just her way. ❤️

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Kurzgesagt is a Youtube channel that uses clever animation to make science beautiful and to explain things with optimistic nihilism. In this update, they tackle the existential trappings of living and dying in a demanding world that seems intent on having us forget how precious our time really is. 

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Genuine healing occurs when we take ourselves mercifully into our open hearts and accept the totality of our lives. The healing of the soul or spirit, says Stephen Levine, is independent of bodily healing. We harden our hearts when we fail to forgive ourselves of our own pain. In this sense, one can only heal one’s self. One can never truly be healed by another.

Conscious living and conscious dying require that we bring our pain into our hearts, rather than wall ourselves off from it. In this moving and personal two-part program, the late Stephen Levine illustrates this point by referring to several cases of dying individuals with whom he has worked.

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If there's a key takeaway from my comic, Caitlin Doughty has summed it up here, eloquently. Our fear of mortality prevents us from talking about and preparing for the reality of our own death.

Because our family avoided thinking about it, Mom died without dignity, security, or a penny to her name. She became more and more dehumanized, even while surrounded by caring professionals trying to do the right thing, and supported by a system designed to do good.

Mom was not necessarily limited by her class, race, or income, but she BECAME marginalized because we avoided thinking of death as part of our lives.

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Once more, this important topic get the spotlight treatment, this time on LastWeek Tonight. John Oliver explains the industry behind nursing homes and assisted living facilities, and why long-term care needs fixing in this funny but quite dire episode.

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Not exactly breaking news, but I was unaware of this figure until today.

According to a new report from Gallup, uninsured rates in the U.S. have reached a four-year high, with nearly 13.7% adults in the U.S. reporting they are uninsured. Coverage is at its lowest since the Affordable Care Act’s individual health insurance mandate was put into effect in 2014, Gallup said. According to the report, about seven million more adults are without health insurance since the number started rising in 2016.

What a very troubling state of affairs when many of the procedures that cost Americans tens of thousands can be had for free in countries like Canada and Great Britain. 

I hate to wax hyperbolic, but this video does a better job outlining the problems with our status quo than I can. Plus, it stars David Cross and I just love hearing him talk.

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“It seems like a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets.” 

The idea of post-traumatic growth really resonates with me, as it’s become one of the emergent themes of my comic. When I started writing How Mom Died, I had merely planned to tell a helpful story outlining the pitfalls and surprises that await would-be caregivers, especially when the person in need of care falls in a grey area of coverage like my mom did. Slowly, the story has enlightened me to the ways that my experience as a caregiver led me to a path of compassion. I think we all face a choice between letting painful experiences drag us into darker places or using them grow, spiritually. 

Anyway, looking through the lens of karma, some would say that no matter what you choose, your soul will still learn the lessons it needs to. I do think that our spiritual growth continues long after the vessel dies. Impermanence is just resilience in disguise.

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I just read this heartbreaking look into the life of a funeral director—a collaboration between Reveal and The Nib. 

It reminded me a lot of the revelation that I had at my godfather’s funeral, which I wrote about in strip #40 of How Mom Died. Funerals are not just for honoring the deceased. They’re also a space where grieving families and friends can begin to process their loss.

The last funeral I went to was just before this pandemic had hit our country hard. Restrictions had not been imposed yet, and thankfully none of us got sick. It was an open-casket funeral. I had not been to one of those since my Nana died when I was in high school. For many years, I thought I would never view a body again, but at this recent funeral I felt it was worth spending time with a corpse, like Caitlin Doughty might recommend. I was one of a small minority in the crowd who did this, other than immediate family members. 

The experience was profound, to say the least. Sensations of “uncanny valley” came over me, and strange optical illusions happened. My brain would produce these impressions that the eyelids or fingers were about to twitch or move, because they were supposed to. This was my friend’s body but it was not my friend anymore. There were no micro-expressions. No subtle signs of life. My brain attempted to overlay these expected signals and the result was weird and transformative. 

Today, I understand the process of viewing the deceased, and this comic presents some food for thought in regards to the toll it may take on our culture to be denied this opportunity. Even commiserating with family and friends takes on a different pallor when done over an internet connection. 

These are troubling times.

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Movie Review: To Dust

My Wife is obsessed with human composting... and I know something intense is on the horizon. We moved to Washington State a few years ago, and shortly after we arrived (dumb luck or more evidence that we’re living in a simulation?) Washington became the first state to legalize human composting.

Washington became the first state to legalize “human composting” on Tuesday, when Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law that will allow human bodies to be converted into soil in licensed facilities.

The state law, which passed with bipartisan support, is aimed at providing a burial alternative that is less costly and more environmentally friendly than cremation or traditional coffin burials. It will take effect on May 1, 2020.

source: https://time.com/5593438/washington-legalizes-human-composting/

We’ve had long conversations about this, Emily and I. Most methods of bodily disposal are horribly toxic to the environment, and the simple act of burying a body inside a coffin speaks very directly to our culture’s inability to face the reality of what death really is—part of the natural cycle of energy transfer on this planet. We humans have such a narrow focus when it comes to our lives. We are intensely afraid that we aren’t somehow “special”, and we have built massive monuments to immortalize our lives, long after we are gone. 

If anything, my comic aims to open up conversation about dying, making it less taboo so that we can lift some of these veils that prevent us from preparing for death or acknowledging death. Our failure to face death leads to our resistance of aging. 

From plastic surgeons mutilating people to “look like a 28 year old lizard” (Bill Burr, You People Are All The Same, Netflix, 2012) to transhumanist Ray Kurzweil making the preposterous claim that he wants to cure death altogether, in his lifetime, our culture is brimming with examples of how we have divorced ourself from the natural processes of the earth. Is it any wonder that the planet feels so desperately out-of-balance? 

“The fact that we put pillows in caskets shows how little we understand about death.”

— Caitlin Doughty, mortician, activist, and advocate of death acceptance and the reform of Western funeral industry practices.

We come up with crackpot theories as to what lies beyond, and then we create ideologies around these stories and go to war over them. It has even been suggested that evangelicals who truly believe in the rapture would rather propel this planet to the brink of destruction, just to bring it on as soon as possible. All of this is to say, when we deny death, we deny life.

Oh yeah. This was supposed to be a movie review. 

So the other night, I’m flipping through my streaming watchlists and I find this gem on Prime. 

Shmuel (Geza Rohrig), a hasidic cantor in upstate New York, distraught by the untimely death of his wife, knows little more of life after death than what’s written in the Torah and Talmud, and is worried that his wife’s burial has put her soul in great pain, preventing her soul from ultimately reconnecting with the divine. He enlists the help of Albert (Matthew Broderick) and they embark on a quest to understand exactly what happens to the human body after it dies. 

Eventually, (spoilers) Shmuel decides to free his wife’s corpse from the confines of the box she was buried in, and develops a clandestine partnership with Albert to move her body to an above-ground human composting site.

I found this movie to be darkly funny and challenging at times. Shmuel’s character was a little less complex than I would have preferred. That said, I enjoyed it enough to watch it more than once. It was great seeing Matthew Broderick in a dry and serious role like this, and the two had great, if not awkward, chemistry together. I even learned a thing or two about human decomposition in the process.

Look, I say all this like I’m fully liberated from the cultural taboos that prevent us from accepting death, but when Emily talks about how she wants her body treated after she dies, I truly wince. It’s a strong wince that starts with my face and ends somewhere inside my heart. It’s a conversation I don’t want to have, even after all we’ve been through. Even after filling out our POLST forms in our mid-30s. I’m struggling just like everyone else. But these conversations are really important to have with our loved ones. They’re important to have with everyone, because we can’t keep roaming this earth with our heads in the sand, in regards to our true nature. 

We are part of this planet. We came from it. We will return to it. And the fact that we have iron in our blood proves that we are also children of the stars, because all of the iron on Earth was produced in the intense conditions present in the hearts of stars, released by supernovae, and distributed across the universe to coalesce over billions of years as gravity-wells that become planets, and from within these planets, we emerge. What business do we have boxing ourselves up inside coffins and pyramids, removing ourselves from the natural order of things? We do these things because we hope that we are special. But that is so short-sighted because when you zoom out and consider that universal perspective, how can we NOT feel special? We are the universe becoming alive, experiencing every configuration possible. We are not insignificant. We are everything. 

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Movie Recommendation: Robot and Frank

This one was a real treat. I was lucky enough to catch Robot and Frank, in the theater when it first came out. This would have been back in Sacramento, shortly after Mom died. We saw it at the Tower Theater, a Sacramento landmark that I hope survives this COVID nightmare that threatens to close so many small and struggling businesses.

From Wikipedia:

Robot & Frank is a 2012 American science fiction comedy-drama film directed by Jake Schreier and screenplay by Christopher Ford. Set in the near future, it focuses on Frank Weld, an aging jewel thief, played by Frank Langella, whose son buys him a domestic robot. Resistant at first, Frank warms up to the robot when he realizes he can use it to restart his career as a cat burglar.

Robot and Frank does an amazing job highlighting the difficulty that adult children face, trying to straddle two worlds. In one world, you are expected to build a career and a family of your own. In the other world, you are expected to provide care for your aging parent. And in modern times, world 1 places so many geographic limitations and time constraints on you that you have less and less ability to live in world 2. 

In Japan, this problem has come to a head, as 33.0% of the Japanese population is above the age of 60, and the youth have been conditioned to think of their careers above all else. 

The low birthrate, unsurpassed longevity and deep-seated aversion to immigration mean the population is expected to shrink by 20% by 2050 — The impact on the healthcare system will be staggering, made worse by the shortage of younger workers to support and care for their elders.

To meet the demand for caregivers, people in government, welfare services, and robot industries have developed elaborate visions of nursing robots; the Japan Robot Association sees elder-care robots inflating the personal robot industry to forty billion dollars in 2025 from the current four billion.

Timothy N. Hornyak, Loving the Machine. The Art and Science of Japanese Robots (Kondasha International, Ltd., 2006)  

Robot and Frank is an entertaining and heartfelt science fiction story set in the near-future, where robot caregivers are commonplace. It manages to be a fun heist movie that simultaneously explores a lot of caregiving complexities within the meta-narrative.

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Elder Poverty in South Korea

So I’ve been writing a lot about my struggles with elder care in the U.S. in a Korean-American family, but i had no idea that South Korea has one of the highest elderly poverty rates among OECD countries. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that elders are being pushed to the periphery in such a heavily westernized culture. 

Thank you @shaman.mudang for sharing, and spreading awareness. 

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REPOST  @asianbossmedia "Either we die from the virus or the hunger." ⁣⁣

With the pandemic sweeping the globe and placing thousands under lockdown, it's become an especially challenging time for seniors in poverty. Schools, workplaces and many other public facilities shut down. But so have the welfare centers and soup kitchens, leaving impoverished elderly stripped of the one and only place where they were able to get a free, hearty meal to survive the day.⁣

The Korea Legacy Committee (KLC, @korealegacy), strives to support the struggling senior citizens of Korea during these challenging times through a regular meal program.⁣

This is our biggest fundraising effort to date. We're collaborating with the Korean Legacy Committee (KLC) to serve meals to homeless elders who have nowhere else to go during the COVID-19 pandemic and you can do your part to contribute. ⁣

Click on this donation link to TAKE ACTION https://korealegacy.give.asia/campaign/klc-help-feed-our-elder#/

@theasianboss @asianbossk @bubicorn ⁣

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Let’s talk about Cathy

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been posting comics featuring a new character—a senior services referral agent who I’ve named “Cathy.” (I put Cathy in quotes here because her name and appearance are fictitious. I don’t even remember the name of the actual referral agent who approached us.)

What really surprised me is how her first appearance elicited an immediate, visceral response from my readers. People do not trust her and even express contempt for the character. I don’t know if it’s because of how I’ve drawn her or if people generally don’t trust people approaching them with binders during emotional moments. Maybe it’s simply because I gave this strip the title, “Cathy.” Maybe that implies foreshadowing. I don’t know, but it’s been really interesting to think about, especially in terms of visual storytelling. 

The truth is (spoilers) that Cathy was not disseminating bad information. She pointed us in the right direction to get Mom’s legal and financial situation straightened out, so that she could apply for financial aid (Medi-Cal) and expect to afford assisted living at all. To that end, Cathy was valuable. But I often compare her to the taxi driver who waits outside the drunk tank every morning, handing out business cards for DUI attorneys to every unfortunate soul who catches a ride with him. Cathy’s help ended the second she introduced us to these services, and later we would find out that the places she referred us to didn’t even accept the assisted living waiver she told us we would need. It appeared she was only in it for the referral bonus.

So does that make Cathy a nefarious character in this story? If you weigh the good with the bad, I would say we were fortunate to learn the things we learned from her. I believe Cathy felt she was providing a helpful and positive service for people. Was it perfect? No. Did she stop answering my calls shortly after telling me to call her if i had any questions? Yes. Can I label Cathy a villain? Absolutely not. As my wife likes to say, “she’s doing her best, even if her best is a little shitty right now.” 

Cathy, like many of us, is a mixed bag of altruistic and selfish intent. In The Hero’s Journey, she might qualify as the Threshold Guardian. She stood at the entry point to a zone of magnified power, and was the first cog in a network of gears that we became stuck in for a very long time. When we finally emerged from this abyss, we could look back and say “that was truly horrible” but nearly everybody along the way had good intent. It’s worth reflecting on that, especially in this crazy time. Systems are complex. We have to remain compassionate for others. Everyone is just trying to do their best, even if it’s a little shitty right now.

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Documentary: Being Mortal

This was really sobering and emotional ride. Hearing about these situations from the physician’s perspective is a good reminder that people on both sides of this relationship can be caught in unfair or difficult situations. The proper course of action is not always clear, even for the experts we place our trust in. 

How do you talk about death with a dying loved one? Dr. Atul Gawande explores death, dying and why even doctors struggle to discuss being mortal with patients, in this Emmy-nominated documentary. “Aging and dying — you can’t fix those," says Dr. Gawande. 

This film examines the relationships between doctors and patients nearing the end of life, and how the medical profession can better help people navigate mortality. The ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life — to the very end.

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This is relevant to my interests. It amazes me how many caregivers and healthcare professionals are bringing light to these important issues by illustrated means.

If you have a few minutes today, this one is worth a read. ❤️