A Little Bit of Good? on Dying, Communication, and Breaking Bad
Within the realm of narrative medicine on TV, Breaking Bad took us to a dark and violent place. The devastatingly brutal finale took the protagonist, Walter White – a cancer patient and chemist like no other – where he was destined to go from the start: he died. Walt had, from the first episode, a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer. And he was human. So there’s no surprise, really.
What made the ending so memorable, besides wrenching, was Walt’s final surrender, to his circumstances. He accepted his impending death and decided, with what hours remained, to do some good. It wasn’t much, but he tracked down former friends and directed them, however forcibly, to provide for his son; he spoke honestly with his wife; he took a bullet.
Walt, a school teacher, got turned on to cooking crystal blue methamphetamine. He, a man who in the beginning could barely hold a pistol, became a ruthless killer. He called himself Heisenberg, after the physicist who established a principle of uncertainty. His new line of work led, indirectly, to planes crashing and body parts raining over his neighborhood. As a consequence of Walt’s choices in the fictional TV-years between his 50th and 52nd birthdays, other men’s daughters died, drug dealers died, crime bosses and old people and kids died. His world and home became ruinous. Until the end, he kept saying he was doing it, cooking meth for his family – that he might leave money for his wife, disabled teenage son and infant daughter.
In the end, he couldn’t repair his relationship with his teenage son, who’d idolized him. He couldn’t bring to life his former student and partner’s dead lover. Or resurrect others he’d killed along his strange, calculating and horrifying journey. Walt died in a bloody scene, right along with the professional bad guys, the hit-men he’d hired to get at others.
Someone close to me suggested the ending was “too good” – that Walt’s fit of honesty in an i-dotting finale offers a sense of catharsis, or redemption, that doesn’t follow from the antihero’s trail of heartless decisions. It was unlikely, he said. Unlike Heisenberg.
But I loved it. A lot. Mostly because in my real life, I’ve seen people nearing death who lacked the courage to contact loved ones, to say a few words that – while insufficient to fix what’s irreparable – might have helped them gain peace of mind, or future solace. On the other side, I’ve seen family members and long-lost friends afraid to call or visit patients on their death beds, for not knowing what to say, for not being able to set things perfectly right.
Sometimes there’s no way to mend a person or a bad situation. You can’t deny reality. But if you’re still conscious and able to communicate, you may be able to lessen the damage you’ve done, or the pain someone else is experiencing, just a bit.
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