Death Be Not Loud

The HVAC Grim Reaper

I have wanted to write about the end of life for some time. I just didn’t anticipate that the blaring last days of my air conditioner would provide the inspiration.

One of my two middle-aged air conditioning units loudly went kaput last month. In fact, the unit’s noise level was one of the diagnostic criteria that led the technician to declare it moribund. 

With an awful bedside manner, he insensitively told me it was time for a replacement -- to the tune of a major cash outlay. His words upset me. In fact, I was apoplectic. Nobody wants to spend big bucks on HVAC. Moreover, the AC seemed to have a little life left in it yet, leading me to feel pangs of guilt associated with euthanasia.

I immediately went through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous 5 stages of dying -- simultaneously. I felt all of her emotions  -- anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- in one giant flash.

I am almost certain that this expenditure was baked in by planned obsolescence. The HVAC company won’t stay in business by making routine service calls; they need regular customers to have terminal malfunctions that bring in big bucks.

Bargaining, I told this Grim Reaper that we had an air conditioning unit that was easily 30 years old at our previous home. It was a reliable workhorse. Manufactured before planned obsolescence, the unit still provided regular, cool blasts of air when we moved out in 2020. What’s more, the original occupant had smoked. The damned thing was undying.

After my encounter with the HVAC Grim Reaper, my HVAC woes made me reflect on my own planned obsolescence -- the time when I, too, will go to that junkyard in the sky. From birth, our obsolescence is foretold. What we do with the time between functioning with easy efficiency and sputtering out is up to us. If I have a philosophy, it comes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “Always look on the bright side of life.” I would even flip that and say that we need to look on the bright side of death as well. 

Literature provides some cautionary examples of people trying to defy death. 

In the famous 18^th Century satiric novel Gulliver’s Travels, the protagonist encounters a species of people who have achieved immortality without eternal youth. Their plight makes dying seem like the better option.

In the 14^th Century, the poet Chaucer wrote of three young fools who set out to kill Death -- a paradoxical quest if ever there was one.

Today, AI is leading to debates over digital immortality. Some say this will be achievable in a mere seven years. Digital immortality sounds like a living hell.

That we are currently in a golden age of medicine with breakthrough after breakthrough within reach is miraculous; this glimmering new hope does not, however, obviate death’s eventuality.

Whether you believe in God, a higher power, or just the laws of nature, biological life as we know it still must end at some point. We are not made to keep going like my old house's everlasting air conditioning unit. Nor do we get to knock on the coffin to be let out, as an Ecuadoran woman recently did at her own wake; she was the freakish exception who got to defy death.

Short of an immortality breakthrough, I will one day, like my air conditioning unit, become obsolete. Until that time, I plan to keep it cool, only occasionally becoming overheated with intimations of my own mortality. If I have to replace an air conditioner or two along the way, well, I suppose, that’s life.