10/15/2025

 Wednesday, October 15, 2025

1966 Black Panther Party was founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California

1991 Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a US Supreme Court Justice (52-48)

2000 Larry David's comedy show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" debuted on HBO

In bed around 10, with Brewers down 5-1 against the Dodgers, up at 3:30, unable to sleep.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 5:50 p.m.!!!

Bertrand Russell:  "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

My journal entry 3 years ago this date: "Saints,  Heroes, and Miracles:  I got up this morning as Geri and Lilly were returning to the bedroom from their second outing of the night, Geri with her CPAP mask still on.  I thought then, as I have countless times, what a good woman she is, what a care-giving, care-taking, generous, loving person she is.  I see it every day in how she cares for Lilly, feeding, walking, grooming, medicating, and attending, but I realize how much she has acted similarly to her brother Jim for the nearly 4 years he was with us, how she cared for and befriended my father when he lived with us, how she tends to her friend E---- with her Parkinson's, and most of her how she quietly cares for me.  My life is enriched by living in our house and living in this house is possible for me because of her.  She cares for our house and grounds like she cares for everyone and everything under her quiet, vigilant guard.  I all too often fail to appreciate the saintliness and heroism around me.  They are not states of being but actions, activities, and behavior.   Saints are individuals who perform saintly acts, and heroes are individuals who perform heroic deeds.  Both qualities are activities reflected in Matthew 25:31 et seq.  Both involve willingly subordinating one's own comfort and interests to those of others.  My wife, my sister, my mother - all saints and heroes, not all the time, but most of the time and always when it counts.  Many, many saints and heroes in our lives, invisible unless we scrape the scales off our eyes to see them.  The same is true of miracles; they're all around us.    'Mere' existence why is there anything anywhere?  Life, we have it and stones don't.  Why? How?  Nature, trees, leaves, lichens, fungi, birds, mammals, fish, whales, penguins, . . . . Why? whence? whither?"

. . . .  

I believed those words three years ago, and I have continued to believe them between then and today.  Indeed, I have long believed them and encouraged my children to share the belief.  I have believed them even during times of serious illnesses, from bladder ulcers and from PMR, causing such severe, recurrent, or persistent pain that I wished I could die and be done with it.  When I'm asked at the VA whether I've thought of hurting myself, the euphemism for suicide, my honest response should be "Of course!"  It's the belief in all the goodness, the saintliness and heroism, the love and beauty all around me and sometimes in me, that keeps me alive even during the many times I have wished I were dead and wished I could end it myself.  The VA considers me a suicide risk, but not an "acute" one.  In other words, maybe later, not now, which I suppose is accurate enough.  When they asked me when I was hospitalized between September 27 and October 4 whether I wished to be resuscitated and/or intubated if necessary while I was hospitalized, I answered literally and without hesitation, 'Let me die' to each question.  Is that a kind of deferred suicide?  It seems to me that it is.  When presented with a clear choice between dying and being saved from dying, I chose dying.  The significant words are "I chose dying.

"I think now of Zeke Emanuel's article in The Atlantic, 'Why I Hope to Die at 75.'  He is 68 now, getting ever closer to that target age of 75 that he claims is the optimum age of death for most of us.  He is approaching the time at which he says he will stop taking vaccines and treatments intended to prolong his life.  Will he?  How is it that I am "up to date" on all my vaccinations, or will be if I receive a Covid-19 vaccination when it is available at the VA later this month?  I tell myself I don't want to grow older, sicker, frailer, more compromised in all of life's functions, yet at my last visit to meet my new primary care provider, Kali Kisro, I said "yes" to the offered flu and pneumonia vaccines.  I'm not thinking straight.  Should I take a pass on the upcoming Covid vaccine?  I'll probably accept it because Covid seems like such a hard, nasty, awful way to die, based on what I saw on the news back in 2020 and 2021, all the information about ventilators, etc.  On the first page of my "Life in the Time of Covid" sketchbooks, I put a quote from Woody Allen: "I'm not afraid to die.  I just don't want to be there when it happens."  I kind of feel that way.  But old age doesn't offer us a lot of choices.  When I was clearly given a choice between death and continued life "as is," so to speak, I clearly chose death.  Isn't that a form of wishful suicide?

  Geri asked me today whether I "was alright," in a way that suggested that she could tell I'm not well.  I said that I was alright, in the sense of 'not sick,' but that I'm miserable.  It led to a discussion of Zeke Emanuel's article on hoping to die at 75, living with pain, diminished physical and mental capacity, and almost continuous discomfort.  Longer life = not productive, capable, productive, and fruitful life, but protracted disability and slow dying.  Our discussion might have led to a deeper exploration of our own personal thoughts about deterioration, decrepitude, and when and why death becomes desirable, but it unfortunately did not.  I suspect we have gotten about as close as we can get to openness about these matters in our discussions about assisted suicide, unassisted suicide, our similar instructions in our advance directives, etc.

. . . . 

I drove up to Sendik's in Mequon this afternoon, my first trip away from the house since I was released from the hospital on 10/4, other than my taxing trip to the Apple Store at Bayshore on 10/8 to get my laptop fixed.  On the way to and from the store, I noticed the mostly cloudy but still beautiful clouds floating in the sky above me.  I wondered why I hadn't wondered before why they float as they do.  Why don't they sink to the earth or levitate up into the ether?  They just hang there, blown wherever the winds may take them, and usually foolishly ignored by us earthbound creatures, scurrying hither and yon, oblivious to anything other than our own earthly thoughts, necessities, desires, and destinations.