Joanne Jacobson
Against the unforgiving cycles of chronic illness, Every Last Breath: A Memoir of Two Illnesses brings illuminating detail to the process of transformation.
As an academic and writer, Joanne Jacobson most respects the language of resiliency.
DM: What inspired you to write about death and dying?
I’ve never really thought about myself as writing about death and dying. But my most recent project began with my commitment to “following” my mother’s chronic respiratory illness in a series of present-tense essays, as I saw her going through an emotionally and physically demanding set of changes and steadily adapting to them in ways that I admired. Increasingly I saw myself witnessing end-of-life while it was still—because she made it so, day by day—emphatically life.
When my writing about my mother was interrupted by my own diagnosis with a very rare chronic blood disorder, I was forced/invited to witness my own encounter with mortality. From the vantage point of a hospital ward, where I was undergoing radical procedures like complete plasma exchange, I also saw so many others reaching extreme points of pain and endangered survival. In the presence of so much really serious illness, I think I lost a lot of innocence—and arrogance—about the proximity of death and dying.
DM: What is your current state of mind?
Grateful to have love and enough financial resources in these confounding, isolated times; content to have found myself as a writer; restless and pained by the disasters of 2020, by the indifference to life shown by the Trump administration and the destruction of life caused by COVID-19; hopeful about change in 2021.
DM: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Being able to swim laps every day.
DM: What lesson do you wish everyone could acquire during their lifetime, long before the end?
So much that’s good and that matters follows from simple kindness.
DM: What are you reading, what’s on your bedside table?
J.A. Baker, The Peregrine; Bernard Heinrich, The Homing Instinct; Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild; Thomas Merton, From Pilgrimage to Crusade; Acqua Alta, Donna Leon; The Silver Swan, Benjamin Black; Best American Food Writing 2020; Best American Essays 2020; Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies; Melville’s Moby-Dick.
DM: What is one thing people never imagined about you?
I love childhood foods (Cream of Wheat, Oreos, pablum).
DM: What book would you like to be buried with?
Thoreau’s Walden
DM: What is your exit plan? How would you like to die?
I don’t really have an exit plan. But I’d like very much to avoid enduring relentless pain; and I’d like to live my final days in the presence of people I love.
DM: Finish this sentence: “My perfect last day on earth, I’d be ________?
A private lap swim followed by late afternoon open-air hot tub with my wife on a New Mexico mountainside, finishing with a quiet, open-air dinner together.
DM: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
Honestly, this is so far outside the way I think of things that just about anything I say would have to be stretched to the point of absurdity. But if you insist, I can live with Elizabeth Warren!
DM: If heaven exists, what would you like to hear when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
K.D. Lang singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah