Shreya Panathula Week 10: The Man Who Lived Through Death
Graham once thought he was dead.
Or, at least, in the midst of his second divorce, undergoing a bout of severe depression, Graham woke up in a hospital believing to have met his end. What tipped him over the edge, we will never know.
Graham vehemently claims to hate thinking about how he got to that state of depression, a place “so low” that he had no clue how he reached such a point in his life in the first place (Thomson). Recounting his unclear memories, Graham only remembers calling his brother, panicked. It was that call that brought him to the hospital where he was diagnosed with severe depression. It would also be the call after which he would think himself dead for months to come.
“I was convinced I didn’t have a brain,” Graham claims during his hospitalization. “It was blank. Just a blank mind (Thomson).”
You would think him to be in a coma during such an experience, in a dazed state, somewhere between waking and dreaming. Yet Graham was a walking, sitting, breathing, talking human being, confident his brain was dead, attempting to convince his doctors that he was no longer alive either. He couldn’t feel emotions or have thoughts. He couldn’t smell or taste anymore. The pleasure and relief he once found in smoking had vanished now, replaced by the disconcerting notion of not knowing what pleasure felt like at all.
Graham’s “death” would become a challenge faced by each and every one of his doctors. Logically and rationally, they could medically prove he was alive and well. Yet, as he told them himself, “[his] brain was dead” and for all the antipsychotics and antidepressants he was forced to swallow, “they might as well have just been giving [him] Smarties (Thomson).”
It came to an impasse. The doctors would not believe Graham was dead. Graham could not believe that he was alive. So, they agreed for him to leave, under the condition that his brother would be his caretaker. For months to come, Graham remained in a vegetative state, lying on his couch, unable to move. It was as though his body had not caught up to his already deceased brain.
How was it that he coped?
“What could I do?” Graham responds to the question, “I was dead. I just accepted it (Thomson).”
That is the control our brains possess over our bodies. That is the control our brains have on our day-to-day lives. They are the reason why people have split personalities, conjure up hallucinations that no one else can see, can never forget a single detail of their past, or even cause some to remain a perpetual state of being lost. They are the reason why people can believe themselves to have died for months until something snaps back into place again.
Our brains are in full control of us. The most terrifying part of it all lies in the fact that we know virtually nothing about them.
Works Cited:
Icon Symbols Logo. “Brain Black and White Clipart.” ClipArtMag, 7 Mar. 2021, clipartmag.com/brain-black-and-white-clipart. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Thomson, Helen. Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains. Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.
Hi Shreya! Your hook was very interesting, and to be honest I was confused for the first few sentences until the situation began clearing up. Even still, I would love to look into this topic more, as it is similar to something I have heard of before but not quite. My favorite show is New Amsterdam, a t.v. show following a medical director who fired a lot of his staff on his first day there to reform healthcare at his hospital, called New Amsterdam. One of the first few episodes is about a man who is fully convinced that he is dead, but his mind was not blank as Graham’s was. Instead, he kept wandering into the area of the hospital where dead bodies are stored and laid down inside one of the drawers where they were placed, because he was “dead” so he thought he belonged with them. I had completely forgotten about that intriguing episode until your blog brought it to my attention again, and I will certainly do some research on that soon!
ReplyDeleteHey Shreya! This blog was incredibly hooking and exciting to read! Although starting off as a documentary or even a story, the tension kept on building as we learnt detail after detail what was actually occurring in the story. The rather unexpected and confusing story of simply forgetting about having a brain was both intense and comical at the same time. The fact that Graham accepted his fateful end without ever actually dying is a powerful testament to the power that the mind has over the body, the essence which you summarized aptly in your concluding thoughts. Exploring this psychological and biological interconnection and how it played out for both doctors and the people involved made it an insightful story to read, and I am curious about what actually causes a condition like this. We often believe that we are the ones controlling our brain, but your idea of our brains controlling us is unique and forces me to think about what our brain even is. Is it an organ that is entirely unconscious or are we only able to control parts of it? I have developed a lot of questions in my mind about where the power of the mind truly comes from and how much of it we can harness ourselves. I loved the writing style of this blog and I can’t wait to read more!
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