In recent years, the relationship between doctors and patients has not been harmonious, urging medicine to eagerly call for humanities to join. Narrative medicine is the encounter between medicine and humanities, which overcomes the cold characteristics of modern medicine's solipsism and dehumanization by writing parallel medical records with temperature (relative and parallel with the traditional medical records of biomedicine) that are not lacking in empathy and reflection, etc., and achieves all-round medical care. The usual narrative medicine is from the perspective of the doctor, but medical treatment is ultimately a matter for both doctors and patients, and it is necessary to go in both directions, so is there a narrative medicine that starts from the patient? Yes, He Hengqing's "Perception at the Door of Life and Death - The Awakening of the Lives of 25 Ordinary People" (Published by Lijiang Publishing House in February 2022, hereinafter referred to as "The Awareness at the Door of Life and Death") is such a book.
Narrative medicine is an important practice of medical humanities, which treats parallel medical records as stories and emphasizes the healing power of storytelling. At the same time, there is also a creative practice of "telling medical stories", which may be called folk "medical narratives", which is a more people-friendly embodiment of humanism in medical humanities. For example, the American medical dramas "The Story of the Emergency Room" and "Monday Morning" convey medical views in the form of TV dramas to help the people understand the uncertainty and complexity of medicine; China has held "Emergency Room Stories" and "Doctor-Patient Stories" and other theme essay collection activities to narrow the distance between the hospital and the people. He Hengqing's "Perception at the Door of Life and Death" is also such a "medical narrative", and it reflects the extreme situation of the disease, that is, the experience and perception of patients who were once on the verge of death, one is related to life, the other is related to death, which is the deep percussion of the philosophy of life and death.
Death is the ultimate subject of human beings, but it is often avoided, but if we cannot understand death, how can we cherish life? Therefore, in recent years, there are some books that break the taboo of death that are very popular, such as Atul Gervind's "The Best Farewell" in the United States, and "Death is So Sentimental" in China, which subverts the traditional concept of life and death, faces the dying moment of clinical medicine, and provides a deep and vivid dimension for the life's death cognition. Now, "The Perception at the Door of Life and Death" has added a new text to this "life and death narrative" sequence.
Like "Death Is So Sentimental", "The Perception at the Door of Life and Death" mainly adopts the oral record method. Although the subtitle of the book is "The Life Awakening of 25 Ordinary People", the main character is not only these 25, but a capital "I", that is, the author's soul is always present. From a stylistic point of view, these 25 character writings are composed of three parts: interview stories, interview face-to-face, and interview notes. In terms of time, it is before the interview, when the interview is in progress, and after the interview. Therefore, this book is full of He Hengqing's own expectations before the interview and his feelings after the interview, not the author's exit from the sidelines, but the "hot writing" that is substituted for him.
Death alone cannot be practiced by the living, death is a journey that never returns, and no one can die and come back to tell, so the information between the living and the dead is actually not equal. The invaluable thing about "The Perception of the Door of Life and Death" is that some people who have arrived at the door of death tell their lives before and after and the enlightenment of the threshold of life and death, so as to compensatoryly make up for the life terminal consciousness of ordinary living beings and bridge the "ignorance" of the living for death.
There are four models of clinical medicine: war, substitution, palliative, and conformity. Among them, the first two models are more common, the war model is targeted therapy, the lesion is the target, and the alternative model is organ transplantation and reconstruction. Most of the 25 people selected by He Hengqing were critically ill patients who had been treated by these two models. Before being forced to the threshold of life and death, they either overdraw themselves for one order after another, or live in the past injuries without letting go of themselves or others, and after walking through that threshold, they let go, found the exit, and became the bird of paradise of rebirth.
What prevents us from facing death well is the discovery that we have not lived well. Therefore, when Yu Lishi, the writer and painter yu Lishi in "The Perception of The Door of Life and Death", when fighting against the disease, her life wish is only: "Now if you give me a healthy body, a confidant, a pair of children, even if I am a peasant woman, I am very happy." In the book, another person who has awakened to enlightenment through illness summarizes his changes: he used to take an airplane, encountered a large air current, and when the plane bumped, he would be afraid. After experiencing this ordeal, now when you take a plane, you can face it calmly when you encounter the biggest air current and the biggest bump. Now, facing everything with a normal mind, good things and bad things, is regarded as an experience. Without exception, these 25 interviewees deeply felt after "coming over": No illness, it is so good! Only then did I wonder how I didn't know how to cherish when I wasn't sick! After "coming", they can be considered to have lived and understood, and they have lived in the present: they have lived every day as if it were the last day. After "coming", they will look at those who live very "well" and sigh, and they will know how to live for the good. People who are ignorant can probably only look back, appreciate the beauty of normalcy, and know how to cherish ordinary life after they feel the fragmentation of the abnormal state at close range. Just like after people spend one or two thousand yuan to plant a tooth, they realize that they have hundreds of thousands of yuan of treasure in their mouths.
Behind all these great realizations is the price of a once-dying situation. After being abandoned by life, I realized that the price was too high? Is it possible to have a kind of listening that enables us to contemplate ourselves and attain enlightenment in the midst of other people's encounters? "The Perception of the Door of Life and Death" is such a kind of listening, and what the reader listens to is the confession of 25 people who have been to the door of life and death. People may never be prepared for illness, so this book is a reminder, a warning, a psychological preparation. "Nothing can't be without money, there can't be sick", everyone will say, but it is abstract, and this book is figurative, a realistic touch of the blood of witnesses.
When people wantonly squander life and neglect health management, they regard the body and life as impregnable, and once the threat of illness and death is approaching, they will be alarmed, but it is too late, "The Perception of the Door of Life and Death" is a timely reminder given by some people before "too late", and the self-statement of the nirvana reborn is more convincing. The enlightenment of life often does not come naturally, death is the only sober agent in life, let yourself "die" once in your mind, you will have a sober awareness of life. Reading this book, we have such a simulated experience of death, and, through the narration of others, there is enough psychological buffer, and the text is equivalent to a cushion. There is a saying that goes to the hospital often. And this book allows us to "go to the hospital" compensatoryly. In this sense, it is also the "afterscent" of giving people roses, and it is a "parallel medical record" that evokes the reader's sense of life and death.
The 25 interviewees in the book experienced nirvana, began to let go of utilitarian desires, removed "self-grasping", and realized that everything is a small matter except life and death. However, is this actually the case? Not necessarily. They did not go to Buddhism from then on, and they did not conclude that they should lie flat from this—this is where the book's value judgments are reliable. After all, survival still has to be faced, life must continue, otherwise, society will not become a society. However, they all understand: you can't overdraft and let yourself go. For example, an elevator agent said that in order to get the project of "Father A", if he had to start over in life, he might still have no choice, but he would no longer overdraft his body. There are many people who live involuntarily, understand their own hearts, and live as much as possible - rather than desperately - according to their own wishes, which is a prerequisite for one day being able to face life and death calmly. In fact, everyone has his party A, every party A has also been party B, the whole society is each other's party A and party B, so those who blindly cater to the helpless reality of party A are actually the joint efforts of many people, including themselves. These personnel cases provided by "The Perception of life and death" are enough to cause readers to reflect on themselves, and if most people have reflection, the entire social atmosphere is expected to be reversed.
Death is the ceiling of life, death is more certain than life, so death is a problem that everyone has to face, and the "scientific doctor" who highly respects technology and tools cannot make people feel at ease on the issue of life and death, but writing based on real cases can do this. There are some emotional details in "The Perception of the Door of Life and Death" that make people's impression of the moment of life and death unforgettable, for example, there is a person who has been thinking of suicide after getting sick, so in the end, what makes him give up the idea of suicide? It's the stomach that gradually becomes hungry—a plausible reason. "It is also strange that once people have a sense of hunger, they begin to think about life outside the ward, and miss those delicious and spicy outside. Once the desire for good food is restored, the suicidal thoughts gradually weaken, and the desire to survive becomes stronger and stronger. "About living, about the relationship between life and death, such details are like a switch, which has an unforgettable touch effect on people." Another person who fell from a high-rise building on the construction site when he had an accident described the feeling when he fell: his body was in the air at that time, and he felt that he had flown for a long time and did not see the ground. Such an incredible montage is also an experience that ordinary people cannot have. One patient was completely unaware that he was sick, so he was caught off guard by being pulled to the rescue, and said in his heart: Don't call me, I am awake. This kind of out-of-body experience is also unimaginable to ordinary people, and it is more like a nightmare than a nightmare.
He Hengqing asked one of the interviewees, do you believe there is an afterlife? The interviewee replied that they did not believe it, or to live this life first. This is firm materialism, but also a kind of dharma that lives in the present moment and in this life. Unknown life and death? Similarly, unknown death, unknown life? The question of life and death is the greatest question of the soul, and its answers are endless, and even the same person will have different answers. He Hengqing once thought that he had insight into death and realized the three ambiguities of life, until he encountered a car accident, and he was shocked to find that the "I" of the parties was not willing to deal with the "I" of another question. That is to say, people's "original self" and "superego" are inconsistent in their treatment of life and death, one is escaping, the other is following up. Just as it is easier said than done, even if the mind is enlightened about life and death, the flesh will still be constrained. However, the mirror of death hanging high in the heart will not recognize the value of life differently after all, as written in the book, everyone is in a hurry, but not everyone knows where they are going. Hopefully, we don't look into the office and ask ourselves when we retire: What have we been doing in these decades? This book may be enlightening us to ask ourselves: Where am I going? This is a question about living in the air, a question about being alive.
Li Meijun: Doctor of Literature, Critic, Writer, former Air Force Colonel. Author of a collection of literary criticisms
There are 10 novels, including "What Is Easily Disturbed is Our Heart" (People's Literature Publishing House), "Say It, Woman" (Oriental Publishing Center), novel "Say It, Body" (Lijiang Publishing House), "Marriage Year", (Writers Publishing House), etc. He has won the Zhuang Chongwen Literature Award, the Bingxin Prose Award, the Professional and Technical Major Contribution Award of the Second Department of the General Staff, the Outstanding Literary and Art Works Award of the Whole Army, the Literary and Art Criticism Award of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the New Author Award of "Literary Freedom Talk" and the 30-Year Important Author Award, the Annual Paper Award of "Southern Literature", and the Annual Award of "National Literature".
Edit | Li Rui, Du Yu
Proofreading | Huang Yuan, Huang Xuemei
Final Review | Zhang Qian, Liang Zhi
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