Nelson Mandela & Organizing Your Life Closet
Amanda Anderson is a Graduate Fellow at CHMP
There’s a closet in my apartment that I generally tend to avoid. Besides housing my winter coats, it’s where I hide my toolbox and vacuum cleaner. Dark and crowded, every time I venture into it for my hammer, I become instantly angry at the chaos. It’d be easy enough to organize and light, but who wants to do that? Instead, I curse audibly when forced to enter, and all other times avoid it.
While reading about Nelson Mandela’s current clinical status and lack of documented end of life planning, I couldn’t help but think of my disorganized, but highly necessary storage space.
Death is a topic that plagues every living thing, but our society has decided it is worth talking about only when the occasion arises or is near. Hence, we are left, or leave our loved ones, to make decisions that we likely never spoke of in our healthy life. Cramped and disorganized, we’re forced to piece together parts of the puzzle of illness care in the dark; would mom want to live on a ventilator, would dad be okay with a feeding tube, would I want to persist as a vegetable?