Mr. Death

Monty Python, Susan Campbell, and me

Have you noticed that the title of this blog is two gerunds. Coming and Aging. It’s all process, but make no mistake, I began when I realized that the end is around the bend.

Death lurks behind every post here, behind every choice I make now, but I haven’t written about death directly. Time to turn around and look this companion in the eye.

Before sharing the post by

Susan Campbell

that got me thinking about death, I’ll fulfill the promise of this post’s title. Here’s Monty Python’s wicked take on death arriving at a British dinner party among stuffed-shirt fools. It's part of my vocabulary of death. The characters are also all facets of my own ego’s reactions to death arriving…

Now for something completely different…

Dr. Susan Campbell and I go way back to 1981. Now, with Susan 83, and me almost 80, we’re both curious about aging and death.

In this post she looks at the right to die:

I have started looking more seriously at the idea of self-deliverance, medical aid in dying, voluntary assisted dying, voluntary euthanasia, rational suicide (some of the terms being used these days). And I have acquired a new collection of books, videos, and films on the topic. I plan to make sure I have this option—even if I never use ingng

This is a simple issue for me when I think of the right to die in general: I believe people over a certain age, if they are of sound mind and not depressed, should have the right to end their lives without having to have a terminal illness. [Currently, “medical aid in dying” (MAID) is legal in many states, but only for people who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness (6 months to live) by two medical doctors. So, I am excluding MAID in this blog. What I’m focused on is the issue of having the right to die in cases not involving a terminal diagnosis.]

But when I ask the personal question, “Would I choose rational suicide for myself?” the issue is not so simple. On the one hand, I would definitely feel less fear of death if I knew I had a reliable and peaceful way to avoid the suffering (for myself and others) of a slow, painful, dying process.

To be imperfectly honest…

I have not given death due attention. I can throw the word into a sentence. I have been present at deaths. Lovers have died. Mentors have died. Friends have died. I have written eulogies. I have grieved losses. Strangely, though, my eyes cannot turn inward to know viscerally and intimately that I will die. There’s some gap I can’t seem to cross. I know, intellectually, that I will die but I do not have an inner relationship with my death. We are not intimate. Yet.

Nor do I have theories, assumptions, beliefs, or a faith tradition that might provide certainty about death for me.

Does my ego need this veil of unknowing to protect me from facing my own end? Is my resistance a form of vanity, like William Saroyan when he said “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case”? Even as I write, I can feel my mind squirming away. Like Scarlet O’Hara, I want to think about that tomorrow. Is death just too big to think about?

Turning towards the end

Susan’s post helped me open my mind to death. Please read the whole post about the rights and methods to consciously ending one’s own life - not out of depression but rational choice.

If I were to end my own life for my own reasons, what would those be? Would I have the courage? How would I know I’m done? As a curious human for whom life is an endless set of thrills, chills and lessons, how could I choose to die? I would want to still be alive to think about what just happened.

I can feel the back pressure of death in this Coming of Aging inquiry. The joy has been in the discoveries and liberations along the way. It's a process of arriving, not arrival. Until considering Susan's post about Self-Deliverance, I had only touched death in passing, like running my hand over a hedge as I walk.

Even in this moment of writing, I can feel the resistance. I can't actually imagine the passage from existence to non-existence?

Memories

When I had stage 3 colon cancer in 2004, I rehearsed dying under the tutelage of a student of Rajneesh. Again and again he guided us through dying. Each time it felt impersonal. Each time I reeled back in, after 50 years of unfurling, the strands of my life and then, concentrated to a point, I exited through my crown. I didn’t die, clearly, and I count that experience like a guided fantasy, useful but not necessarily the truth.

As for the intense cancer year, from diagnosis in February 2004 to all clear on December 31, even then I said of that passage, “I don't have a will to live, I have a will to be alive.” Awareness and discovery were my focus, and perhaps my salvation.

Susan brings up situations in which rational suicide might be her choice, whether or not any authorities say she has the right to do so. Unrelenting pain might be one. Another could be having a progressive disease - Alzheimer’s or ALS - that is a one way ticket to losing any agency over body and mind.

In a made for tv movie from 1987, “The Right to Die" with Raquel Welch, a successful wife, mother and professional is diagnosed with ALS. At one point in the movie, completely paralyzed, she has fought for and gained her right to end her life, yet, at the last moment, she panics and cannot go through with it. That scene comes as I write this. It is filed, along with a growing assortment of scenes from fiction and memoir and the lives of others.

In the movie Still Alice, the protagonist, a professor in her 50s, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She figures out how to kill herself once her decline has passed a certain point of capacity, hiding the pills in a drawer and recording an instruction video her diminished self would find and obey. We watch Alice watch the video, go upstairs, open the drawer, find the pills and, at the last moment, drop them when the front door opens - the last chance to exit before losing her mind completely.

Katy Butler, an author friend, wrote Knocking on Heaven’s Door about her mighty father’s long and painful death after her mother, in a panic, agreed to have a pacemaker put in him, thus denying him a natural and probably swift death. The book also includes her Mother’s long decline and death. Neither of them got to engineer their own graceful exit, but rather got trapped in bodies that advanced medicine could keep alive.

These are the first images that come up from the inner well as I consider Susan’s brave, clear, rational article. It is an initiation for me, cracking open a door tentatively - with the chain still on it so nothing fearful can barge in. I’ve fussed over this post more than most. I simply haven’t found my footing in the topic. I know that once I’ve allowed the unthinkable to be thought, the process of acceptance is underway.

Coming of Aging is an invitation to myself, and readers, to consider what the events of our lives teach us, and to slough off other people’s good advice as we walk, eyes as open as possible, into aging out of our identities and into many liberations and then the reality of death. We are teaching one another about death through our stories. Writing for me anchors what I learn, and peels off yet one more layer of ignorance. I’m a different person even now from when I sat down to write than here at the conclusion. Fears, observed, can loose their grip.

PS

A day later, and resisting the impulse to add more memories. Apparently many people were affected by Susan’s post. I include here her addenda:

Susan writes:

“I have been enjoying writing about the final stage of life recently. And after this last post about choosing one’s time of exit, I received some particularly interesting responses. For some people, it was too much for their nervous systems. Some were full of appreciation. Some were worried about me. And some were critical about how much of my life’s energy (they thought) I was spending on such a downer of a topic. …..

My takeaway from reading these comments is to remember that these are times of changing values. And, as with any change, there will be a wide range of opinions and responses. Death is a sacred transition. There is no bigger transition, other than birth. Peoples’ deeply-held spiritual and religious beliefs may be involved. Existential fears are involved. Other peoples’ opinions are often involved. People’s projections are involved. Any author who ventures into this territory will stir up feelings, reactions, judgments, and taking sides.”