The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

18
Meditate on Our Common
Mortality
The Law of Death Denial
ost of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead,
the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds.
Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose
and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and
accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks,
separations, and crises in life. It gives us a sense of proportion, of
what really matters in this brief existence of ours. Most people
continually look for ways to separate themselves from others and feel
superior. Instead, we must see the mortality in everyone, how it
equalizes and connects us all. By becoming deeply aware of our
mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.
The Bullet in the Side
As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor
(1925–1964) felt a strange and powerful connection to her father,
Edward. Some of this naturally stemmed from their striking physical
resemblance—the same large, piercing eyes, the same facial
expressions. But more important to Mary, their whole way of thinking
and feeling seemed completely in sync. She could sense this when her
father participated in the games she invented—he slipped so naturally
into the spirit of it all, and his imagination moved in such a similar
direction to her own. They had ways of communicating without ever
saying a word.

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Mary, an only child, did not feel the same way about her mother,
Regina, who came from a socially superior class to her husband and
had aspirations of being a figure in local society. The mother wanted to
mold her rather bookish and reclusive daughter into the quintessential
southern lady, but Mary, stubborn and willful, would not go along.
Mary found her mother and relatives a bit formal and superficial. At
the age of ten, she wrote a series of caricatures of them, which she
called “My Relitives.” In a mischievous spirit, she let her mother and
relatives read the vignettes, and they were, naturally, shocked—not
only by how they were portrayed but also by the sharp wit of this ten-
year-old.
The father, however, found the caricatures delightful. He collected
them into a little book that he showed to visitors. He foresaw a great
future for his daughter as a writer. Mary knew from early on that she
was different from other children, even a bit eccentric, and she basked
in the pride he displayed in her unusual qualities.
She understood her father so well that it frightened her when in the
summer of 1937 she sensed a change in his energy and spirit. At first it
was subtle—rashes on his face, a sudden weariness that came over him
in the afternoon. Then he began to take increasingly long naps and
suffer frequent bouts of flu, his entire body aching. Occasionally Mary
would eavesdrop on her parents as they talked behind closed doors of
his ailments, and what she could glean was that something was
seriously wrong.
The real estate business her father had started some years earlier
was not doing so well, and he had to let it go. A few months later, he
was able to land a government job in Atlanta, which did not pay very
well. To manage their tight budget Mary and her mother moved into a
spacious home owned by relatives in the town of Milledgeville, in the
center of Georgia, not too far from Atlanta.
By 1940 the father was too weak to continue at his job. He moved
back home, and over the next few months Mary watched as her
beloved father grew weaker and thinner by the day, racked by
excruciating pain in his joints, until he finally died on February 1, 1941,
at the age of forty-five. It was months later that Mary learned that his
illness was known as lupus erythematosus—a disease that makes the
body create antibodies that attack and weaken its own healthy tissues.

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(Today it is known as systemic lupus erythematosus, and it is the most
severe version of the disease.)
In the aftermath of his death, Mary felt too stunned to speak to
anyone about the loss, but she confided in a private notebook the effect
his death had on her: “The reality of death has come upon us and a
consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency, like a
bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite,
has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief,
wonder.”
She felt as if a part of her had died with her father, so enmeshed had
they been in each other’s lives. But beyond the sudden and violent
wound it inflicted on her, she was made to wonder about what it all
meant in the larger cosmic scheme of things. Deeply devout in her
Catholic faith, she imagined that everything occurred for a reason and
was part of God’s mysterious plan. Something so significant as her
father’s early death could not be meaningless.
In the months to come, a change came over Mary. She became
unusually serious and devoted to her schoolwork, something she had
been rather indifferent to in the past. She began to write longer and
more ambitious stories. She attended a local college for women and
impressed her professors with her writing skill and the depth of her
thinking. She had determined that her father had guessed correctly her
destiny—to be a writer.
Increasingly confident in her creative powers, she decided that her
success depended on getting out of Georgia. Living with her mother in
Milledgeville made her feel claustrophobic. She applied to the
University of Iowa and was accepted with a full scholarship for the
academic year beginning in 1945. Her mother begged her to
reconsider, thinking her only child was too fragile to live on her own,
but Mary had made up her mind. Enrolled in the famous Writers’
Workshop at the university, she decided to simplify her name to
Flannery O’Connor, signaling her new identity.
Working with fierce determination and discipline, Flannery began
to attract attention for her short stories and the characters from the
South she depicted and seemed to know so well, bringing out the dark
and grotesque qualities just below the surface of southern gentility.
Agents and publishers came calling, and the most prestigious
magazines accepted her stories.

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After Iowa, Flannery moved to the East Coast, settling in a country
house in Connecticut owned by her friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald,
who rented out a room to her. There, without distractions, she began
to work feverishly on her first novel. The future seemed so full of
promise, and it was all going according to the plan she had laid out for
herself after the death of her father.
At Christmas of 1949 she returned to Milledgeville for a visit, and
once there she fell quite ill, the doctors diagnosing her with a floating
kidney. It would require surgery and some recovery time at home. All
she wanted was to get back to Connecticut, to be with her friends, and
to finish her novel, which was becoming increasingly ambitious.
Finally, by March, she was able to return, but over the course of the
next few months she experienced strange bouts of pain in her arms.
She visited doctors in New York, who diagnosed her with rheumatoid
arthritis. That December she was to return to Georgia once again for
Christmas, and on the train ride home she fell desperately ill. When
she got off the train and was met by her uncle, she could barely walk.
She felt as if she had suddenly turned elderly and feeble.
Racked with pain in her joints and suffering high fevers, she was
admitted immediately to a hospital. She was told it was a severe case of
rheumatoid arthritis, and that it would take months to stabilize her;
she would have to remain in Milledgeville for an indefinite period. She
had little faith in doctors and was not so sure of their diagnosis, but
she was far too weak to argue. The fevers made her feel as if she were
dying.
To treat her, the doctors gave her massive doses of cortisone, the
new miracle drug, which greatly alleviated the pain and the
inflammation in her joints. It also gave her bursts of intense energy
that troubled her mind and made it race with all kinds of strange
thoughts. As a side effect, it also made her hair fall out and bloated her
face. And as part of her therapy, she had to have frequent blood
transfusions. Her life had suddenly taken a dark turn.
It seemed to her a rather strange coincidence that when the fevers
were at their highest, she had the sensation that she was growing blind
and paralyzed. Only months before, when she was not yet ill, she had
decided to make the main character in her novel blind himself. Had
she foreseen her own fate, or had the disease already been there,
making her think such thoughts?

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Feeling death at her heels and writing at a fast pace while in the
hospital, she finished the novel, which she now called Wise Blood,
inspired by all of the transfusions she had undergone. The novel
concerned a young man, Hazel Motes, determined to spread the gospel
of atheism to a new scientific age. He thinks he has “wise blood,” with
no need for any kind of spiritual guidance. The novel chronicles his
descent into murder and madness and was published in 1952.
After months of hospitalization and having sufficiently recovered at
home, Flannery returned to Connecticut for a visit with the Fitzgeralds,
hoping that in the near future she could perhaps resume her old life at
their country home. One day, as she and Sally were taking a drive in
the country, Flannery mentioned her rheumatoid arthritis, and Sally
decided to finally tell her the truth that her overprotective mother, in
league with the doctors, had kept from her. “Flannery, you don’t have
arthritis, you have lupus.” Flannery began to tremble. After a few
moments of silence, she replied, “Well, that’s not good news. But I
can’t thank you enough for telling me. . . . I thought I had lupus, and I
thought I was going crazy. I’d a lot rather be sick than crazy.”
Despite her calm reaction, the news stunned her. This was like a
second bullet in her side, the original sensation returning with double
the impact. Now she knew for sure that she had inherited the disease
from her father. Suddenly she had to confront the reality that perhaps
she did not have long to live, considering how quickly her father had
gone downhill. It was now clear to her that there would be no plans or
hopes for living anywhere else but Milledgeville. She cut short the trip
to Connecticut and returned home, feeling depressed and confused.
Her mother was now the manager of her family’s farm, called
Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville. Flannery would have to spend
the rest of her life on this farm with her mother, who would take care
of her. The doctors seemed to think she could live a normal length of
life thanks to this new miracle drug, but Flannery did not share their
confidence, experiencing firsthand the many adverse side effects and
wondering how long her body could endure them.
She loved her mother, but they were very different. The mother was
the chatty type, obsessed with status and appearances. In her first
weeks back, Flannery felt a sense of panic. She had always been willful,
like her father. She liked living on her own terms, and her mother
could be quite intense and meddlesome. But beyond that, Flannery

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associated her creative powers with living her own life outside Georgia,
encountering the wide world, among peers with whom she could talk
about serious matters. She felt her mind expanding with those larger
horizons.
Andalusia would feel like a prison, and she worried that her mind
would tighten up in these circumstances. But as she contemplated
death staring her in the face, she thought deeply about the course of
her life. What clearly mattered to her more than friends or where she
lived or even her health itself was her writing, expressing all of the
ideas and impressions she had accumulated in her short life. She had
so many more stories to write, and another novel or two. Perhaps, in
some strange way, this forced return home was a blessing in disguise,