Flower interrupted: The ineffable sayability of death and the silence of life entangled

Let me begin with a story.

A girl sits in a waiting room. Sounds of pink, blue, yellow hospital scrubs flurry past and around her. She clutches a bright arrangement of peonies, lotuses, and roses meant for her mom, her hold resting near the base of the flower stems. Her knees jitter up and down; the bouquet bobs in time with them.

When her mom’s doctor appears, he is an image of seriousness. Gravitas has followed him to her, wearing down his countenance and shoulders. The doctor opens his mouth to speak. The girl curls her fingers around bright green stems.

“She’s gonna die today.” A heavy pause.

A violet lotus finds the girl’s gaze just then. It beckons her beyond the apprehension of color, but she isn’t listening.

And neither is the grave doctor, who instead is attuned to what must be said by a medical professional about the mother of the girl sitting before him. “There’s been too much bleeding in her brain. I’m sorry.”

A haze begins to fog the girl’s view. “Today?”

A slow nod from the doctor reaches her through mist. “Today, she’ll die today.”

With one arm he gently helps her up and with another, he holds her mother’s bouquet. “Beautiful flowers.”

Loss avalanching toward her, she almost doesn’t hear him.

“She’s gonna die today”: What makes this utterance sayable?

The sayability of the utterance, “She’s gonna die today,” lies in knowing what Western knowledge teaches us of death. Indeed, in this brief story, the spoken words “She’s gonna die today” are made sensible insofar as the doctor and girl partake in a shared knowledge of death. That is, both know of a shared story of death as the end of life, an end storied as eventually reaching all. The sayability of “She’s gonna die today” relies, then, on the simultaneity of life and death, where the latter shuts the former.

The sayability of the utterance, however, is distinct from its understandability. To know what knowledge teaches us of death does not and cannot suggest we understand death. Hannah Arendt¹ says,

Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world…Understanding is unending and therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of being alive; for every single person needs to be reconciled to a world in which he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, he always remains a stranger. Understanding begins with birth and ends with death.

The utterance, “She’s gonna die today,” which can be read as an articulation of death, beckons us to a shared knowledge of death. Backgrounding this beckoning to knowledge is the unending activity of understanding. The doctor is serious as he approaches the girl in the waiting room. He has read the medical scans of the mother’s brain. Based on what he’s read, he knows must be said. The girl, too, trusts the knowledge of the one who faces her as her mother’s doctor. Both girl and doctor, through what the doctor must say and what he eventually utters, are enmeshed in ongoing activity of trying to be at home in a world wherein the loss of the Beloved is made knowable yet irreconcilable, wherein death is inevitable and thus anticipated by systems of knowledge tasked with all manners of predicting and delaying its arrival. It might be said then that the sayability of death does not merely occur in the moment between girl and doctor but also, that the sayability of death attempts to reconcile them — two strangers of distinct uniqueness — together. Understanding, Arendt says, begins with birth and ends with death, and to push further, as to do as understanding does, we might ask, whose birth and what death? To continue with Arendt’s phraseology, what world and whose reality?

As a way to further explicate Arendt’s words more fully, let me turn to a Disability Studies perspective. The social phenomenon of disability perplexes the singularization of home, world, and reality. Disability studies scholars Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkoksky², in writing about the complexity of moving through the world together in and with blindness and dyslexia, discuss their experience of reality through shared perception, an experience which they refer to as “perception-negotiation.” They say:

Sight is present in Rod’s intersection, in much the same way that memory is present in Tanya’s. Together, our perceptions intersect, and as we move together in Toronto, we construct “an immense city of evocation and remembrance.” Our “immense city” has its “precincts” together with memories and images of other cities. The “metropolis” that we have constructed resides in the “mind” insofar as it begins in imagination. We imagine not only abstract movement, but also movement oriented to the imagination of moving blind and dyslexic.

“Movement oriented to the imagination of moving blind and dyslexic,” as Michalko and Titchkosky say, supports Arendt’s discussion of the complicated and unending process of understanding. That is, Michalko and Titchkosky’s perceptions unfold from the intersection of blindness and dyslexia, such that their movements refuse closure and permanence, and construct a reality — “an immense city” — to which they must reconcile. Their perception-negotiation helps them come to terms with the world that they are moving to find a home within, an experience “already bound in trust in the possibility of shared perception”³.

Let us return to the story shared earlier. Reconciling ourselves to a reality where death marks the end of life, and even understanding itself, calls forth a particular world. In this world, time organizes perception, laying claim to how urgency, impatience, anxiety, and more are experienced. “She’s gonna die today” is an utterance inhabited by the multiplicity of time, where what was, what is, and what will be coalesce to test the girl’s capacity to move through the world together with different versions of her self commanded by the indefinite silence of existence. She is a girl sitting in a waiting room; a girl being addressed by her mother’s doctor. She is also a girl whose arms barely reached the handle of the shopping cart when she used to accompany her mother to the grocery store. She is a girl who was afraid to lose her mother; she is a girl who will lose her mother. The challenge of perception-negotiation, of a shared perception bound in trust emerging from these and more versions of the same person, is clear. The arrival of death-to-come narrows her imagination so that all she feels is an onslaught on the girl she hopes to hang onto – a girl about to deliver flowers to her mother getting better in the hospital. And so, the utterance “she’s gonna die today,” trailed by a depthless pause amplifies the difficulty of constructing an “’immense city’ [with] its ’precincts’ together with memories and images of other cities” (Michalko & Titchkosky, 2024). Orienting one’s movement to the imagination of moving closer to death is no easy task for the girl in the story as moving in the city of death is neither what she thought she would do that day nor what she could ever have prepared for.

Evoking Arendt again, when we speak of birth and death, of whose and what birth and death do we speak? In speaking of them, what is realized and expressed? As Merleau-Ponty⁴ says, “I can apprehend my birth and my death only as prepersonal horizons: I know that people are born and die, but I cannot know my own birth and death.” “She’s gonna die today” does not call on the girl to apprehend her own death. Indeed, the utterance is a call to apprehend the nearing horizon of the death of someone she loves. Her existence is therefore entangled in the existence of others – at the very least, in the existence of the person who has uttered the words “she’s gonna die today” and in the existence of the person who has been said will “die today.” The speaking of death in this moment, then, realizes the ineffable sayability of our entangled lives. When the death of a beloved is spoken, then, life entangled (in life) guts us lifeless.

The appearance of death-to-come, and in turn lifelessness-to-come, expresses a given situation. A mother (“She” of “She’s gonna die today”) is in the hospital. A doctor (“The doctor” of “The doctor opens his mouth to speak”) is charged with caring for her. Part of the care he is expected to do, as the story suggests, is tell the mother’s family members (“The girl”) of the predicted arrival of her death. Once the doctor delivers the news, the girl feels herself crying before she knows herself to be doing so. She feels “loss avalanching toward her.” After all, the purpose of the girl’s visit to the hospital that morning was to deliver flowers to her mother. Her purpose is interrupted by the silence of what accompanies the sayability of death’s predicted arrival — the delivery of avalanching loss.

In the spirit of the term, let us pause briefly with the notion of interruption. Being interrupted suggests a crack in marble, an unwelcome change to a predicted sequence of events. In the story, the delivery of flowers arrives at the reader already interrupted. That is, the girl is in the waiting room and not, as the sequence of events determined by flower delivery would suggest, in her mother’s hospital room to secure the successful flower delivery to a mother-getting-better. As the girl finds out, mother-getting-better is not the reality to which she must reconcile. No, the reality to which must reconcile – to which, until that very moment, she had been comfortably stranger to – is the reality of mother-dying-today. The interruption of flowers follows the interruption of mother-getting-better follows the interruption and the fear of losing a beloved.

Interruptions, too, often do not announce themselves as such. The doctor does not approach the girl by saying, “I am here to interrupt your delivery of flowers to your mother-getting-better.” The girl, too, does not say, “Mother-getting-better has now been interrupted.” Essential to interruption is not its sayability but rather, the break in pattern that it enacts. A true interruption, we might say, is necessarily silent. The sayability of death’s predicted arrival marks here the utmost interruption, of flowers we’ve established, and yet further, of what else? As with the interruption that foreclosed a hopeful delivery of flowers, the girl is also silent after the doctor remarks, “Beautiful flowers.” Absorbed from one reality and thrown into another, she is overcome by the presence of loss she feels avalanching toward her. A loss that did not announce itself as an interruption and yet, an interruption to reality, home, and world it surely is. The shift in realities brings enough swerve to knock the girl backwards, shoving her speechless.

The change in momentum reflected in the shift from flower delivery to delivery of death’s predicted arrival, in interruption of mother-getting-better by mother-dying-today, in the tremendous ether between knowing and understanding the loss of a beloved — all of this takes place without having been spoken. What is not spoken, often taken as the absence of a speech event, can be perceived as silence. Yet, as this reflection herein on the speech event of death’s predicted arrival suggests, silence is not merely the absence of speech.

Silence is world-weaving work. The pause that follows “she’s gonna die today” tightly knits the worlds of doctor to girl, mother to daughter, life to death. Silence loudens the unending activity of understanding as well as the struggle of reconciling oneself to a reality wherein humanness is a condition of entanglement and connection. What kind of speech event, then, enables the silence of enduring connection and being human to come forward? How do we experience, through sense and perception, the coming forth of silence?

Pausing to notice, as Michalko and Titchkosky say, the social act of “perception-negotiation” required to make sense of the movement activated by the words “she’s gonna die today,” spoken to me by a doctor, brings me to wonder about how the articulation of death-to-come is tethered to the social setting wherein the phenomenon of forecasting absence is possible and further, constitutive of the world from which it springs — in this case, the ordinary goings-on of a hospital moving in and toward a world determined by what was, what is, and what will be.

Attending to the confirmed arrival of absence as a kind of speech event enables the silence of enduring connection as well as the silence of being human to come forward. A cautious attention to absence in this way may allow us to approach, and wrestle with, the following taken-for-granted assumptions: (a) that we have the perceptive apparatus and sensible wherewithal to understand and deal with the disruption that awaits between what was and what will be, and (b) that death’s predicted arrival may be ordinarily spoken when in the foreground, the ineffable sayability of our entangled lives guts us lifeless and, silently, plays on.

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1. Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding),” in Essays in Understanding 1930-1954, ed. J. Kohn (Shocken Books, 1994), 307-308.↩︎

2. Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky, “Blindness and Dyslexia in the Movements of Everyday Life in Toronto,” in Placing Disability, eds. S. B. Mintz, and G. Fraser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 85.↩︎

3. Michalko and Titchkosky, “Blindness and Dyslexia,” 91.↩︎

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Sense Experience,” in Phenomenology of Perception, ed. C. Smith (Routledge Classics, 2002), 250.↩︎