What comes next? Am I ready for it?

It might come across as strange that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, given how convinced I am that there is nothing after I die.  (Note: it is death. Not "resting peacefully" or any other crappy euphemism!!!)  To be so convinced that there is neither hell nor heaven nor any limbo-state pending resolution of my status is liberating.  I am not at all worried about the after.  I am only worried about the here and the now.  I am, therefore, worried about whether or not I am doing things that I won't have to regret about as I lay dying.

I have always believed that everybody wonders at the last stages whether they did alright and whether it was worth it.  Even if it was a sudden end to life, that fraction of a second, the dying person might contemplate that.  Death can strike us any second, which means that I better have my answer ready at all times.

The immanence of human finitude — the fact that we’re dying right now and not in some distant future — should create the impetus for philosophical reflection. Most philosophers know this in some abstract sense. The Platonic dialogues are set against the backdrop of the trial and death of Socrates for a reason: The difficulty of facing death is that it comes with the sudden challenge of giving a good account of your life, what Plato called an apologia.
When dying finally delivers us to our inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve endured this arduous trial for a reason.

How can this not be a question that people try to answer every day?  Maybe we are arrogant, and we believe that death is far, far, away.  Or, maybe we are in extreme denial about death.  I cannot imagine either one to be a good approach to living one's short time on this planet.

When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?" he simultaneously queries the infinitely more particular question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Which is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my death?"
Any satisfying answers would have to address what this meaning might be from the inside, in terms that could be subjectively felt.

Nothing to disagree there.  The meaning is inside.  Indeed.  That is why I focus on death.  Not because I want to die--my posts make it very clear that I love life.  I love living.  The life that I love ends with death.  The end point of death is the destination. For me, and for you too.

In a wonderful essay, from where I had excerpted those quotes above, the authors ask, “Are we teaching students everything without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that matter most?”

It must be part of our jobs, as college teachers, to launch our students on the search for something larger than their immediate concerns, to confront them with the challenges that are presented by such intractable questions as the meaning of suffering, life, and death. "One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going," Goethe wrote elsewhere, and that’s a big hint. The elusiveness of knowing about life and death might be the point. Like falling in love, or even like remembering riding a bike, thinking about death might be the willingness to embrace what is unknown, what is unknowable. The cheerfulness displayed by that old skeptic Socrates in the face of death is apt for one wise enough to admit that he’s never known anything about the most important matters.

I don't think so.  Not because it is not our jobs.  In fact, I am convinced that it is.  One of the biggest reasons that I am offering a seminar course this term is precisely because I want students to be able to think above and beyond merely coursework and their immediate concerns.  However, we will be fooling ourselves if we think that students will truly latch on to understanding the importance of examining one's life.  As much as the larger population does not care, students too do not care.

There in lies the tragedy.  We all know we will all die.  But, we do not want to spend a good chunk of our time and energy into understanding our own existence.  Our "education" is about anything but this fundamental existential question.

Yes, in the face of life and death, all that knowledge amounts to nothing. Of course it does. The meaning of life and death is not something we will ever know. They are rather places we are willing or unwilling to go. To feel them, moment by moment, to the end, authentically, thoughtfully, passionately — that is an answer in itself.

Yes.

On the meaning of death ... and life

I asked Google, on an average "how many people die a day?"

A strange question to ask on a Monday morning, yes.  Google recommended this simulation to visualize the deaths that happen every second.  Take a look at that simulation. It is a reminder that so many fellow humans die every second that we are alive, right?

Yet, for the most part, none of those deaths matter to us.  Those deaths do not affect us one bit.  We do not even think about them.  And, even when presented with such a reminder, we merely shrug and keep going.  "Tell me something I don't know."

Death somewhere, to somebody, does not affect us at all.  How fascinating, right?  Which means, we are not really concerned about death.  Or, are we?

Yes, we are.  Death concerns us, upsets us, even makes us all depressed, when the person who died matters to us.  As I quoted in this post from a while ago,

When you lose someone very close to you, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds.

Interesting, right?  A simulation that shows how many people die every second and, therefore, a confirmation that we humans are mortals, does not affect us one bit.  Yet, the death of a single person has the power to bring our lives to a near standstill.  Which means, is it death itself that we are concerned about?  Or is it the loss of that person?  Or, is a death really about us and not the one who died?

There are, of course, plenty of other things about a death to get upset about, most obviously our sadness for the person who has died. However, philosophers have struggled to make sense of this and, as a result, have often concluded that there is simply nothing to be concerned about. The person has died. He cannot suffer in any way. There is no point in feeling sorry about what he might have missed out on because there is no longer anyone there to feel sorry for. The only people who can feel any pain are those who survive.

 We feel the pain only because we survive. Because we are alive. We are alive to know and feel that the person who was close to us died.  That person is not around anymore.

The most common, and accurate, way of describing this is as a loss of a part of yourself. This is more than just a metaphor. When someone is close to you, his way of thinking, his thoughts and his biography become inextricably linked with yours. Where you end and he begins is not clear. No one would think it controversial to say that when you lose such a companion, then a part of your life is lost too. If, as I and many wiser minds have concluded, you are the sum of your experiences, thoughts, projects, plans and so on, then to lose someone who is such a big part of these things is indeed to lose a part of yourself.

I.e., the death of a person who died this very second in Malawi does not affect me one bit because that person was not a part of my who I am, via my "experiences, thoughts, projects, plans and so on."  But, when my grandmother died, well, now that part of the very fabric of my life has now been torn, shredded.  So, wait a second; it then means that it is not the grandmother's death itself as much as how her death affects me. We live such a life in which I think or do not think about somebody's death unless it is about me?

Which is exactly why one Hindu philosophical thought is that we do not need to get all wrapped up in emotions over the death of a member of the family.  It suggests that we think of that death just like how we would think of a death at the neighbor's house.  The philosophical idea here is to separate out the "me" from this entire understanding.  The phenomenally profound idea that "I," "mine," "me" and the likes are the cause of all miseries that we experience--including the emotions from the death of one who was a part our "experiences, thoughts, projects, plans and so on."

So, finally, if you read until here, why all this on a Monday morning?  As always, I woke up (I am alive!) had coffee with toast while I read the paper, and then booted up the computer to check my email.  One had the subject line "Sad news."  I knew right then it was about a death in the extended family.  I opened that email first.  The death of a 67-year old:

Massive cardiac arrest with no suffering or notice. Blesssed in a way but very very sad indeed

Such is the unpredictability of life and its end, as this couplet from the old country makes clear:

नाकाले म्रियते जंतुः विद्धः शरशतैरपि । 
कुशकंटकविद्धोऽपि प्राप्तकालो न जीवति ॥ 
When your time is not yet up, even if one throws a hundred arrows at you – nothing happens to you.
However, when it is up, even a blade of grass can kill you.

Till death do us part

I walked around observing students talk through and write in response to the task that I had assigned. I stopped at every group's table.  Quick chats with students during these moments are yet another way that I try to connect with them.

"Are you an EMT?" I asked one because of the logo on the work clothes that he was wearing.

Teaching is so much about learning about the students.  They, too, learn about me--from my sense of humor to my intellectual pursuits to, heck, even about my daughter being a neurosurgeon.  It is almost like my classroom is also a blogging space for me, where I talk and listen instead of the writing and reading that I do here.

"A non-emergency guy," he replied.  "But, I know about emergency responses if situations arise."

"If I should have a cardiac arrest in this class, don't do anything.  I have a DNR," I told him.

"You have a DNR?  Why?"

"I have had a good life.  I am done," I replied with what I assumed was a pleasant face, fully knowing that my smiles don't get across.

"But, isn't he required to assist in an emergency? asked his groupmate.

He and I were in agreement--if he did, I could later sue him for bringing me back from the almost-dead.

Later, as I was driving home, I kept thinking about this interaction, and about how I became so embracing of death.

I think I understood death to be a natural process of life even when I was a kid.

My father was in the local hospital for hemorrhoid surgery.  Was I about eleven or ten at that time?  I went there during visiting hours.  The patient in the adjacent room was a boy about two years older than me.  He had blood cancer, and was dying.

I had known of grandfathers and others who were dead.   But, this was my first exposure to one who was dying.  And he was only two years older than me.

About four years later, I witnessed my grandmother's death.

During my train trips to and from the engineering college, I have often wondered what might happen if the train were to derail and I were to die.  I did not worry that I might die.
 
With every passing day, I find that such an approach to life and death is a contrast to how most people, and especially the medical profession, view life and death:

the attitude now towards disease and old age and death is that they are basically technical problems. It is a huge revolution in human thinking. Throughout history, old age and death were always treated as metaphysical problems, as something that the gods decreed, as something fundamental to what defines humans, what defines the human condition and reality.

Death and dying are not really viewed and treated as the human condition.

Maybe we still don't know all the mechanisms and all the remedies, but in principle, people always die due to technical reasons, not metaphysical reasons. In the middle ages, you had an image of how does a person die? Suddenly, the Angel of Death appears, and touches you on the shoulder and says, "Come. Your time has come." And you say, "No, no, no. Give me some more time." And Death said, "No, you have to come." And that's it, that is how you die.
We don't think like that today. People never die because the Angel of Death comes, they die because their heart stops pumping, or because an artery is clogged, or because cancerous cells are spreading in the liver or somewhere. These are all technical problems, and in essence, they should have some technical solution. And this way of thinking is now becoming very dominant in scientific circles, and also among the ultra-rich who have come to understand that, wait a minute, something is happening here. For the first time in history, if I'm rich enough, maybe I don't have to die.

This is a huge change in our attitude towards death.

Death is optional. And if you think about it from the viewpoint of the poor, it looks terrible, because throughout history, death was the great equalizer. The big consolation of the poor throughout history was that okay, these rich people, they have it good, but they're going to die just like me. But think about the world, say, in 50 years, 100 years, where the poor people continue to die, but the rich people, in addition to all the other things they get, also get an exemption from death. That's going to bring a lot of anger.

If everything goes according to plans, I won't be here to witness all that "development."

How We Die. With dignity, I hope. Thanks, Dr. Nuland

Throughout my adult existence, I have given death a great deal of thought--perhaps more, way more, than how much the average person thinks about it.  One needs to go no farther than this blog itself to get an idea of how much I think and read about it--like these that are tagged with "death."  Of course, there are also quite a few posts tagged with "life."

That there are so many posts about death, and life, should not be a surprise--death is, after all, a part of life. Life comes to an end--it is only a case of when, not if.  Understanding and appreciating death is a powerful route to understanding and appreciating life itself. On this, I got a valuable piece of help almost two decades ago, from Sherwin Nuland's How We Die.

This book came out soon after I was done with graduate school and had joined the "real world" in California.  Life was changing rapidly. I read this book. I was blown away by it. All my thoughts about death which had been nebulous until then all of a sudden made sense. I knew that I wanted to die with dignity when death came knocking.  And thus came about the instructions to the family on my preferences for end of life care.

I talked about it with the attorney friend.  I told him that I thought the worst of all was Alzheimer's.  Funny he always was, and his comeback was hilarious: "With Alzheimer's, it is not your problem but somebody else's problem."

I read in the Twitter feed that Sherwin Nuland died. I meant what I said in my re-tweet:

MT his book taught me a lot About life itself. “@robinlloyd99: Sherwin B. Nuland, ‘How We Die’ Author, Dies at 83 / http://t.co/7SxQPm7Xlb
— sriram khe (@congoboy) March 5, 2014

It is now almost twenty years since I read that book. I live in a different state, Oregon, which was the pioneer with the "Death with Dignity" legislation. Of course, that is not the reason why I moved to this state but, nonetheless, it is of great comfort to me that if the Grim Reaper gives me an advance notice of his visit, then I might be able to exit the stage on my own terms.

It is an ironic coincidence that my first ever op-ed after moving to Oregon was about the Death with Dignity Act, because Bush and his fundamentalist attorney general, Ashcroft, wanted to get rid of this.  While that op-ed, and the gazillion blog posts here on death, never ever mentioned Sherwin Nuland, I owe him a great deal for helping me get a better and clearer idea of that inevitability that we all face-death.

I was certain that Compassion and Choices would have an obit about Nuland. (I have been a paying supporter on and off.)  Sure enough, they do:

“Dr. Nuland was heroic in bringing conversations about dying out of the closet. He openly acknowledged medically assisted dying exists in states like Connecticut where it is considered illegal. Our own fight is to legalize aid in dying and bring a surreptitious practice into the open, where it is safe and accessible to everyone,” said Compassion & Choices President Barbara Coombs Lee, a former ER and ICU nurse and physician assistant who coauthored the nation’s first death-with-dignity law in Oregon.
“Like so many of my colleagues, I have more than once broken the law to ease a patient’s going, because my promise, spoken or implied, [to do everything possible to provide an easy death] could not be kept unless I did so,” Dr. Nuland wrote in “How to Die” (see pages 242-243)
“Dr. Nuland learned from his brother’s death from colon cancer that physicians who urge futile treatments on patients with incurable, terminal diseases often cause great suffering,” concluded Coombs Lee. “Ultimately, Dr. Nuland died as most doctors do, peacefully in his own home. He understood the end was near and opted to die gently in the loving arms of his family. And most Americans want to follow his example.”

Way to go, Dr. Nuland; thanks!

Click here to learn about the efforts underway in different states to make Death with Dignity legal.

How much longer for me?

In responding to, and reflecting on, an essay that I had required the class to read, one student agreed with the author that the classics in literature helped her know more about, and understand, herself.  "I learnt a lot about who I am from reading Dickens and others" she said.

Higher education no longer requires students to read the classics.  I recently read in an essay that at many universities, students majoring in English literature can graduate with the highest of honors without having read and analyzed even one of the many plays that Shakespeare penned.  We have courses on Lady Gaga and the history of rock and roll and quite a few other fluffy topics that students can take to fulfill the requirements on their way to earning that piece of paper.

To comment on the changing times, with the changes seemingly for the worse, is perhaps the surest sign of getting older.  The disappointment keeps growing and soon it is an angry, grumpy, old man blabbering something while swinging his walking stick in the air.  And, of course, with every passing day is the seemingly higher probability of death.

George Santayana claimed that one of the reasons older people tend to grumpiness is that they find it difficult to envision a world of any quality in which they will not play a part.

The essay by Joseph Epstein, whom I have quoted more than once in this blog--especially when commenting on the pathetic state of higher education--is also a wonderful reminder of how much the classics can help one understand about life and the self.  His essay, humorous throughout, is a commentary on a series of observations on life and death.  Observations by philosophical and literary giants, most of whom are not a part of the undergraduate canon anymore.

Epstein writes:

The Persian King Xerxes, Herodotus reports, witnessing his more than 2,000 troops massed for the battle to conquer Greece, wept at the thought that “all these multitudes here and yet in 100 years’ time not one of them will be alive.” Then as now the mortality rate remains at 100 percent, with no likelihood of dropping soon.

Could it be that such a passage will be lost on the youth today because they are far removed from death and suffering?  When it was rare for humans to live past 35, surely there was death all around, in contrast to now.  Unless one was systematically protected from witnessing the suffering that life was/is, as was the case with Siddhartha, there was no escaping being a daily witness to death.  Therefore, the learned and the wise thought and spoke and wrote a lot about death.  Epstein writes about Montaigne:

All learning, he believed, was to make us ready for the end, to prepare us for death. “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” is the title of his essay, and major statement, on the subject. He hoped that when death finally did appear, “it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must have our boots on, ready to go.”

Learning is to prepare for death.  That preparation does not imply that I am ready to check out today; after all, my eating and lifestyle habits are clearly to postpone that expiration date.  Again, Epstein:

The truth is that I have been waiting to die for quite some while now. I do not wish to die, certainly not until, as Socrates says, “life has no more to offer.” I’ve not found that life has anywhere near run out of delight for me. I’ve never considered suicide, though I have, at different times, out of spiritual fatigue, thought I would welcome death. “All is finite,” wrote Santayana, “all is to end, all is bearable—that is my only comfort.”
Yet, though, contra Dylan Thomas, I hope to be allowed to go gently into that good night, I do not figure to welcome death when it arrives.

When that moment comes, I, too, hope to fade gently into that good night.  The "peaceful death" that we sometimes read in obituaries.  And a timely death, in contrast to the "untimely death" that we read about.  I will not struggle because I know I have had one lucky life.  Lucky in my own way, and thematically no different from Epstein's articulation:

I have had a good and lucky run, having been born to honorable and intelligent parents in the most interesting country in the world during a period of unrivaled prosperity and vast technological advance. I prefer to think I’ve got the best out of my ability, and have been properly appreciated for what I’ve managed to accomplish. One may regard one’s death as a tragic event, or view it as the ineluctable conclusion to the great good fortune of having been born to begin with. I’m going with the latter.

If only I knew how much longer for me so that I can decide on whether or not to indulge on chocolate tonight ;)

Lynching's stepchild

The President and his attorney general, who couldn't care less about the rule of law, beat their chests and proclaim themselves to be defenders of the constitution only when it pleases them.  The death penalty is one of those instances.

After nearly two decades, the federal government resumed capital punishment.  Yes, resumed, and in the middle of a pandemic that is also killing people aided by the federal government's willful inaction.  The Supreme Court refused to stop it:

Hours after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute legal-challenge on a 5-4 vote, the Justice Department put a 47-year-old man to death for his role in the 1996 murder of a family of three, the first federal execution in more than 17 years.

A left-of-center person throughout my life, I have always opposed capital punishment.  But, as a secular liberal, what do I know compared to those god-loving Republicans who favor the death penalty!  I am sure that Jesus said torture and kill those who harmed you, right?

My earliest post on the awful Republican pursuit of the death penalty was in 2011, well before tRump became a darling candidate for the hate-filled Republicans.  I quoted Christopher Hitchens there when linking the religiosity of the country (especially Republicans) and the support for capital punishment:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

The Jesus-loving, Bible-thumping, pro-life party wants the government to kill.  Whether it is the support for war or the death penalty, these ardent supporters are pro-death.  These proud pro-life people are maniacally pro-killing!

Dahlia Lithwick noted the unfortunate irony that most of the ardent supporters of the death sentence are simultaneously the same ones denouncing the role of government, and their primary reason is that the government can't get any damn thing right:

when you hear Republicans moan about the bureaucratic burdens and failures of government-run education, health care, and disaster-relief systems, doesn't any part of you wonder why they have such boundless confidence in the capital justice system?

They have such remarkable confidence that the government is awesome when it comes to killing people!

There is one more dimension that is exceptional to the US among the advanced liberal democracies that have otherwise done away with capital punishment--the continuing effects in a society that once enslaved human beings.  Capital punishment in the United States is linked with "its history of racially motivated lynchings in the South."

Southern legislatures shifted to capital punishment so that legal and ostensibly unbiased court proceedings could serve the same purpose as vigilante violence: satisfying the lust for revenge.

The Equal Justice Initiative reported on this:

The death penalty in America is a “direct descendant of lynching.” Racial terror lynchings gave way to executions in response to criticism that torturing and killing Black people for cheering audiences was undermining America’s image and moral authority on the world stage.

The reality is that we the people are not in favor of the death penalty; "a majority of Americans say that life imprisonment with no possibility of parole is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty is."

As with the results of the 2016 election, the majority opinion does not count here too :(

Republicans are one of the rare groups in society to indicate a preference for the death penalty over life imprisonment. Political conservatives (51%) are another.
Democrats and political liberals (77%) are two of the subgroups most likely to believe life imprisonment is a better punishment for murder than the death penalty.

There is only one way to get rid of capital punishment--vote against the pro-death Republican candidates in November 2020, and throw tRump and his toadies out of power.

What if the sound that you hear is the death-rattle?

Answer this question, especially if you are not a healthcare professional: how many deaths were you witness to?  As in you were there watching a dearly loved one of yours die?

Even though we know really, really well that death comes to every one of us humans, few among us bear witness to the very process of dying.  Right?  To watch a person die in your presence is perhaps one of the most humbling moments ever.  I believe that the dying that I witnessed has made me respect death, and respect living even more.  I consider myself immensely privileged that they died in my presence.  Prized learning moments.

I don't understand why death happens behind sometimes a literal curtain, often with the ICU as the magical separator, when in this modern world we have such a sophisticated understanding of various aspects of life.  Isn't death a part of life itself that we want to understand?  If giving birth is now an event that is even recorded for posterity (whose, I wonder!) why this collective wanton ignorance about dying?

Most people in western societies die in hospital or in institutional care. Keeping death out of sight and out of mind in this way means that most people have little real experience of death and dying.

Which is also why practically every medical student witnesses the first ever deaths only when they are well into their twenties.  Our daily lives are like what the prince Siddhārtha lived--a life of comfort, and well protected from ailments and death.  But then all of us cannot transform into the Buddha, I suppose ;)

The ones who have witnessed the dying know all too well that it can be messy.  It can be uncomfortable.  It can be traumatic--to the observer!

As the end nears, it’s not uncommon for the breathing pattern to change, involving repeated cycles of breathing stopping (for what seems like ages) only to start up again. This restarted breathing is often quite rapid and deep. It then slows and stops again, and this cycle repeats over and over. ...
For family this can be difficult for each time the breathing stops it seems death has finally come, but no. Death seems to toy with them.
On top of this, breathing often becomes noisy. This is the so-called “death rattle”. During dying, swallowing becomes impaired and secretions, which would normally be swallowed or would provoke a brisk cough, sit at the back of the throat. With each breath, air bubbles through this fluid, and the resulting guttural noise often causes concern and distress to onlookers.

You watch that happen and you know you cannot do a damn thing.  You can be the richest person around, the most powerful ever, but the most one can do is to speed up the process of dying and make it less traumatic.

A recent letter I received from a grief stricken lady who sat with her husband for many hours through a long and difficult death, reported how he coughed, choked and wheezed, breathed erratically and gasped sporadically. He kept appearing to have died, only to start breathing again. This poor woman was completely traumatised, sitting through a night and day with her much-loved husband.
“It was a complete nightmare, like something out of a horror movie,” she wrote “… I just wanted the it to end, but it went on interminably. I will never forget it and I so wish it could have been made more dignified.”

In the old days, people took turns at the death-watch.  Not only because it might be unbearable for a single person, but also because there is no way to know beforehand if the end is five minutes away or after five days of deathly struggle.

Maybe it is time to question the belief that it is wrong to treat a dying patient in order to minimise the distress that their dying may cause their closest relatives. After all, few of us would desire our own deaths to be viewed as “something from a horror movie” and would support actions that might help our family at this difficult time.

Exactly.  I don't want my death to be "something from a horror movie," especially when I have had such a wonderful life.  I am prepared; are you?

Another atheist advantage: no worries about "rest in peace"

As my cohort gets over the proverbial age hill and begins the descent on the other side, our parents are beginning to rapidly vanish past the horizon.  A couple of days ago, it was the news of the death of a classmate's mother.  She was also a teacher in our school, which makes the death that much more of a real person that we all knew.

Responses on the Google Group soon came in from classmates from wherever we are on this planet, and typically included a note on "may her soul rest in peace."

My response did not include that.

I had other things to write to the friend, but not about his mother's soul.

How could I when I don't believe there is a soul, and for it to find a resting place after the death of a person!

All I know is that we die. Left to itself, the body will start decaying after death. Even from a practical and hygienic perspective, humans had to somehow take care of the dead.  We developed different narratives in order to make sense of life and death and what do with the person who has now been reduced to being referred to as "the body."

When my grandmother died, which was when I was still in high school, I found it bizarre that one moment she was paatti (grandmother) when she breathed her last in the car in which we were taking, and a few minutes after the breath ended, she became "the body" who was being transported to the morgue.  The name, the person, the identity was gone and reduced to "the body" all because she had stopped breathing.  How bizarre is that!

Maybe we reduce the dead person to that kind of a designation because of the emotions that we otherwise have to deal with, when it comes to the post-death procedures?  We are not comfortable with saying "paatti will be  cremated at about 3 pm tomorrow" whereas it is less difficult to deal with "the body will be cremated at 3 pm tomorrow"?  Or in a different culture that buries the dead, to visualize grandma being buried six feet under is more traumatic than if merely "the body" is buried?

Cultures have their own narratives of dealing not only with death but also with the dead.  "Rest in peace" is a part of that narrative.  The imagination here is of a soul that is different from the body, and the worry is about that soul.  If it is Hitler's soul, an overwhelming majority wants that soul to suffer. The narratives about that suffering then paint us pictures of hell and purgatory.  We don't want grandma souls to be anywhere near these horrible place and want those souls to rest in peace.  Nor do we want them to wander around as half-dead, zombies, who might wake up on Halloween and devour our brains.  (Sidebar question: will the souls of vegetarians also stay vegetarians and, thus, not eat human brains?)

Even if I leave my atheist framework aside and work with this "rest in peace," given that the classmate's mother was a Hindu, then is it really appropriate to note "may her soul rest in peace?"

No theologian I am, but that usage sounds a lot more like the purgatory-related narratives of Christianity.  In the Hindu faith, if one sinned a lot, then the "soul" is sent to hell, and is reborn after whatever time it will be in that hell.  Where is the place that the soul is going to rest?  Rebirth is then another chance for the soul to do good and access that other route that takes the soul to heaven.  Of course, Thrishanku is an exception here!

So, how does "rest in peace" really fit into the context of a Hindu's death?

Has "rest in peace" become a phrase that we utter as a reflex response anymore?  Like when people sneeze and we say gesundheit, even if we have no idea that means?  Is "rest in peace" no more than a part of the social behavior, like saying "have a nice day"?  But, when death is so different from everyday happenings, shouldn't our response be a lot more profound than a mere utterance of "may the soul rest in peace?"

Do people, including my classmates, think about all these when they say "rest in peace"?  Should they not think about these, especially when they claim to believe in whatever the narrative is of their choice on what happens after death?

I have profound respect for death; my posts in plenty are evidence of that.  It is one of those rare binary things.  One is either alive or dead.  When things are that definitive, there is something truly awesome.  I suspect that quite a few atheists are like me--we are simply amazed at the power of death.  We live every single day with that thought that death could happen any second.

The wonderful thing is that I don't have to worry about whether or not I will rest in peace.

Atheists or religious, the question is this: are we (our souls) at peace within when alive?

We kill because we are pro-life

My induction into following the American national politics, especially the presidential election, was when Michael Dukakis ran against George HW Bush.  Dukakis's ideas matched my preferred positions, and if I had a vote, I would have voted him in.

And then came the big one at the debates.  CNN's Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis that famous question related to the death penalty.  Dukakis articulated his progressive ideas.  And Republicans wasted no time to call him a wuss because he was not in favor of capital punishment.  Of course, the GOP racialized the election, as they always do. 

I cannot ever understand why a party faithful that so cherishes the right-to-life and quotes Jesus all the time would be so manically supportive of killing people.  It is insanity!

While 72% of Republicans say they favor the death penalty, as compared to 58% of Independents and 39% of Democrats, death-penalty support among Republicans fell by ten percentage points, from 82% just before the presidential election in October 2016. Death-penalty support has plummeted 26 percentage points among Democrats—a 40% decline—since 2002, when 65% told Gallup they favored capital punishment.

Look at that divergence.  72% of Republicans favor the death penalty, while only 39% of Democrats do.

That strong Republican support then translates to a slight overall majority in the country.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in April and May 2018 found that 54% of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, while 39% oppose it. That was up from 2016, when 49% of U.S. adults said they favored the death penalty, compared with 42% who opposed it.

And, this too: "A majority of whites (59%) favor the death penalty, compared with 36% of blacks and 47% of Hispanics, according to the Center’s 2018 survey."

Such a strong support for the death penalty is also why we have ended up with a strange, Twilight Zone, situation: Alabama wants to kill Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old death-row inmate.  The problem that the blood-thirsty, Bible-thumping, pro-lifers, have is this:

The 33-year veteran of death row—in solitary confinement for all that time—cannot “fully orient to time and place”, his lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, told the justices. His acute vascular dementia brought on by strokes “has left his cognitive abilities greatly diminished” with “intellectual functioning in the borderline range” and a sharply compromised memory. He is legally blind, slurs his speech, walks only with assistance and cannot recite the alphabet past the letter G. He is, Mr Stevenson said, “bewildered and confused most of the time”.

He is the guy they want to kill.

Nobody denies that Madison is a murderer.  That is not the issue.  The issue before the Supreme Court is whether this dementia patient with greatly diminished cognitive abilities ought to be murdered by the state.  The great state of Alabama contends it has the right and duty to kill him.  It has "a strong interest in seeking retribution for a horrible crime."

In his rebuttal, Mr Stevenson noted that the “awesome” power of executing someone must be exercised “fairly, reliably and humanely”. The Eighth Amendment’s constraints on punishing “really fragile, really vulnerable people” aren’t just a window into political justice. They are “a mirror”, he told the justices, on ourselves.

The mirror shows that we are cold, calculating, murderers!

Off with the head!

As I get older, I find myself to be more and more against violence.  Especially violence that is the state-sponsored kind.  It is gross. It is inhuman. To call state-sponsored violence beastly is an insult to the predators in the wild.

It is even more fucked up when it is the passionately religious who seem to be more supportive of state-sponsored violence in democratic societies.  It is bizarre when, for instance, those who are ready to kill people using the government machinery are also the ones who use the imagery of Jesus to tell us how we should live.  I suppose Jesus never talked about peace and love!

And hence the odd situation that the US, with all its bible-thumpers, continues with the death penalty.

the U.S. has ended up in some rough company, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. In the past generation, the number of countries that have stopping using the death penalty has doubled, from about fifty to about a hundred. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and of the thirty-five member states of the Organization of American States, only the U.S. carried out executions last year. The countries that executed the most offenders were, in order, China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Take a look again at the company that we keep: China, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.  Puke-worthy about how we treat life!  The US is a religious country alright, as much as the theocratic Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are.  As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote (I quoted him in this blog-post from more than five years ago)

The point of the penalty was that it was death. It expressed righteous revulsion and symbolized rectitude and retribution. Voila tout! The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

Whether or not the US is loved around the world, what the US does--not the rhetoric--is keenly watched by everybody.  Therefore, when the US government machinery kills its own people, then it is a convenient justification for other countries to kill their own people.

In August at a rally in Istanbul, after the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the BBC reported, the country’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said, “They say there is no death penalty in the E.U. … Well, the U.S. has it; Japan has it; China has it; most of the world has it. So they are allowed to have it. We used to have it until 1984. Sovereignty belongs to the people, so if the people make this decision I am sure the political parties will comply.” He said that the Turkish people might want to restore the death penalty to punish those responsible for killing hundreds of citizens during the attempted coup. That has not happened yet, but, if it does, its purpose, Erdogan suggested, will be a display of cold-blooded power.

Now that we in the US too will have a strongman president, the likes of Erdoğan will be all the happier to kill their own people, and will feel justified to do so.

the voters—the populists—continue to back the death penalty, as does the President-elect. (Donald Trump notoriously called for the execution of the Central Park Five, fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who were charged with a high-profile rape and beating, in 1989. Even though the five were later exonerated, Trump, during this year’s campaign, reiterated his belief in their guilt.)

Of course, in the US, politicians who want to reach the Oval Office dare not oppose the death penalty, especially because of the racial dimension of the punishment.  Remember what happened to Michael Dukakis?  Or how Bill Clinton had to prove his mettle to the White Christian voters by putting to death a mentally-impaired black man?  Yep, the US lives according to Jesus's words!

The only ray of hope is the trend of remarkable fall in the number of executions and death sentences.  Aziz Ansari joked that for racism to go away, we simply have to wait for the racists to die--the younger generation is a lot more progressive than the middle-aged and older whites are.  Similarly, we simply have to wait for another generation to exit the world for the US to end the horrible practice of state-sponsored killing.  And maybe by then we will also stop electing the likes of the worst human being ever to reach the Oval Office.

Philosophy, shmilosophy. Death happens. It sucks!

It has been a month since Nelson Mandela was taken to the hospital.  If not for the machines doing the breathing for him, Mandela would have died many days ago.  This is exactly the kind of a situation that I hope I will not be put through, whenever that time comes.

Of course, Mandela's month is nothing compared to Ariel Sharon's condition.  Remember Sharon?  The tough no-nonsense former prime minister of Israel?  Back in January 2006, Sharon suffered a stroke and brain hemorrhage that a mere couple of decades ago would have ended a human's life.  Not now. Sharon continues to live in a comatose state.  He is 85-years old.  Mandela will be 95 in a fortnight.

Mandela and Sharon are not abstract entities.  They are real people, with real family members.  And those families do whatever any typical family does.  We want to fight that death.  Even when the person is 95 years old.  Even when it is a comatose state in one's eighties.

Mandela's and Sharon's machine-assisted living are, to a large extent, reflections of our inability to deal with mortality.   We are not at ease to deal with our own mortality as well as another person's mortality.  We struggle.

And we struggle a lot more as our personal connection with the dying person gets stronger.  Thus, we cry and sob when one of our own dies, but we rarely ever pause when some stranger across town dies.  When an Ethiopian dies in a village somewhere, well, we don't even know about it for us to react, though we know that quite a few Ethiopians die every single day.

Which means the death of the person is not merely about that person.  But, it is really about us.  If that death matters to us, affects us, then that death is significant. We shed tears. If that death does not matter to us, we couldn't care.  We continue to watch movies, make love, eat, do laundry, without any change in our lives.

Oh, but, death is terribly traumatic when it is a close one who dies. Doesn't matter if it is a dog or a human. A grandfather or an uncle or a mother. It gets us.

When you lose someone very close to you, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds.

Our stories are so intertwined with that life that is no more.  When my dog died, that part of my world was shattered. To pieces.

With my dog, Congo, a couple months before he died

An outsider from a culture in which dogs don't matter much would not have understood why I should have grieved that loss so much.  But, I did. I do, even now.

[If] the hardest thing is not that the other person’s life has ended but that our own has been ripped to shreds, then has grief become a deeply selfish thing? I don’t think so. The phenomenology of grief means that we cannot draw any simple division between self and other. We feel confused — are we crying for ourselves or for the deceased? — because our feelings for ourselves and the person we love can’t be neatly taken apart, just as we cannot neatly take ourselves apart from those to whom we are closest. Rather than being a purely selfish thought, the idea that someone was so loved that he became a part of you is the most profound form of appreciation possible. It’s perhaps also why death is so often marked by regret, which is not about just you or the one you mourn, but for the shared opportunities lost to you both.

Yep, that some other person, or even a dog, was loved so much that they became a part of who we are is why we grieve so much.  Which is why the death of immediate family and very close friends and pets tear apart our lives, whereas the death of that Ethiopian is a mere statistic to us.

Every death is:

a reminder that no one gets it all straight, and that even the best philosophy in the world can’t save us from ultimate extinction, likely in a state far from enlightenment. It has to be enough to have lived well and to have played a part in the lives of others too, and the only philosophy worth its salt is the kind that helps us to do just that.
However we grieve, after the tomb is sealed, the ashes scattered, or the coffin buried, all we can do is get on with trying to make sure we write the best chapters of our own lives that we can, while contributing some good lines and passages to those of others. We can’t guarantee that the great editor of fate won’t ruin it by inserting an ugly ending. But we can give the bastard as little help as possible.

So, yes, give that grim reaper as little help as possible.

A "Christian Sharia" in Texas? OMD!

According to this news item from the Times (HT),

A Texas man is due to be executed next month despite admissions by jurors that they consulted biblical passages advocating death as a punishment to help to decide his fate.
Before sending Khristian Oliver to his death after he was convicted of murdering his victim — who was bludgeoned with a gun barrel — jurors read passages of the Old Testament, including one that states that a killer who uses an iron object to kill “shall surely be put to death”.

Note that there was no reasonable doubt regarding the guilt of the accused.  So, the issue is not with establishing whether or not the accused was indeed guilty.  But, it is with the punishment--even though capital punishment is legal in Texas, and even though "the jurors were instructed by the judge not to refer to anything that was not presented as evidence in the courtroom" the jurors' decision to go with the death sentence was guided by passages from the bible :-(

Amnesty International called on the Texas authorities to commute Oliver’s death sentence because since his trial, jurors had admitted that they read the Bible while they decided whether he should live or die. In particular, they said that Bibles were passed around with specific passages highlighted, and that one juror read aloud to his fellow jurors the passage, from Numbers XXXV, 16: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

This is not a new case--the homicidal act was in 1998.  And apparently the consultation with the bible was known soon after, which is why the death sentence had been appealed:

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said last year that jurors had wrongly used the Bible and that it had amounted to an “external influence” prohibited under the US Constitution. Yet the court said there was not enough evidence to show they were prejudiced when they decided to send Oliver to death row.
In April the US Supreme Court — the final chance Oliver had to appeal against his death sentence — refused to hear the case, despite being urged to do so by 50 former and current federal and state prosecutors.

Hmmm ....refused to hear the case?  How awful!  So, does the refusal legitimize jurors consulting the bible to award punishments?  What if a few other juries decide to follow this "precedent?"  Isn't the role of the Supremes to essentially make sure we have the correct constitutional precedents for law?  Oh wait, according to Chief Justice Roberts their job is only to call balls and strikes.  Yeah, right!  And this is not a case where he didn't have to worry if it was a ball or a strike :-(

BTW, what an odd coincidence that the Christian jurors consulted the bible to arrive at the death sentence for the accused whose name sounds the same as the faithful, with one difference in the lettering: Khristian!!!

People just disappear sometimes. You have to love and appreciate them while they're near you.

I woke up after a good night sleep.  And later in the day, came the update that the great aunt had passed away.

It is the third death in the extended family within the past two months.  "It has been three, and I wonder who is next," my mother noted.

Such is our mortal lives.  At some point even when we are young we learn that death eventually comes for us too.  We too are on the same conveyor belt moving towards the same gate.  There is only one direction and only one gate.

The death of a young boy, a year or two older than me, was the event that convinced the 9-year old me that I, too, would die at some point.  Witnessing the death of my grandmother as an early teenager removed any doubt whatsoever.  Every single death further clarifies the understanding that we are mortals with expiration dates.  As George Yancy notes:

No matter how many times I’ve decided to remove the veil, the sting of our collective finitude continues to hit me, along with the reality of bodily decomposition and putrefaction. The unspoken reality of death, which is the haunting background of our lives, shakes my body ... Yet a clarity emerges.

Even though we know that we will not live forever, and even though this accident of being can come to an end at any time, we simply refuse to engage in frank and honest discussions of death and, therefore, life.  I agree, again, with Yancy:

Death is our collective fate. Yet so many of us fear to talk about it, fear to face it, terrified by the idea of nonbeing. But we must face our destiny, our rendezvous with death.

We love living.  It is difficult to accept that there will be a moment from when we will no longer be here.  It sounds like a cruel joke that somebody is playing on us.  But, we can't dodge that  "rendezvous with death."  That fateful encounter is the loneliest event in one's life.

Where went the life of that boy?  My friends?  My grandmother?  My great aunt?  What will happen to me when my life ends?

Years ago, I came to peace with an understanding that I will never know the answer(s).  All I can do is live in the here and in the now.  And feel sad that the people I knew are taking turns exiting this world. We feel the pain only because we survive. Because we are alive. We are alive to know and feel that the person who was close to us died.

I feel privileged that I am alive to think about them.

Death strikes. Again.

Four elders in the extended family died within a span of eight weeks.  They were all octogenarians; one of them was only months away from turning 90, and the latest was not far behind her.

"She was fine even a week ago," father said.  "She had some kind of a nasty cough for two days.  The doctor gave her antibiotics.  Couple of days into this treatment, when they tried to wake her up for the afternoon coffee, she was gone."

We all have to go, sometime, even though we love living.  The later it happens in one's life, the easier it is for the rest of us to accept that death.  We are often traumatized when death happens to a younger person.  Especially when kids die.  Which is also why the old tradition considers the death of the very elderly who have experienced life to its fullest as கல்யாண சாவு "kalyaana saavu"--in this case, the death is like a celebration.

All the four deaths happened with their people around.  Only one was in a hospice setting, and the rest were at home.  We forget that this is how humans usually died, and not in some sterile setting.  Away from traditional societies, like here in the US, only the rarest of the lucky ones ever get such an exit.  For most of us, we die among strangers:

For most of human history, death has been an intensely spiritual experience. Frequently, some religious figure, a pastor or a shaman, would be at a patient’s side at the end to help make it a deep and meaningful experience not only for the patient but also for his or her family and friends. Studies show that most patients have great spiritual needs and many derive strength from their faith. These days, instead of a shaman, patients are surrounded by strangers in scrubs. Death – one of the most complex events that can occur in a hospital – is usually handled by the youngest physicians.

Even though we know really, really well that death comes to every one of us humans, few among us bear witness to the very process of dying.  My father recalled witnessing one death in particular, when he could see the flame of life slowly extinguishing.  Even in the old country, only a lucky few get to witness the end, which is a humbling experience. 

I have been lucky to have been taught this most fundamental lesson of life more than once.  Witnessing the ending is a profound lesson on how fragile our existence is.  To watch a person die in your presence is perhaps one of the most humbling moments ever.  I believe that the dying that I witnessed has made me respect death, and respect living even more.  I consider myself immensely privileged that they died in my presence.

And when the end happens, the person instantly becomes referred to as "the body" that needs to be taken care of!  In the old traditions, the four bodies were cremated.  We mourn the passing.

Life continues on for the rest, and it is important to remind ourselves that we live in the present--without ever forgetting those who went before us, and who made the present possible for us.  

Death in the time of the coronavirus

Death is a part of life.  Yes.  But, what worries us now is the additional deaths--the ones that have been suddenly caused by the coronavirus.  It is overwhelming, literally and emotionally.

Hospital chaplains are also overwhelmed.  This essay in The New Yorker that is centered on a young chaplain in New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital is poignant.

[Kaytlin] Butler, twenty-six, is one of eight chaplains on Mount Sinai’s Spiritual Care team. The team, which also has four residents, includes two rabbis, a Jewish woman who is not ordained, a Seventh-day Adventist, a woman who is inspired by Buddhism, and an evangelical Christian. (The hospital is also served by two Catholic priests, who are sent by the New York archdiocese.)      

What if a patient is Muslim? Or not religious?  "when families request prayers for loved ones, she honors their traditions. For Muslims, she says the Shahada."

It is a tough job--both in terms of what they have to do, and the context in which they do it.  COVID-19 has made it even tougher for chaplains because invariably the coronavirus patients die alone when they are hooked up to ventilators and more in the ICUs.  It is such a lonely event that even the chaplain cannot be at the patient's bedside calming and reassuring them.  This virus is diabolical.

I have blogged about death as the loneliest event, though that "lonely" was about the end being a solo act.  The following is an edited version of that post from September 2017.
*******************

I am pretty much convinced that it is the acute realization that I might be dead at any second that drives most of my decision-making.

It is good to know that I am not alone in thinking like this.  Today, I came to know that there is something called existential psychotherapy, and that there is an existential psychotherapist writer named Irvin Yalom.

Yalom is practically my father's age.  He "helped introduce to American psychological circles the idea that a person’s conflicts can result from unresolvable dilemmas of human existence, among them the dread of dying."

Hey, that's what I have been saying and writing, based on my intuitive understanding.

Another of Yalom’s signature ideas, expressed in books such as Staring at the Sun and Creatures of a Day, is that we can lessen our fear of dying by living a regret-free life, meditating on our effect on subsequent generations, and confiding in loved ones about our death anxiety. When I asked whether his lifelong preoccupation with death eases the prospect that he might pass away soon, he replied, “I think it probably makes things easier.”

Exactly!  Regret-free life. Effect on future generations. Talking about death and the anxiety.  To me, this is a healthy formula for a wonderful life.

“If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven’t done, if we’ve lived an unfulfilled life,” he says, “when death comes along, it’s a lot worse. I think it’s true for all of us.”

Yep, the religions and cultural traditions do not matter one bit.  It always comes down to living fulfilled lives.

When two of his close friends died recently, he realized that his cherished memory of their friendship is all that remains. “It dawned on me that that reality doesn’t exist anymore,” he said sadly. “When I die, it will be gone.”

Friends die.  Sometimes suddenly. Relatives die. Every death tears the fabric of our own lives.  We worry that we did not spend time with them when they were alive.

But, memories remain. And memories are all that we can take with us.

“Dying,” he wrote in Staring at the Sun, “is lonely, the loneliest event of life.” Yet empathy and connectedness can go a long way toward reducing our anxieties about mortality.

Empathy is perhaps the emotion that is most important to me, especially in the way it helps me understand my own existence and, thereby, my death.

For all the morbidity of existential psychotherapy, it is deeply life-affirming. Change is always possible. Intimacy can be freeing. Existence is precious. “I hate the idea of leaving this world, this wonderful life,” Yalom said.

Yes, when the day comes, I will hate leaving behind this wonderful life.  But, as my father said, "even the great souls could not stop death.  They too are gone."  Such is life on this pale blue dot.

A Death in the Family

"We are ok" dad said when I answered the phone.

But, I knew everything was not ok.  It was a call that originated from India during the early hours of the day there.

We had learnt from the Tamil version of Ramayana--Kambar's--about how masterfully Hanuman conveyed to Rama regarding what he saw in Lanka, and about Sita--Rama's wife.  He reports, கண்டேன் சீதையை (Saw Sita.)  Getting to that important bottom-line right away.  And then moves on to providing the details.

Thus, dad, knowing that I knew it was not any normal, regular, call, gave me the bottom-line first that mom was ok. 

Then came the reason for the phone call.

A death.

Of his brother.

The only sibling he has ever had.

It was a long life into his mid-80s.  A long life compared to his father--my grandfather--who died in his early 20s.  A long life compared to his mother--my grandmother--who lived to 67.

However long one lives, a death is a death.  And however much we might not have been close, death is that final termination of a relationship. The finality of it all.

Every moment we live is a battle that we win against death.  But, ultimately, we lose the war.  One of the challenges when we are alive is to be ready for deaths. Of our dogs. Of parents. Of children. Of neighbors. Most of all, to be ready for our own deaths.

As Martin Luther King noted in his marvelous and moving speech the day before his assassination, "Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."  It is that profound sense of being at peace inside and mentally ready for death to strike at any second. 

A death makes us notice the sharp contrast that life is.  The bright, vivid, luscious colors of life against the dark shades of death. 

Any time I am reminded of my own mortality, I feel compelled to ask myself whether there is anything left hanging loose that I would want to tie up before it is my turn to exit this wonderful planet, of which I have seen very little and of which I have understood practically nothing. 

The loneliest event of life

The conversations with my father last week were mostly about two deaths.  One was in his mid 70s, and the other was in her early 80s.

In one of those conversations, I told my father, "yes, we all have to go at some time.  But, when that happens, it is difficult for the others to handle."

It felt odd saying that.  For one, I am much younger.  And the son to say such stuff to his father?

Father agreed with me.  "Even the great souls could not stop death.  They too are gone."

I am pretty much convinced that it is the acute realization that I might be dead at any second that drives my decision-making.  I will be dead, after a fleeting existence.

It is good to know that I am not alone in thinking like this.  Today, I came to know that there is something called existential psychotherapy, and that there is an existential psychotherapist writer named Irvin Yalom. 

Yalom is practically my father's age.  He "helped introduce to American psychological circles the idea that a person’s conflicts can result from unresolvable dilemmas of human existence, among them the dread of dying."  Hey, that's what I have been saying and writing.  So, there is backing for my intuitive understanding.  Alright!

Another of Yalom’s signature ideas, expressed in books such as Staring at the Sun and Creatures of a Day, is that we can lessen our fear of dying by living a regret-free life, meditating on our effect on subsequent generations, and confiding in loved ones about our death anxiety. When I asked whether his lifelong preoccupation with death eases the prospect that he might pass away soon, he replied, “I think it probably makes things easier.”

Exactly!  Regret-free life. Effect on future generations. Talking about death and the anxiety.  To me, this is a healthy formula for a wonderful life.

“If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven’t done, if we’ve lived an unfulfilled life,” he says, “when death comes along, it’s a lot worse. I think it’s true for all of us.”

Yep, the religions and cultural traditions do not matter one bit.  It always comes down to living fulfilled lives.

When two of his close friends died recently, he realized that his cherished memory of their friendship is all that remains. “It dawned on me that that reality doesn’t exist anymore,” he said sadly. “When I die, it will be gone.”

Friends die.  Sometimes suddenly. Relatives die. Every death tears the fabric of our own lives.  We worry that we did not spend time with them when they were alive.

But, memories remain. And memories are all that we can take with us.

“Dying,” he wrote in Staring at the Sun, “is lonely, the loneliest event of life.” Yet empathy and connectedness can go a long way toward reducing our anxieties about mortality.

Oh my, how come I never knew about Yalom all these years?  Empathy is perhaps the emotion that is most important to me, especially in the way it helps me understand my own existence and, thereby, my death.

For all the morbidity of existential psychotherapy, it is deeply life-affirming. Change is always possible. Intimacy can be freeing. Existence is precious. “I hate the idea of leaving this world, this wonderful life,” Yalom said.

Yes, the sincere thinking about death and my existence makes me appreciate life in ways that I never knew before.  The friend has mentioned more than once about how much I talk about the blue sky and puffy white clouds.  Or about the river.  There is way too much beauty in the world all around me.  I will terribly hate leaving all these behind.  But, when that day comes--perhaps only sixty years from now, much against my wishes--I hope to leave regret-free and with content.

Source

Till Death Do Us Part ... or until the contract expires?

A student who graduated more than a year ago knocked on my office door, came in for a chat, and sat down for a whole lot of talk.  Any time any such student comes by, well, it means that I know quite a bit of their stories.  I asked him about his sister and parents, whom I have never met though.  His parents are divorced, he said.

"Are you doing ok?" I asked him and told him about the research on adult children of parents getting divorced finding it more difficult to handle than the young kids who relatively easily adapt to the change.

"Mine was a twenty-year story" I said.  And then told  him about my parents who, if things go well, will celebrate sixty years of married life in slightly more than a year.  In their case, it will be "till death do us part."

But, being married to another till death was an idea that dates back to the times when the average life expectancy at birth was barely thirty-five.  Life, especially the number of years we live, has changed dramatically in a mere two hundred years.  In those old times, if people married at puberty and died in their mid-thirties, well, that is a twenty-year period.  Hmmm.... wait, twenty echoed in my life too!

What if we are operating with a model that is no longer applicable?

Our current contract – ‘until death’ – might have worked when people didn’t live all that long (according to the American sociologist and author Stephanie Coontz, the average marriage in colonial times lasted under 12 years); or when many women died in childbirth, freeing men to marry multiple times (which they did); and when men of means needed women to cook, clean and caretake, and women needed men for financial security.

One grandmother was married to her husband for less than four years--a tragic event killed grandfather.  The other grandmother was married for many more years than four--when grandfather died of a heart attack, they had been married for thirty years.  In both cases, it was "death do us part."  Of course, as traditions mandated, the grandmothers lived as widows for the rest of their lives.  Had the grandmother died after four years of being married, grandfather would have re-married, of course; but, that's a different topic for another day.

At the recent conference, a wonderful, older, colleague sounded a tad agitated over how his son's fairy-tale marriage ended even before the first anniversary--a divorce, not death, parted the couple.  We live in a different world now.

In a recent survey, many Millennials indicated that they’d be open to a ‘beta marriage’, in which couples would commit to each other for a certain number of years – two years seemed to be the ‘right’ amount – after which they could renew, renegotiate or split, as Jessica Bennett wrote in Time magazine last year. While it wasn’t a scientific survey, it points to a willingness to see marriage as something other than ‘until death’, which, in fact, it is not. In 2013, 40 per cent of newlyweds had been married at least once before, according to the US think tank the Pew Research Center. Since 10 per cent of first marriages don’t even make it past five years, a renewable marriage contract makes more sense than ever.

Marriage as a renewable contract makes rational sense.

In 1971, the Maryland legislator Lena King Lee proposed a Marriage-Contractual Renewal Bill so couples could annul or renew their marriage every three years. In 2007, a German legislator proposed a seven-year contract; in 2010, a women’s group in the Philippines proposed a 10-year marital contract; and in 2011, Mexico City legislators suggested a reform to the civil code that would allow couples to decide on the length of their marital commitment, with a minimum of two years.

But, imagine the logistical hassles of contract renewals.  Common property, kids, tangible and intangible investment into making the contract work, ... nightmares for most of us, but pleasant wet-dreams for attorneys who will think of billable hours!

At some point, we might have to admit to the outdated and pointless "till death do us part" notion and work on a major overhaul.

Whose life is it anyway?

“If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

That is one tough question.

If I give consent to my own death, then I won't even be here after a while to find out what happened; after all, I will be dead!

On the other hand, when the person is "Sue Rodriguez, a 42-year-old suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S." it is not merely a theoretical thought experiment.

 The NIH fact-sheet on ALS is an awfully depressing read.  What a curse to be afflicted with that disease.  Which is why Rodriguez wanted to have a doctor-assisted-suicide. And it was in that Canadian legal battle in 1993 that she said, “If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?”

The NY Times piece reports that she lost the case, which was taken up later by other patients and lawyers.  Now, this has become legal in Canada, and "the Canadian system puts doctors and nurse practitioners at its center."

The legal victory made possible 78-year old John Shields to schedule his death well into an incurable and terminal heart disease.  The report can be emotionally challenging to read; imagine then how intensely emotional it would be to watch a loved one die.  Right?

Here in Oregon, it is "20 years since Oregon voters passed the nation’s first death-with-dignity law."

Washington became the second state to adopt a death with dignity law, followed by Colorado, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Montana joined the list by court order. What may prove to be the turning point came in 2015, when the California Assembly approved a death with dignity law, tripling the number of Americans who can choose to end their lives on their own terms. More than 20 other states are now considering their own death-with-dignity laws.
Other states, including California, have patterned their laws on Oregon’s, which allows a patient with a terminal illness who is expected to die within six months or less to request life-ending prescription drugs. The request must be witnessed by two people and approved by two physicians, and the patient must be determined to be mentally sound. Last year, 204 people in Oregon requested the drugs and 133 people used them. That’s less than 0.5 percent of all deaths.

Of course, in Oregon (and in the other states too) patients have to self-administer the life-ending chemical cocktail.  Physicians are not allowed to press the syringe, unlike in the Canadian or Dutch euthanasia procedures.

The letters to the editor reflect the typical concerns and worries that we might have on this extremely difficult topic.  As one letter-writer notes there even when disagreeing with such an exit, "The growing discussion of dying well is a welcome and needed one."  Yes.

Do bugs mourn the death of one of their own?

For a few months now I have been bugged.
No, not by the NSA--at least, I hope.  I am far too insignificant to even blip in the NSA's radar.
This is a living bug. No, not the much joked about mother-in-law either ;)

A real bug.
Tiny-sized.
Every day I see one or two and I kill them.

When I was gone to India for three weeks, there was a little bit of a worry in me that when I return I might find a party going on at home with the bugs and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.  But, nope.  I guess they, too, took a vacation from the daily grind and then decided to show up to work when I returned.

Every single time I wipe one off the face of the earth, I feel sorry for those critters.  I kill them when I see them inside my home.  I don't care what they do outside, or if they raid my neighbor's awesome cobblers.  Not in my home.

Of course, I am not the only one who worries himself to death, metaphorically speaking, about the killing of bugs that occasionally stray into my home.  I worry because there are larger issues at stake:

it seems to me quite reasonable to think that the death of the fly is entirely insignificant and that it is at the same time a kind of catastrophe. To entertain such contradictions is always uncomfortable, but in this case the dissonance echoes far and wide, bouncing off countless other decisions about what to buy, what to eat – what to kill; highlighting the inconsistencies in our philosophies, our attempts to make sense of our place in the world and our relations to our co‑inhabitants on Earth. The reality is that we do not know what to think about death: not that of a fly, or of a dog or a pig, or of ourselves.

We do not know what to make of death.  Death, which we know happens all the time all around us.  If we paused to think about death, then we see it everywhere. We see ourselves in the deaths that happen.

As the poet William Blake realised when he, too, carelessly squashed an insect:

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

So, ok, what do we do?  How do we figure this out?  What to make of killing a fly or a roach?  Why is it ok to swat a fly but not kosher, ahem, to kill a pig?  Or, why do we feel squeamish when we read about an execution gone wrong?

There are no answers.  Well, there are plenty of answers and, for all I know, most of them are correct answers too, even if the answers contradict each other.  To use a line from an old IBM advertisement series, "you make the call."  Because:

Philosophers academic and amateur – which is to say, pretty much all of us – prefer to think that paradoxes must have solutions, that they are somehow just the wrong way of looking at things, or a muddle of grammar and syntax. But not this one. It is, as far as I can see, part of the nature of things. To take both sides seriously and to seek some way to live with them is part of what it is to be human; part of what it means to be a guest at the party of life and death.

Struggling to answer such questions is very much a part of being human.

Being human is not meant to be easy.  Certainly nowhere as easy as squashing a bug.