Dudley Clendinen has a splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” where he defines what life is. According to him “ Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.”
Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.” But instead of choosing that long, dehumanizing, expensive course, he decided to face death as one of life’s “most absorbing thrills and challenges.”
“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.
And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left.”
"I respect the wishes of people who want to live as long as they can. But I would like the same respect for those of us who decide — rationally — not to. I’ve done my homework. I have a plan. ..I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.Knowing that comforts me. I don’t worry about fatty foods anymore. I don’t worry about having enough money to grow old. I’m not going to grow old."
He concludes this touching article saying “I’m having a wonderful time…I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love. When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over.
It’s time to be gone.”
*Here are links to three other essays, which offer other perspectives on why we should accept the finitude of life and the naturalness of death. They are: “Born Toward Dying,” by Richard John Neuhaus, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” by Leon Kass and “Thinking About Aging,” by Gilbert Meilaender.
just read your blog re dying. wonderful! but how would one do it? ritu
ReplyDeleteAnil,
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing graffitti in a London toilet that read 'Death is the greatest kick of them all........that's why they save it for the last!
Kit