How Much Will It Cost to Die?

A weird essay about the future.

Unsplash

It cost my mom $30,000 to die.

I’m rounding here.

I never saw every bill for myself. My dad talked about some of them, and that’s the amount I know. It was probably more.

Last month, they charged my dad $100,000 to remove some kidney stones and run some tests on his heart. His healthcare plan covered it this time. What about the next? If that’s how much it costs for a relatively simple procedure, I suspect the cost of dying has gone up a lot since my mom’s exit.

Meanwhile, we’ve got family living in western North Carolina. They gave us an update on the recovery efforts there. It’s still utter devastation everywhere. “How long do you think it’ll take?” my dad asked them. “You know, to rebuild?”

“Ten years,” said my brother-in-law. “At least ten.”

That’s occupying my headspace right now. Not Sydney Sweeney. Not the Epstein files. Not all the noise and virtue signalling.

That.

This is the real world. It’s a world where you go to a birthday party and you don’t debate politics or the climate, not anymore. You talk about the hurricane that just rewrote the geology of your hometown. You talk about how you’re going to care for family members who can’t take care of themselves. It’s what environmental scientist David Suzuki recently called “units of survival.”

We’re already living in them.

Many of us believe we’re in the opening pages of a dystopian novel. We are. Unfortunately, what takes a paragraph in a novel can take years in real life. Between the big events, there’s so many days like your kid’s birthday, moments that feel halfway normal, but only because your definition of normal has changed, and only because you focus on what’s in front of you.

A term from Greek mythology floated back into my head as I was sitting and thinking about inflation and the cost of death.

It’s called peripeteia.

This term describes a sudden reversal of fortune for a main character. It’s often accompanied by a kind of existential crisis. The character learns that most, maybe everything, they ever believed was a lie. If we really wanted to get fancy, we could call it an epistemological crisis—a crisis of knowing.

Maybe you’ve been through such a moment, or you’re going through one now. It feels terrible at first, like something clawing at the inside of your eyes. Then you start to understand that it’s a good thing.

Now you see clearly.

Some of us have been thinking a lot about the future and how it’s all going to shake out for us. We want to know what’s going to hit us first. We want to know how we can prepare. There was a time when I thought we would handle whatever the slow collapse of civilization could throw at us, and then I woke up. Learning to grow tomatoes in your backyard?

That’s the easy part.

The hard part is convincing your aging parents to start thinking about what’ll happen when they lose all or part of their healthcare coverage. It’s figuring out how to protect yourself from predatory healthcare CEOs who want to charge them a fortune just to die. It’s staying employed as robots take over the job market. It’s reminding yourself that the angry jerk behind you in traffic probably has a gun. It’s keeping your mouth shut when someone talks about hope, because who are you to ruin their morning? It’s realizing that, for you, building community means you take care of others, even if there’s nobody taking care of you. It’s knowing that when they say nobody is coming to save you, they mean nobody is coming to save you, but someone is coming to hurt you, and they might have a badge.

The hard part is realizing that collapse isn’t just happening. It has happened in pockets of the country. It’s seeing how the rest of the world shrugs and goes off chasing the latest conspiracy. It’s knowing that long before the cinematic parts of collapse arrive in our town, before we’re like the dystopian heroes we’ve rooted for our entire lives, we have to live through the mundane parts. Sadly, those parts will be the ones that get many of us.

The hard part is knowing that your backyard garden, your compost pile, your solar generator, your rain catchment system, your compost toilet, your bugout bag, your survival skills, and your homesteading books aren’t going to save you from a $100,000 medical bill or a collections agency.

You’re going to do as much as you can anyway.

Back in 2009, sociologist Andrew Szasz published a book on the shift from collectivist to individualist approaches to problems, including some of the ones driving the collapse of civilization. He argued that when someone invests in personal defenses against these threats, it makes them less likely to do anything except hide from them. That argument became the backbone of Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of The Richest, about all the billionaires trying to escape the end of the world by building bunkers. They’re all in for a rude awakening.

My rude awakening?

My peripeteia?

Like some of you, I already figured we’re past the point of fixing this world. Some of us tried to save it, then we realized something. This world had its shot, and now it’s time for a new one. Maybe it won’t include us.

That has to be okay.

What we do now is go on having little birthdays until we can’t. Maybe in our final moments, we find some solace in those memories. In the meantime, sometimes survival isn’t just about knowing how to milk a cow. It’s also understanding how to read legal documents and having a good lawyer.

That’s my rude awakening.

We might never make it to the “really interesting” chapters of social collapse. Medical bankruptcy might get us first. Even if we lived through a disaster of biblical proportions like our in-laws did, most of this flickering world just won’t care for very long. And in the end, you have to wonder…

Will we care if they don’t care?

Probably not.