Friday, May 24, 2024
I fell asleep shortly after 9 during LO'C, up at 3:25. At about 5:30, I dozed off again until 6:45 when I let Lilly out and listened, with Merlin, to the chickadees, robins, goldfinches, house finches, cowbirds, and cardinals.
Song sparrow
LTMW at the song sparrow or pine siskin loading up again on nesting material from our big cotton ball.
Prednisone, day 12. I took my initial 10 mg. pill with dinner last night around 7 p.m., and my 20 mg. pill with oatmeal, raspberries & blueberries around 4 a.m. My shoulders were very slightly painful as I awoke, but with good ROM.
Major accomplishment; (1) I mounted and inaugurated the toilet riser. It's not as secure as I had hoped but seems to be OK. (2) I took a walk outside with Judy, up to Sequoia, back around to our mailbox, and back to the garage. Serendipity: I ran into Shirly and Tom and had a nice chat. Small world.
I'm grateful for having been prompted by unknown others to include a thankfulness entry in my journal, in my conscious life. When I stopped journaling during the darkest days and nights of PMR, I was too overtaken by the pain and disability to focus on any element of gratitude in my life. I thought each night how death was preferable to living as I was living, facing an unknown but perhaps worsening and unendurable future. But even then, while regularly thinking about ways to end the misery, the thought that always brought me up short was that I couldn't do anything cruel and traumatic to Geri. I would have to endure the pain and hopelessness rather than inflict pain on her. I wonder how many of us, in extremis, are deterred from ending their lives because of concern for another, or for others. Albert Camus infamously posited that “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.” The ecclesiast Fulton Sheen in his weekly television program purpored to answer Camus with "Life Is Worth Living." But Camus and Sheen were dealing with competing underlying philosophical/theological assumptions that life is absurd (Camus) and that we are all children of a loving, redeeming, saving God (Sheen). I'm thinking of the simpler problem of inescapable pain and conscious helplessness and the necessity of weighing whether indeed life is worth living, or whether for a given person in a given set of extreme circumstances, the burden of life outweighs all available benefits when persistent pain deprives us not only of ease but also of all agency. I think of my Aunt Mary Healy, in her 90s, in the nursing home, demented and wanting to die, saying "God, I'm ready. What's the problem?" In any event, for the person ready to give it up, to end the journey, there is the practical problem of how to do it, where to do it, when to do it, etc. I think of Ernest Hemingway, in the entrance foyer of his home in Idaho that he shared with his wife Mary, taking his favorite shotgun, putting it to his head, and blowing his brains out. The sound of the gunshot woke his wife Mary in the bedroom and she discovered his body. He was, of course, mentally in extremis, but what did this act say of his concern for Mary? And, in any event, why am I thinking of these matters at 5 in the morning while eating my oatmeal and wondering whether I can nab another hour or so of sleep. I'm grateful that I'm not in extremis and that I seem to love my Geri more than Hemingway loved his Mary. Lights out.
“Harold Arnett,” from Spoon River Anthology
I LEANED against the mantel, sick, sick, / Thinking of my failure, looking into the abysm, / Weak from the noon-day heat.
A church bell sounded mournfully far away, / I heard the cry of a baby, / And the coughing of John Yarnell, / Bed-ridden, feverish, feverish, dying,
Then the violent voice of my wife: / “Watch out, the potatoes are burning!” / I smelled them . . . then there was irresistible disgust.
I pulled the trigger . . . blackness . . . light . . . / Unspeakable regret . . . fumbling for the world again.
Too late! Thus I came here,
With lungs for breathing . . . one cannot breathe here with lungs, / Though one must breathe
Of what use is it To rid one’s self of the world, /When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?
There are many poems about suicide. The one I thought of most was the humorous(?) one by Dorothy Parker:
Resumé
Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramps.
Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; / You might as well live.
. . . .
Parker dismissed suicide by shooting simply because it wouldn't be lawful, disregarding the fact that it is necessarily messy, sometimes very messy (Ernest Hemingway!) Stanley Kunitz wrote about the effect of suicide on the suicide's survivors.
The Portrait
My mother never forgave my father / for killing himself, / especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park, / that spring / when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name / in her deepest cabinet /and would not let him out, / though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic / with the pastel portrait in my hand / of a long-lipped stranger / with a brave mustache / and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds / without a single word / and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year / I can feel my cheek / still burning.
. . .
Thus I always feared the effect of suicide on my survivors, most especially, on G. I am struck by Kunitz's father doing himself in "in a public park," reminding me of my thoughts to shoot myself in my car, parked along the lakefront, away from home, to spare G. the fate of Mary Hemingway.
Suicide is a taboo subject. I suspect that many fewer people are willing to admit they have contemplated it than in fact have, but perhaps I am wrong. I think mainly of older people, very sick people, people in untreatable pain, and of course, lonely people. There are many such people and I have to believe that many of them at least think of 'ending it all.' Presumably, most of them don't do it and we have to wonder why. There is a stigma to suicide, of course. The Catholic Church has always taught that suicide is a sin. Suicides are refused burial in consecrated Catholic cemeteries, although this practice has become more 'pastoral' with a greater understanding of mental illness and its effect on moral responsibility. In the U.S., although no state permits euthanasia, nine states and the District of Columbia permit physician-assisted suicides. I have long believed that suicide is the ultimate right, the ultimate personal freedom or exercise of autonomy, as is choosing not to die, Perhaps that is why I was fascinated by Peter Freuchen's book Eskimo, with its description of families leaving their elderly to die alone in igloos when they can no longer keep up with the family's hunt for food, and why I have watched more than once the Japanese movies The Ballad of Narayama (1983) and Plan 75 (2023). Almost everybody accepts that it is better, and more caring, to euthanize an animal that is irremediably suffering than to let its suffering continue. Why is not the same true for us humans? The Church has long accepted the Principle of Double Effect to determine when an action that has two effects, one good and one evil, may still be chosen without sin. Thomas Aquinas used it to show that killing in self-defense is justified. Why not extend it to suicide? The bad effect (only arguably) would be the termination of a human life; the good effect would be the end of a human's severe suffering. The opposing argument would be, I suppose that an act that is unavoidably the killing of a human being is an intrinsically bad/evil act that can never be used to justify the good which would spring from it, i.e., the end of pure suffering. But, as mentioned previously, the Church easily allows the killing of human beings in the case of self-defense and excuses such killing by the thousands in the case of the so-called "just wars." Why the difference for individual suicides, or even euthanasia?
That we should feel shame or guilt in admitting to thinking about suicide is attributable to either a false sense of weakness or an absence of caring for the survivors. It's hard for me to think that there is anything particularly "weak" about shooting oneself or otherwise bringing about one's own death. Quite the opposite would seem to be true. Plus, we don't ask a dog run over by a car to 'stiff upper lip it' through painful death throes, why humans? On the other hand, we may well responsibly have a sense of shame or guilt because of the effect of the suicide on our survivors, our loved ones. I think again of Ernest Hemingway's voluntary shotgun blast to his head in circumstances where his wife Mary would be sure to discover the gruesome remains. So again I come to the conclusion that what keeps many people from suicide is not their fear of death or desire to prolong their life, but rather concern over the psychological, emotional, and spiritual effects on the survivors.
One Month Age: "Another rough night, multiple PSs, considerable pain in shoulders and hands, wrists. Swollen right hand. Meeting with Dr. Chatt was not what I hoped for but pretty much what I expected. One referral after another but basically samo samo: more Tylenol, more Diclofenac, much more physical therapy in saecula saeculorum.
One Year Ago: "I picked up Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935). this morning as part of my project of clearing up the rat's nest around my tv room recliner. I bought the book many years ago and it is heavily highlighted, underlined, checkmarked, and post-it-noted. What caught my attention on the page (114) that flipped open was the sentence "The Christian who lives in and benefits from a society in which coercive economic and political relationships are taken for granted, all of which are contrary to the love absolutism of the gospels, cannot arbitrarily introduce the uncompromising ethic of the gospel [i.e., non-violence/pacifism] into one particular issue. It calls to mind the American Evangelicals and their embrace of Donald Trump, Trumpism, and right-wing Republicanism, but also my failures as one who by nature or nurture tends toward agnostic or atheistic Christian socialism. How hard it is to be a Christian, indeed, how impossible it is, as reflected in the title of Niebuhr's Chapter 4: "The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal."
Chronic pelvic pain, interstitial cystitis, etc. In addition to Neibuhr, I also pulled out an old Walmart notebook in which I had written notes about the chronic pain I was experiencing back in March and April 2009 and I don't know for how long before that. Partial notes from 3/26/2009: "intermittent pain during the night... received a call from Dr. Silbar's office to schedule 'a look inside your bladder' on 4/1. I informed the caller of my bad experience at Froederdt with the urodynamics test. I don't know whether trainee-nurse was particularly ham-handed or whether the intense pain was a result of my bladder-urethra-prostate-perinium-penis anatomy but I hope never to have a similar experience. . . By 2:30, the pain has increased to 5/6, L.T. and perineal, walking becoming painful. " There is also a note about zonking out on amitryptiline as I did several weeks ago again. I think the CPP started 20 years ago, when I was still at The House of Peace. The good old days."
. . . .
Wow, I've had how many years of bad chronic pain problems, enough to beset me during two periods with suicidal ideation.
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