The Art of Dying
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
After being in and out of hospital for a while my dad is now in intensive care. The doctor took me and mom to a private room today where they explained that he's so frail, if anything happens there's no point in trying to help him. No CPR, no respirator. Basically, it's going to be either this time or another time, but it's going to be like this.
My main thought is that he's doing the opposite of being born. When I watched my kids get born, they were little things with no personality. As they grow more and more of them gets created. Their habits, what they like to eat, soon their friends and interests. Opinions about every little thing in the world.
Now I'm seeing that deconstructed in my dad. I stopped being able to talk to him about adult stuff some time ago. Science, politics, history. His thoughts on being transplanted to the west as an adult. As he's gotten more ill recently it's degenerated into what is essentially teenager stuff: why won't he exercise to improve his heart condition? It's not like he doesn't understand what the doctors say.
I might not have another conversation with him, and the last one was last night. We're beyond teenager stage now. He kept asking the same series of questions over and over. Is my heart OK? Nose? Ear? Brain? Leg? Tissemand? Yes really, he said that. The only part of his body he asked me about in Danish, not Chinese.
I feel bad about being angry with him, too. He's basically not followed any medical advice since his bypass. Many family members have brought it up with him. He's just sat there for the best part of three years, doing nothing to get better.
And part of me thinks I caused him to check out of life. Before he had his surgery I sat down with him, when we were both adults, and talked through what might have been the last conversation. He said he had no regrets, the world had treated him just fine, and if the end was now, that was fine. There was a peaceful resignation at that time. Perhaps having the sign off conversation made him not want to struggle back to fitness.
Was given these when my Dad was clearly failing to thrive and had given up. He basically stopped caring about living after my Mom died, although it wasn’t entirely clear at the time.
He said he used it to remind him that the only thing he had control over was that little dot in the middle. The rest was outside of his control.
Acceptance of death is as much about accepting that we only have today and should focus on steering it in the best direction we can as it is about accepting there is an end. Don’t beat yourself up over your feelings or past conversations that you feel influenced his decision.
I would also caution about taking what the doctor says at face value. Right off the bat, the elderly are a population that has the lowest ROI for care because the older we get the less likely we are to survive, and I've seen many doctors on autopilot with my grandparents. Medicine is also a very difficult field where even experienced professionals can make mistakes when it comes to diagnosing something, and the elderly also tend to be the most complicated medically. It's also confounded, at least in the US, by care being doled out based on your insurance, which can further complicate an accurate diagnosis by restricting access to resources and care.
I have accepted that I will probably be dead in a few years. It is why I haven't had the PEG removed. I'm keeping it in so I can dump pills and vodka directly into my stomach if things hurt too much.
I have accepted things. I have all my end of life stuff sitting in a envelope on my desk. I have already paid for my remains to be taken care of. Sigh, the funeral home I paid in advance is probably going to end up on a episode of of American Greed.
But yeah, don't take it personal if we give up. There is a point where the bad is greater than the good and just checking out is the smart thing to do.
His reply: he's already lived longer than he expected to (he's in his late 70s) and is satisfied with what he's done. There's no doubt he loves us but he doesn't feel obligated to stick around for our sake. It's taken a long time for me to accept this as his right.
I wish I could change his mind and every day I try and think of ways to get him excited to stick around longer. I'd love for my (hypothetical future) kids to meet him. There's still so much I want to learn from him.
But I don't know what it's like to be as old as him, and I don't have a right to ask him to do more than he already has. Maybe when he's closer to the end I'll be mad at myself for not fighting harder for him. This piece - and your comment - have made me more determined to do so.
Death is as natural as birth. But sadism, addiction, domination, waste... those are not natural. They are a force from another place, one many religions have a name for.
This does seem to be the point many religions try to make. That there are things in this world worse than death, worse than suffering. There are things which strip you of your nature, and many of them may even feel pleasant, tempting, satisfying as they wrap their hands around you.
The comment you linked also makes many flawed assumptions. For example: infinite population growth is always good. That idea is literally cancer and deeply ignorant of ecological homeostasis
This is probably correct.
Of course, it would also mean the total upheaval of human society. Not just in terms of our environment and physical space, but all of our customs and culture. What's the point of any rite of passage if the group you enter is ever-expanding, never diminishing?
How would we even look back at what we've done, our own past, and have it matter if our future is essentially infinite? Death provides us with a context to make our lives meaningful. I cannot for the life of me even begin to imagine the sort of society that would emerge if humans didn't die.
The universe is a pretty big place. We’re going to need long lives if we expect to go anywhere.
We're born; we live; we die. Just like every other living organism.
But if you to try to objectively answer a more abstract question, "Is it better for humans to live to 150 years of age rather than 75 years of age?", I don't think there is objectively a right answer.
It's not very different from the question of whether having more people living on earth is a better or worse thing. Is having 5 billion people living on earth better than having 1 billion? Or 100 million? Or 1 million? Or 50,000? Why?
You might end up making an argument that "more progress is possible" if we have more people, or if people can live longer lives. But the idea of "progress" for the sake of "progress" is not necessarily one that enhances the human lives being lived.
There is a current strain of thought that the pinnacle of happy lives for humans was during the hunter-gatherer stage tens of thousands of years ago, and that the switch to agriculturally based societies did not enhance human lives, although once it happened it was not possible to reverse the change. For one example of this, refer to Noah Harari's first book, _Sapiens_, an excerpt here: https://www.ynharari.com/topic/ecology/
Something very similar may have happened with the industrial revolution, and be happening now with, e.g., the digital revolution. IN the realm of medicine/health there are many areas of "progress" that have the potential to make our lives worse. E.g., cloning. On another note, there is little doubt in my mind that merely inventing new ways to prolong human lives is by no means necessarily a good thing. You can see that in current medical world, where many people are kept alive in an undignified state and with extremely low quality of life, while at the same time voluntary euthanasia is illegal.
At the very least, more careful thought should be put into what impact major "progress" is likely to have on human life. Unfortunately, in our world things are driven by corporations, profit, and a mostly unquestioned assumption that "progress is good". As it is, technological progress continues at a pace we can't really grasp, and we're left to try to make sense of it after the technology is here. Not a good scenario, it's like unleashing the genie in the bottle, opening pandora's box.
This answer depends on the definition of what is "better".
Is it "better" to have two "medium" happy people or one "very" happy person? On a societal level, should we be measured by collective happiness (the sum), average happiness, the most happy person, or the least happy person? Or maybe "happiness" should not be the measure at all. Evolution dictates that the "best" is the one that survives the longest as a species, so maybe we should tune society simply for long term survival, regardless of happiness. Or maybe you believe in god, and "be fruitful and multiply" is the standard, so the more the better, regardless of other criteria. Maybe the answer is to maximize GDP. Or perhaps seeking knowledge is the pinnacle, so any society that builds the largest pool of knowledge is the best.
There are countless other ways of determining "better". Take a philosophy course and dig into it.
Trying to imagine social impacts is too grand and can lead to making you think it's hopeless because you can't imagine how to order the future society. Of course, you aren't in charge of society, so don't worry about it. Worry about yourself and your family.
Imagine that you're at the hospital with your grandmother, or your mother, or your wife. The doctor says "She's got a degenerative disease. She's going to become frail, lose her mental faculties, and die. Oh, of course, I could prescribe this medication which would restore her to perfect health, but I'm not sure about the broader cultural implications..."
Would you prefer that your loved one sicken and die? I wouldn't. I think we can figure out the social and economic problems. We should solve aging and death as quickly as possible.
Seems optimistic. We are decidely bad at figuring out exactly those kinds of problems right now.
Maybe if more people remembered relatives dying of polio or measles, we would have fewer vaccine scares.
Maybe if more people remembered seeing great species going extinct with their own eyes, we would be more concerned about conservation.
I think the most positive outcome would be that we actually stop thinking about our own little lives and get a sense of the bigger picture - all of the other humans and species that matter as much as the I that I send all day thinking about.
I really hope that if we could live longer as individuals, we would mature as a species. But I'm not convinced that that's what would occur.
Have you fleshed out what that might possibly mean, or how that could ever happen? Unless our body/mind is "naturally" declining (i.e., because of nature), there would seem to be no reason for a well-functioning person to choose to die. Nature is always going to dictate the most important terms.
-Plain old ennui. Don't underestimate this.
-Depression from alienation because society and culture has evolved over centuries beyond their capacity to accept change or has evolved to a point that society no longer accepts them.
-Grief at the death of loved ones, either accidentally or through their own choice to check out.
-Grief at the estrangement of loved ones as their personality and beliefs change over time.
-Loss of one's accumulated wealth and privilege, whether by accident, incompetence, or malice of others
I'm sure that many more are possible.
I would add that basically everything you list is why there exists in human cultures a general disapproval of suicide, because people may feel bad in the situations you list, but suicide is not a good answer; in most cases the person's feelings will change and they will be glad they chose not to kill themselves. Deciding to die for reasons like those listed is not generally considered "dying with dignity"; it's a tragic case of people becoming overwhelmed by feeling to their own detriment.
Accepting death is accepting that those unique thoughts will disappear, and that the universe will be lesser for it. Accepting death means looking at each person, intellect blazing like stars, all the clusters and constellations and galaxies of humanity, and accepting that each point of light will sputter, shrivel, and extinguish.
Beating death means that these unique views will not be lost, will not be extinguished. Beating death means that there will be the time to talk to each other, to get to know every person one at a time, and to become the greater for it. It may be tomorrow, it may be in ten thousand years, but I'd like to get to know you, too.
Unless you created your own language that you think in this is most certainly not the case
[EDIT] I knew I was reminded of something from SF. Quoting from the Wikipedia article for Pierson's Puppeteers from Niven's writings:
> "In Ringworld, Nessus, a Puppeteer, explains how his race's cowardice is partly a result of a science experiment (the details of which are not given) that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soul, and therefore death is, for their species, eternal oblivion. As a result, the Puppeteer race is fanatically devoted to its own safety...."
Death is the only form of lasting peace that we can realistically hope for.
Pain hurts. Both physically and mentally.
That being said, and what I wanted to mention is that I don't fly, not because I fear death by plane crash but because I made the mistake of listing to a flight recorder one time and I developed a phobia of dying around a bunch of other people sharing that same fate. It really shook me that to die in a situation like that, it would be very hard to make your peace with death. With all the screaming and pleading going on around you. Not that I don't have empathy for those people but I have to steady myself and god forbid my family for the inevitable.
I always liked the quote from Marcus Aurelius "Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back"
I think of that quote a lot when I am spearfishing and there are sharks around.
...do you drive?
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/21/790422181/peter-schjeldahl-on...
I feel like I've been drinking the author's life from a cup. Spectating his memories right alongside him. What an engaging style of writing.
I highly suggest subscribing to the New Yorker. It's not cheap, I renewed my subscription gift for my sister which was $150 for the year, but there is really great writing in there, and it's fun to have something like this type of writing to look forward to coming in the mail each week.
The disjointedness and incohesion of the writing is an analogy to life itself in a really weirdly perfect way.
Beautiful.
Is there a good place to find his talks to download?
"Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead."