I knew the body was an arcade of menace but the bruising along my inner thigh threatened no less. Defeat looks like this when our tools of self-mastery (kale, weekend marathons, genome-tailored diets) do not stave off imperfection. The mere possibility of malady situates me outside of my body, making me wonder, again and again, what it is we owe our bodies and what we desire of them in return.

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What had I done to invite the aberration that now sat on my dermis? Hadn’t I been good? Hadn’t I cared for this mess of flesh? The moral fabric of the universe noosed around me. I wished to be done with the compulsion to construe disease as divine punishment rather than a biological hiccup.

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When later that evening I see a pedestrian flung by a vehicle at the intersection of East Hadley and South Pleasant, I yield self-chastisement for the worthier anxiety of a disoriented body laid to tarmac. It mattered little what I had done or would do. Peccadillos dimmed in the face of a universe quick to reiterate its propensity for chaos. 

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Once, atop an immobile roller coaster, the stretch of the city sprawled to my gaze, I wondered if I could slip through the bar and make a mess of skull and brain on the ground; if inhaling clumsily, I would permit more moisture in my trachea than my lungs can expel; if the circus meister, swiping languidly on his phone, had neglected to tighten the screw that would see to the wheel’s collapse. For many of us, the idea of death is simply that: an idea, an indulgence of hypotheticals.

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Illumined by red ambulance lights exposing the body on the open road, all sense mutinied. Gone was the casual interest I had held in my survival. In its place: a bitter covet of life, of agency over my body and all its bloody rot.

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Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi accounts for his life and death in When Breath Becomes Air. He was 36 upon diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. The prose is an unflinching first-person account of the certainty of chaos, the uselessness of, “Why me ?”

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All bodies are subject to time and mishap. Pain and indignity are likely. The reason is peripheral. What is left? Shrinking frontiers of choice in how we succumb, what we give up, and when.

These choices are informed by the specific vitalities we draw from our bodies. A sight to a sculptor may be secondary to touch while a singer might do away with both in favor of speech. In optimal as in poor health, we desire that our bodies translate our identities.

There is hierarchy in loss.

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What we owe ourselves are attempts to distill complex identities into simpler impulses. If the painter paints to find beauty, she must learn to find beauty without sight. To practise loss. To articulate what makes her life meaningful, within the body, and without.

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Paul posits that the meaning of life has “something to do with the depth of the relationships we form”. The assertion appears so broad it could never be wrong or uniquely right. A platitude like ‘love is the answer’ or ‘live each moment like your last’, which never means the same thing to two people or to the same person twice.

The unique and the universal tend to coincide. Why would life’s meaning be the exception?

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My desire to survive the body did not wane but death refocused living. The open-wire covet of life gave way to the dull throb of existence. Life can not gaze at itself for too long. It goes on.