While I’ve been dealing with health problems behind the scenes, it looks like Republican Senator, warmonger, and hardline Donald Trump supporter Lindsey Graham had far worse ones on his own plate. Mere hours before his death on Saturday night, he sorta-kinda joked with someone that he couldn’t possibly die right then because he had a “Meet the Press” interview soon and foreign policy stuff in the air.
To borrow the old saying, men plan, and the universe laughs.
But our universe does far worse than just not laugh. It doesn’t even care.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 7/14/2026. Please support my work—see the end of this writeup for options, and thank you for whatever you decide to do! No voicecast today; please see endnote for what’s been going on lately.)
SITUATION REPORT: Lindsey Graham joked about dying right before actually dying
For a week or two, I’ve been hearing nothing but speculation about Mitch McConnell’s recent brush with death. So when I read the headlines about Lindsey Graham dying, my mind read it as McConnell’s name and I went “Oh, finally they admit it.” It actually took a hot minute to realize that this concerned an entirely different Republican big name.
But one part of the reporting around Graham’s death really caught my eye.
Graham’s communications director shared that he died of a ruptured aorta, which is a complication of chronic heart disease (CHD). The official medical lingo appears to be “aortic dissection due to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.” As you might suspect, it’s an extremely serious, life-threatening condition that can very quickly prove fatal.
Leading up to his death, Graham kept extremely busy. On that fateful Saturday, he’d only just gotten back from Ukraine and a meeting with its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Then at his home, according to Axios, he had a phone call with Donald Trump, and then afterward spoke with an unnamed person:
A person who spoke with Graham shortly afterward said the senator complained that he was feeling unwell. When the person urged him to seek medical attention immediately, Graham said he would do so Sunday morning after his scheduled appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Graham then joked: “I can’t die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.” He passed away several hours later.
He might have been blustering, might have been speaking from sheer anxiety, might have been anything. But reality doesn’t care what our plans are.
The death of a Loxodes magnus
Some years back, someone filmed a remarkable sequence: The death of a single-celled ciliate classified as Loxodes magnus. They look a bit like earthworms or maybe a slice of ciabatta bread, but they’re just one cell. They get around with cilia, hair-like protrusions that act a bit as flippers.
And this one was about to die.
First, one pointed end of the organism began to disintegrate. In this screengrab, you can see that disintegration starting on the right—a thin tendril almost like a plane’s contrail plume. This microscopic plume is made up of cytoplasm and cell membrane components. (The orange dot in the body of the organism is something it consumed earlier.)
Gradually, the critter began dissolving at the other end too. It wasn’t a worm anymore. Now, it was more of a pill shape.
Then, it was almost gone. Near death, it resembles a rounded rectangle.
And finally, it begins swimming around aimlessly until it just stops and dissolves. Its cell membrane breaks down, which lets the ciliate’s former insides ooze out into the droplet of water on the slide. Nothing animates this organism anymore; no systems keep it functioning in any way. It simply ceases to be.
Though Lindsey Graham’s ending was far more complex and involved many more systems and cells, it wasn’t overmuch different. Nor will it be for any of us.
Minds that can contemplate death
Death works very similarly for every organism ever—including us, of course. But single-celled organisms like this ciliate can’t think about death. Nothing in them can feel pain at death, much less rage against the idea of dying. Even more complex animals don’t seem to engage with death as an idea the way so many people do.
Or rather, don’t.
Lindsey Graham had to have known he had heart disease. American Congresscritters have just about the best health insurance coverage on the planet. His hardened arteries had to have come up at some point in a doctor’s office. More than that, though, The Hill has noted that he had a grim family history reminding him just in case his physicians didn’t: His own father had died from a heart attack at 68. Lindsey Graham was 71. He almost certainly thought about his dad’s age with frequency after he reached and surpassed that same age.
The more complex the systems keeping an organism alive, the more pear-shaped things can go.
Sometimes the only way to respond is with a macabre joke that is more of an attempt to bargain with a force that can neither bargain nor reject a negotiation. But in its way, that’s about the most human way to deal with an unstoppable force that does not care one bit about how we feel about things.
When I think about that, my mind always strays to Elfquest. In issue 20 of the original quest, a distraught elf comes to grips with her mate’s death:
This elf tribe’s ideal mental state is “the now of wolf-thought.” And to wolves, death “is neither friend nor enemy. It is.” To me, there’s immense comfort in that description. Indeed, death is not an enemy or a friend. It is just the state life falls into when our systems fail. Our wetware can get as philosophical or resistant or accepting about that state as it pleases, but the hardware doesn’t really care.
And yet that wetware transcends death in so many ways. We can write moving poetry about it, create meaningful rituals around it, craft stories challenging our perceptions of it.
We can even try to deny that it’ll happen.
The world is full of the skeletons of people who thought they couldn’t die yet
When Captain Mal tells one of his soldiers that they will survive a firefight because they’re “way too pretty” to die, he’s drawing upon that same kind of bravado: We can’t die, because we’ve got important stuff to do. Or we’re too pretty. Or we just really super-duper want to live. It’s the most supreme kind of survivorship bias there is: The ones who believed that but were not, in fact, too pretty or too busy or too passionate about living?
They won’t be talking about it.
In the end, though, our lives are just tightly-packed, stacked rings of systems that prevent our cells from reaching equilibrium. Sooner or later, one of those systems will start failing. And it will cause others to fail. And new failures still will bloom outward from those failures.
Out of every surreally immoral and inhuman thing Lindsey Graham has ever said or done, the “joke” he told right before his death might be one of the most touchingly human things he’s ever come out with. It’s like he finally became a real boy—just in time to learn that some negotiations cannot even be started, much less won.
NEXT UP: Alpha Course 15, magic healing: When healing’s everything so nothing is, and the way lingering Christian context got ripped away as I catalogued the healing miracles in the Gospels. See you soon! <3
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Please don’t worry about me. As far as I know, I’m in no serious danger. Just extremely weak and tired lately, and getting very very very little sleep. I’m under a doctor’s care—in fact, I’m seeing her on Tuesday morning. I hope to be past the worst soon.
1 Comment
Eric · 07/17/2026 at 6:41 AM
Sorry to hear about your health troubles! Yeah I’m at the same age, where funerals start to vastly outnumber marriages or any other sort of major social invitation. It’s quite a mental shock to the system.
We should keep rolling those dice as long as we can, I guess…