From Section 6: Death Becomes Us
Chapter 14: Marty Crouch and a New Sunrise
Donelle’s story is, among other things, an indictment of the silence we maintain around our most vulnerable. Marty’s story is different in tone, different in circumstance, but carries its own instruction about the limits of what love can do — and about the strange, surprising ways in which two lives can become entangled at a level that defies ordinary explanation. What follows is not a narrative of illness and loss alone. It is an account of what happens when two men, unlikely friends, find themselves connected by something neither of them chose — and what that connection reveals about consciousness, healing, and the particular grief of being excluded from a final crossing.
Over the years, I have come to understand how the forces of oppression and repression—born of failed institutions and wounded relationships—lodge themselves not only in society, but in the body and soul of every individual who passes through them. I had seen this in myself. I had seen it in the men around me. And I would come to see it most profoundly in Marty.
My friend Marty began responding to my philosophical Facebook posts in late 2016. We had shared over twenty years in a couple’s group—weekend trips, dinners, a book club—yet rarely spoke at great length or depth, or showed much interest in developing a friendship beyond what our wives organized around us. I had noted, over those years, how his wife dominated much of his visible life. In group settings, she would speak for him, speak over him, fill every silence with herself. When she was present, Marty would retreat into deference. Much like me in those same moments, all further talk would end.
His engagement with my posts, then, felt like a door opening—and I walked through it.
On January 11, 2017, I had my first seizure. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning, went to my office, and sat down. Without warning, I lost all ability to move—and to think—though I remained strangely aware throughout the approximately one-minute episode. Afterward, I became aware of a dark mass, almost the size of a golf ball, in the left portion of my brain as perceived within my inner field of body awareness. I kept this to myself initially. In February, a second, milder seizure occurred in a public setting. I said nothing because I feared I was losing my mind. When I did eventually speak of it—with my wife and two close friends—it was theorized to be spiritual or psychic in nature. But I came to name it simply: death. Prayers, meditations, affirmations—nothing moved it. I knew that some form of dying was approaching, though I felt little urgency to involve a doctor.
On March 5, 2017, Marty suffered a major seizure and was hospitalized. He had been in a four-year recovery from malignant melanoma, first diagnosed in late 2012, and had appeared to respond successfully to Interleukin II therapy. Now, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Sharon and I visited him two days before its surgical removal. Marty and I spoke about our seizures—the similarity between his and mine struck me deeply, though his was incomparably more severe. I told him plainly: I believed Death had been making itself known to me through the dark mass in my own energy field. I was beginning to sense a relationship between our conditions, but I was not yet ready to name it.
The days surrounding Marty’s surgery became, for me, a period of acute spiritual crisis. I was largely confined to the couch, losing the ability to speak without enormous effort, experiencing dizziness and a strange neurotoxic quality to my consciousness—as though it were trying to escape. Sharon came home to find me severely compromised. She listened, offered her love, and honored my perception that this was a spiritual rather than a medical emergency. Thursday came—the day of Marty’s surgery—and I had not meaningfully improved. I carried dual concern: for Marty on the operating table, and for myself dissolving on the couch.
That Thursday evening, something broke open. My life’s message had been building within me like pressure behind stone. I cried out to Sharon in despair, begging her to carry it for me—to speak what I could not. She looked at me with full acceptance and refused. Unequivocally. My message, she said, was my own, and must be spoken through me—or not at all. It was perhaps the most loving thing she had ever done.
I asked my Spirit how to proceed. A prayer surfaced: Grandfather, Great Spirit, Thank You. I began to write and did not stop until fifteen pages had poured through me. The dark mass in my energy field disappeared upon completion—coincidentally, at approximately the same time Marty’s tumor was being surgically removed. To this day, I remain healed of that particular darkness.
What followed was an insight I still find difficult to articulate: I had become attuned to Marty on a psychic level. Some have called this radical empathy; some have called it telepathic; some have called it just plain mysterious. Somehow, the structure of his consciousness had transmitted itself into my own sensitive, susceptible awareness through love and concern. The dark mass I had perceived was not my cancer. It was Marty’s. And through his matrix of consciousness, the light of my own awareness had finally been able to name—for both of us—the forces of oppression and repression that had long resided within our hearts.
In April 2017, Sharon and I attended Matthew Fox’s Cosmic Christ Workshop in Tacoma. The following week, we met with Marty and his wife. His recovery was progressing well. He was sensing that his death might not be far, and wanted to act on long-deferred desires—among them, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. We tried to discuss the workshop, but his wife dominated the conversation, reaching for her phone to Google what I was attempting to share aloud. It was characteristic of her. My heart opened further for Marty.
At a couple’s group gathering at Marty’s home later that month, his wife had stepped away, and I was able to speak at length with Marty and our friend Jim about transcendent energy and the possibilities of spiritual healing. Marty was genuinely receptive. His own father had experienced something divine before dying, and Marty wanted a taste of it. I promised him a meditation I had prepared—a thought experiment designed to be a verbal bridge from the non-verbal to the conscious mind, built around a spiritual experience I had in July of 1987. I sent it to him the following day.
In the message, I included a dream I had that morning: I was in a noisy industrial plant, working on an electrical panel, and Marty’s security lock needed to be removed. I interpreted it plainly:
“Marty, you have a resistance to your own healing. You must remove the self-protective mechanisms and controls that you—and perhaps your wife—have layered over your consciousness for many years. These controls lock you out of your own greater good. The very state of consciousness that made the melanoma possible is still embedded within your mind and heart. Infusions and medications, though potentially helpful, alone will not get the job done.”
I expressed my full confidence in him—in his beauty and his potential—and planned on living into that dream with him for a long time to come. The meditation, however, had little lasting impact. Marty was a man of highest intellect and character, yet he had never experienced the release of his ego into the great Unknown—though he desired it with everything he had.
Three weeks later, Marty, Sharon, and I hiked Dog Mountain in the Columbia River Gorge. He had just begun a new targeted drug therapy and was encouraged by his own endurance. We began planning for the Pacific Crest Trail. Two days later, he lost all use of his left leg and arm and became wheelchair-bound. It was postulated as a reaction to Keytruda. The potential metastases to his brain carried a deeper fear—that they would compromise his sense of self and his formidable intelligence.
Dying now took on a special urgency. Marty communicated to me his sense of being inarticulate before these new realities. His life was contracting from one of physical engagement, intellectual vitality, and social richness into one of stillness, dependency, and loss. I sent him a letter built around an image that came to me in meditation:
“Life can be like a lifelong adventure hike—perhaps the Pacific Crest Trail of everyday life. On one side of the trail, we witness the unbroken beauty of nature and of our own wholeness. On the other, a wicked forest fire has erupted, obscuring our view, threatening our safety, and burning away our past, our hidings, and all the knowledge we cling to so dearly.
Losing independence is a most difficult proposition. Losing the ability to plan, to move, to be intimate with one’s partner—who is now more caregiver than lover—feels like love has temporarily abandoned us. Losing control of the body can feel like an assault on dignity. Yet your journey, even folded into this measure of suffering, remains part of humanity’s unbroken wholeness.
Marty, our hike along the path goes on. Hope and anticipation push us forward. Around the next bend lies only the unknown—and at that same bend, the fire will have burned away everything unlike your true nature, revealing who you were before the world was.
I will walk with you, in freedom, to whatever extent we can. I will walk with you, in pain, while we must. I will walk with you into the unknown. I will walk with you into death—each in our own time and in our own way.”
At the letter’s end, I quoted the title of Sharon’s book: Whose Death Is It, Anyway?
It is all of ours.
In late June, I began accompanying Marty to his Men’s Cancer Survivor Support creative writing group at OHSU. During our weekly drives, he disclosed that he and his wife were having insurmountable difficulties. He wanted a divorce, yet felt powerless to act on it. He believed she was deeply unwell. Marty was also beginning to have hallucinations. He and his son wanted him relocated to a neutral care facility, but his wife insisted she would follow. He felt trapped. He had concluded that the treatment would yield no positive outcome, and he needed to plan for assisted suicide through the Death with Dignity process.
Near the end of August, Marty told me it would be better to die quickly—so that more money would remain for his wife. I was stricken. I told him he was worth every penny spent on himself. He could not accept that. He had already spent $840 on his end-of-life medications and experienced it as a burden. He said he had to die so that she could live. I was a helpless witness to a self-imposed crucifixion.
I continued to help with small tasks and attend the writing group with him until two weeks before his death. I came to miss, deeply and specifically, the only man who had ever engaged seriously with my philosophically challenging posts—the only man who had met me in that particular silence, and stayed.
Marty exercised his right to Death with Dignity on September 10, 2017, without informing me of his decision. What he had told us was that there would be a party at their home that Saturday—a celebration of life. I was stunned and hurt. In the weeks prior, I had witnessed him regain full use of his left arm and begin recovering sensation in his left leg. His overriding fear, however, had never been the present loss—it was the future ones. He could not bear the thought of future brain lesions erasing his sense of self.
Sharon and I attended a Michael Franti concert that evening, after leaving the celebration early. I cried through most of “Life is Better With You.” It was.
Marty took nearly twenty hours to die, ultimately passing on September 11, 2017. We were excluded from all preparation, planning, and support. Sharon—a hospice nurse and a profound witness to death and dying—was almost entirely shut out by his wife during those final three months. My own presence at the end existed only because Marty had demanded it directly.
Among all my losses, this one carries a particular complexity. I had stayed with Marty through those last six months, present through the crumbling of his marriage and the progression of his illness—until the end, when he chose that I not be in attendance at his Death with Dignity session where he terminated his life. Whether that exclusion was intentional or circumstantial, I have never fully resolved.
What I know is that love does not guarantee inclusion in every final chapter. Sometimes the people we have traveled closest alongside make their last crossing in private. I am left to hold both the intimacy of all that preceded it and the solitude of the ending.
Marty’s death taught me something I am still sitting with: that our presence in another person’s dying, however devoted, is ultimately theirs to grant or withhold. That the intimacy of a life shared does not constitute a claim on the intimacy of a death. There is a particular grief in being loved enough to be protected from witnessing—or in wondering, forever after, whether that was the nature of the exclusion at all. I have learned to live with the uncertainty. I am not sure I have learned to be at peace with it.
My father would die on the day of Marty’s funeral. As I withdrew Marty’s casket from the hearse, I received the phone call of his death.
Often, death claims those with so much life left to live. I am not comforted by promises of reward in an afterlife—that thought is more addictive than opiates. But I do believe the fear of death can be faced without the mask of illusion. That, perhaps, is the path of today’s spiritual warrior: to walk into the fire with open eyes, and to name what is burning.
The body may burn, and so will the one that gives names to reality.
Yet, when the naming stops, that which is eternal moves on a different path, one untouched by fire.
