Death Close Up

A person near and dear to me is deteriorating noticeably. I miss who this person once was, but I know this process is entirely expected and completely natural. Human life is not going to turn out well for any of us, at least to the extent that we strive for eternal life or that we hope that people will continue to think about us after we are dead.

The slow-motion death I am witnessing is causing me to meditate on the meaning of life on this rainy morning. At existential times like these, I have increasingly looked to the wisdom of the Stoics. I found this excellent collection or Stoic writings on death. Here are a few of my favorites:

No person would give up even an inch of their estate, and the slightest dispute with a neighbor can mean hell to pay; yet we easily let others encroach on our lives—worse, we often pave the way for those who will take it over. No person hands out their money to passersby, but to how many do each of us hand out our lives! We’re tight-fisted with property and money, yet think too little of wasting time, the one thing about which we should all be the toughest misers. —Seneca

“No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.” —Zeno of Citium

“Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the Earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.” —Marcus Aurelius

“I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.” —Epictetus

“It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.” —Marcus Aurelius

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day. The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.” —Seneca

Choose to die well while you can; wait too long, and it might become impossible to do so. —Gaius Musonius Rufus

From this essay:

The Latin phrase memento mori literally means “remember that you have to die.” Over the centuries, scholars often would keep a symbolic memento mori image in their study, like a skull, as a reminder of their own mortality.

We are dying every day, in that there is less life in front of us and our accomplishments are increasingly behind us:

[W]e are, in fact, dying every day. This is not the body to which your mother gave birth, as the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius put it. The child dies to become the adolescent. The adolescent dies to become the man. The boy is father to the man but also predeceases him. We die every night when we go to sleep and awaken a different person, although we often barely notice what has been lost in the process.

I veer to the Woody Allen approach to death: "It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." This dovetails well with my assumption after death I will not exist that all forms of non-existence are the same. I've long assumed that after I die, it will be no different than the way things "were" before I was born, a thought expressed by the ancient Greek Sophist known as Prodicus of Ceos:

The state of nonexistence to which we permanently return after our death is no different than the one we were in, for countless aeons, before we were born
As Sigmund Freud suggested, as discussed here:

'It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death.' Because, as Freud goes on, '[...] whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators'. In fact, we could say that we assist at our own death, as if the one who dies in our imagination were a different person. We can't imagine how we would be like dead, without being able to think or see, for example. We can't accept our own death, 'at bottom no one believes in his own death'. As Freud claims, 'in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality'. There is no sense of the passage of time; time does not work chronologically in our unconscious.

This unconscious belief that nothing can happen to us may be seen as 'the secret of heroism'.

And it's a relief to me (based on my assumptions) that non-existence is nothing at all, which makes it a far superior option to some sort of post-death judgment, even where one has a 99% chance of ending up in "heaven" (whatever the hell "heaven" could possibly mean).

But now it is time for me to tend to my life, my remaining months of the 1,000 (or so) months I was bestowed at birth . . .. It's time for me to do my best to strut my remaining hours across the stage, as Shakespeare's MacBeth utters:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

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Daily Aphorism #5: Fickleness and Death

It's like a on/off switch. When I'm feeling good and no one around me is notably ill, I feel like Superman, even though I am 65. All it takes to make me feel my age (or even older) is a tiny bit of morality salience. How tiny? A mild back ache often does the trick. Or noticing my gray hair. Or needing to stretch out after sitting over the computer for a couple hours. Or forgetting someone's name. That is major terror. Why "terror"? Because Terror Management Theory predicts that even subtle morality salience can send us into spirals. TMT is a power and innovative theory that explains so very many things that we encounter every day. Mainly it explains how human animals can carry one with their ordinary (and oftentimes trite) daily tasks as if everyone on the planet won't be dead in 125 years.

Truly, this is heavy stuff to consider. If you haven't before heard of Terror Management Theory, I've written more than a few articles on the topic, and you can find all of them at this link.

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What can an atheist say to a grieving friend?

What can an atheist say to a friend who is grieving the death of a loved one? Believers have a standard repertoire: "He's with God now." "I'll pray for you." "She's in heaven now." As I've written before, I don't really have a standard phrase to utter in those situations, but that's probably for the best. I certainly don't want to sound like a greeting card. Greta Christina recently raised this same issue. She and her readers compiled a list of approaches for people who don't believe in God. Her extensive list includes the following: 1. "I'm so sorry." 2. "I remember when... /My life is so much better because of..." 3. "What can I do to help?"

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Framing the deaths of children

An article at MSNBC caught my eye. The title: "Doctors hastened dying kids’ death, say parents." My initial reaction was that the doctors had done something bad. The article turned out to be more nuanced than the headline, but the opening paragraph suggested that some doctors were acting nefariously:

It's a situation too agonizing to contemplate — a child dying and in pain. Now a small but provocative study suggests that doctors may be giving fatal morphine doses to a few children dying of cancer, to end their suffering at their parents' request.
But then I thought, what if the opposite were true? And then what if the opposite headline read like this:

A provocative study suggests that some doctors are refusing to give enough pain-relieving morphine to children dying of cancer, thereby exacerbating and extending their horrific suffering.

My point is not just to be provocative. Before going further, I should disclose that I am the parent of two young (healthy) children, so this horrid situation is something that I find extremely uncomfortable to even contemplate. Nonetheless, what would I do if I had a a child who was writhing in pain, and who had only weeks or months before he would die? Would it really a bad thing to give that child more pain medication in order to lessen his pain, knowing that it would shorten his already terribly shortened life expectancy? I am amazed at how Americans make simplistic cartoons out of so many moral dilemmas. We call it "mercy killing," even when the aim is to reduce suffering. I would never criticize a parent for wanting to relieve a child's suffering by giving pain medication when that child is dying of cancer. Maybe we need a new language to meaningfully discuss this situation. How about calling it "relieving the suffering of an innocent child." Why call it "killing" at all? Why even call it euthanasia (literally, "good death")? When a child is being non-stop crushed with pain, what kind of parent enhances the pain by withholding drugs in order to attempt to display an incredibly shallow version of moral superiority to others in the community? Shouldn't the whole focus be what's best for the child? Is it better for the child to be in excruciating pain, every hour of the day, or to be given relief from the pain, even though it shortens his life? I know that many people disagree with me--they think that any wretched existence is superior to the end of one's earthly existence. Ironically, most of those people believe in an afterlife. I don't get it. When we're dealing with the family pet, everyone knows the answer. We call it being "humane" to the pet when we choose to painlessly put the pet out of its misery. But somehow, when we are being "humane" to humans, we intensify and extend their suffering. What's driving this upside-down logic? Are the critics merely having sport with doctors, most of whom are working extremely hard to give the families what they need and want? This issue is not limited to dying children, of course. Hence the moral second-guessing when sick elderly adults choose to die in far off places like Switzerland. There are many other ways to needlessly kill healthy children and to make them suffer and to deprive them of healthy minds, but we don't use the word "kill" when describing legislation that does this. You know . . . legislation that cuts medical care, closes subsidized daycare, fails to fund nutrition education centers, or allows bad schools to continue to operate. Perhaps we should use the word "kill" in those situations, since that word often provokes people to take action. But I also think that we need to jettison the "kill" language for those gut-wrenching situations where children are dying and parents are struggling to figure out what to do. We should start over when an entirely new language devoid of the word "kill," because it is the disease that is killing such children, and the parents are trying to deal with the disease. Only with a new language with a more thoughtful version of causation is worth of such situations.

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What to do about your dead Facebook friends

What can be done about your Facebook friends who die? According to an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon.com, Facebook is coming up with some solutions centered on "memorial pages." Williams also gives this advice:

Be careful what profile pic you post or what your friends write on your wall -- it might be your last enduring image.

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