…on the path, a tough one
My friend I spoke of in an earlier post passed away this week.
I had known him for about 3 years and he was very encouraging to me.
His family said he had lived a great life and that made me feel better.
I know he would have liked to have had more control of how and when to die.
I’ve tried to talk to people about this and most don’t know how to begin approaching the subject of how we die. We just agree our culture has no dialog on the subject.
I wonder though, what’s the best way to go?
During sleep?
Right after a great meal?
Right after great sex?
Living to a ‘ripe old age’?
I heard about a woman who lived to be 100 years old, ate nothing but ice cream for the last 6 months of her life and then died in her sleep one night.
I thnk that woman had the perfect way to go.
Then I wonder, what kind of things will I want to do when I’m 100 years old if able?
watch movies, listen to music, have a flat screen TV & a nice chair, enjoy a glass of pinot noir? Or will even care about that stuff anymore?
Will I still belong to myself or will part of me be owned by a genetic lab that own the patents on healthy genes that cured an illness?
Our current culture has very little vernacular to discuss these things in a healthy way. We would rather live in fear and grasp on to anything that seems tangible than discuss ‘how we die’. Well, until it happens to us.
I have became quite close to several people over the past 3 years who have passed away within a matter of weeks of each other.
It gets me thinking about these matters; I start feeling around to see how sharp these edges are to me.
I’m off to watch “hell house”; a documentary about a fundamentalist church in Texas. They put together a haunted house for Halloween to scare people towards salvation.
Kinda like democracy at gunpoint.
Have a good weekend everybody.
Stephen A. Thomas
May 28th, 2006 at 10:02 pm
I think a lot of the problem is that our “culture” (a word that doesn’t really fit - a culture with no culture?) doesn’t have any rituals at all. We’re just expected to shift from one state to another with no fanfare, no recognition, really. I was reminded of this when my daughter started having trouble post-potty training. She just “lets it go” at school or in bed because she doesn’t want to get up. I’m sure she appreciates my mentioning it. Anyway, I wonder if we’d made more of a big deal out of her successful training, if it wouldn’t have “taken” better. The fact that we have no passage to adulthood means we can stay children all our lives, and most of us do, willing to be led by whatever politicians and pundits get the most airtime. Why talk about death if we don’t talk about the rest? It’s just the end, in a societal context. We assume other forces are taking care of things and that we don’t have to care. So we don’t. It’s really sad, and a sign of an empire in the early stages of crumbling.