Monday, September 30, 2024
1938 Treaty of Munich forced Czechoslovakia to give territory to Germany. Chamberlain infamously declared "Peace for our time" upon his return to London.
1943 Pope Pius XII encyclical on Divine spirit
1946 Twenty-two Nazi leaders, including Hermann Goering, were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death or prison at the Nuremberg war trials
In bed at 9, awake at 3:40, and up at 4. Lilly didn't show up until 6:35, after Katherine and Geri had left.
Prednisone, day 139, 7.5 mg., day 18/28. Prednisone at 4:50 a.m., morning meds at 6:30 with pumpkin bread.
Katherine departed for Alexandria at 6:15 this morning, Geri driving her to the airport. Her visit was wonderful.
I don’t remember when I first started thinking about death and dying but I suspect it was one of the many gifts I received as a child from my Holy Mother Church. It was HMC that opened my young mind to the idea of eternal punishment in the fires of Hell. Yes, there was also the everlasting joy of the Beatific Vision (You’re so great God, you’re so good. You’re so good God, you’re so great. You’re so great … you get the idea) But it was the torment of Hellfire that captured my imagination and created a fear of dying and death. As long as I was alive, I was OK. Once I kicked the bucket, I was in a binary game, either endless (if boring) bliss, or never-ending pain and suffering. And you could never be sure whether you’d be a winner or a loser in this game, since, try as you might to be good, we were all born sinners prone to a lifetime of sin.
Ever since those youthful days in the Reign of Error, I’ve been conscious of the inevitability of dying and death but never in an immediate sense until 1965 when I flew from California to Japan. I was sure that my aircraft could not stay airborne for the 14 hours we were en route. Dying in a plane crash at age 24 was hardly a way to go, and somehow I managed to evade dying and death.
Several days later I flew for several hours from Japan to Vietnam on an old C-130 “Hercules.” As we neared Chu Lai, the pilot made a steep nose-down ‘combat approach and landing’ to avoid ground fire from the hills surrounding the airstrip. All the cargo in the belly of the aircraft surged forward to the front of the cargo bay. Again I was sure I was going to die in a crash landing, again not a good way Io go, especially on my first day in Vietnam.
A few weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night in the ’hardback’ tent I lived in at the airbase at Danang, aware of movement and creaking sounds in the tent. I had read Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate a year or so before I went to Vietnam. The novel begins with a Chinese assassin in Shanghai plunging his dagger through mosquito netting into the heart of his sleeping target. Half asleep and surrounded by my own mosquito netting, I was certain that an Asian assassin was in the tent, intent on killing me. This was not a good way to go so I was relieved to discover the ‘assassin’ was just the Marine in the cot next to mine, tossing and turning in the subtropical heat.
On my last day in Vietnam, I was loaded onto a large Air Force transport on the taxiway on the Air Force side of the airbase only to sit on the tarmac forever while the aircraft mechanics tried to find and correct to cause of the “fire warning” light in the cockpit’s instrument panel. The longer we sat there, a huge, shining, silver, immobile easy target for rocket and/or mortar fire from the surrounding hills, the more I thought of being incinerated in that aircraft with the bellyful of fuel on my last day in Vietnam, again not good way to go.
I was 25 when I left Vietnam and I wasn’t plagued by thoughts of death after that, at least not by thoughts of involuntary death. I’m 77 now and my end-of-life thoughts have done a 180. Now I fear involuntary living and how to avoid it. I’m at higher than normal risk of strokes and heart attacks because of diabetes and related morbidities, ironically attributable perhaps to exposure to Agent Orange during my 8 months in Vietnam. But I have no fear of a heart attack or cardiac arrest or even a stroke, thinking that’s a way to go that I could go for, so long as it does kill me. Do not resuscitate! Way to go! On the other hand, with each passing year, I become more at risk for Alzheimer’s or some other form of long-term dementing or otherwise incapacitating disease. Living with those diseases is not something I want to do, at least not in their most incapacitating forms. And even though they inevitably lead to death, that is no way to go as far as I’m concerned.
Long ago, a friend remarked how great it would be to live forever if you lived forever young and healthy, sort of a Mormon and I suppose Christian view of Heaven. When I said I couldn’t imagine anything worse, he couldn’t understand how I could disagree, Living forever seems to me to be a version of Hell, not of Heaven, just another version of the “Do you know how long Eternity is, boys and girls” claptrap that we got from the nuns and priests in Catholic schools. The older I get, the more I believe it, so much so that I have long thought that perhaps the most basic human right is the right to stop living, to call it quits, to say “I’ve had enough.” I’m surer of this than I am of any doctrine or dogma of any religious faith.
“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” One might object that suicide is neither a “problem” nor a “question,” but an act. A proper, philosophical question might rather be: “Under what conditions is suicide warranted?” A philosophical answer might explore the question, “What does it mean to ask whether life is worth living?” as William James did in The Will to Believe. For the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus, however, “Should I kill myself?” is the essential philosophical question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.”
Is life ever not worth living? Even posing the question begs its affirmative answer. One who doubts it, has not seen enough of life, or of human suffering. Those who doubt it embrace cliches, pieties, and religious conventions like “God has a plan for me,” “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so,” and “Suffering is a Grace from God.” The problem is, not all of us, and perhaps only a few of us, really believe those pieties. Not only is there no realistic proof of them, there really is no evidence of them. Their roots are not in experience, but in someone else’s Scripture or in what we were indoctrinated with as children. In my own long life, I have come to prefer a benign atheism that attributes human suffering to Nature, or Random Chance, or evil deeds by human actors rather than to an All Good, All-Powerful, All-Loving God who permits so much suffering as part of “His Plan.”
For me, then, the philosophical question posed by Camus is not hard. Of course, there are circumstances in which life is not worth living. We can all come up with our own lists, though we don’t like to think of such things. The hard questions are how to determine when it’s the right or a good time to stop living and how to stop living in a way that doesn’t risk survival in worse circumstances than those that caused one to prefer death in the first place.
There is always a risk of course of ending life too early, too quickly, or in situations in which waiting might have led to circumstances much more ‘livable’ than those which prompted thoughts of suicide. “If only he had waited . . .” Or when a different set of personal values would lead to different choices. But isn’t it presumptuous to think that we should be able to choose the time of death and the sufficient raison de mourir of another person? Isn’t it arrogant to be so confident that another’s case of depression is only temporary or curable by antidepressant medications to conclude that the presumer is justified in usurping or appropriating the other’s right to autonomy? Isn’t it presumptuous to think that because one is likely to live longer than X months or Y months, it is too soon to recognize her right to call it quits now? Why is it anybody’s business but the sufferer’s whether we believe her pain is bearable or unbearable? Beethoven started losing his hearing before the age of 30 and was totally deaf by 44 or so. He continued to compose beautiful music but he couldn’t hear it as his audiences could. If in these circumstances he had decided, for himself, that his life was no longer worth living, who had the moral right to second-guess him? Ditto if Stephen Hawking had decided, for himself, that living for decades with ALS was not something he chose to do. itto if Claude Monet had given up the will to live after he lost his color vision late in life. Our churches and, through them, our governments have effectively transformed the notion of “a right to life” into “a duty to live.” Isn’t that a rather stunning “leap of faith”?
And then there is the awful question of “how?” And, more specifically, how safely, but safely in the sense of failsafe. If there is something worse than living a life a person doesn’t want to live, it’s trying to end it unsuccessfully and winding up in a worse situation, unable to try again. The poison you take doesn’t kill you but does put you in a nursing home, sitting in a hallway strapped into a wheelchair, incapacitated for years. The bullet that was intended to strike a vital part of the brain or heart misses its target, leaving the shooter alive but more severely impaired than when he pulled the trigger. The tranquilizers and/or other prescription meds you were secretly hoarding don’t kill you but leave you alive and comatose and racking up those huge medical bills you were specifically trying to avoid. The door to the exhaust-fumed-filled garage is opened before you are a goner.
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
I can’t attempt to answer these questions. I don’t know the answers. But I am reasonably sure that it is no answer to prohibit suicide, to deny to each one of us the ultimate right of autonomy, of sovereignty over our own bodies and lives. One reasonable way to recognize and protect this ultimate civil right and human right is to remove legal restrictions on suicide and assisted suicide.
*The photo above is of the headstone on the grave of my great-grandfather Jacob Clausen and his wife Martha in duncombe, Iowa.}
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Austria moves far right. Austria has joined the list of countries moving toward the far right with the victory of its Freedom Party over the center-right Peoples Party and the center-left Social Democrats in the parliamentary elections. The Freedom Party did 13% better than in the last elction and the People's Party did 11% worse. The Freedom Party is Kremlin-riendly, opposes aid to Ukraine and opposes sanctins on Russia. It is decidedly anti-immigrant urging "re-migration" or deportation of immigrants to their homelands. Mene, mene, teckel upharsin.
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