Life and death

As we get closer to the end than the beginning, we begin to think about how we want our end to be. It’s even often the topic of conversations we have with friends. And what I hear is pretty consistent.

We don’t want to be warehoused; put in a nursing home by relatives and forgotten about. We don’t want to spend our last days on earth hooked up to tubes and machines. And it’s not rare for the last days of our lives to be spent in absolute agony and pain with no relief until death takes the pain away. What’s wrong with us wanting the same dignity of life we had when we were young and vibrant?

And yet, when many people get to their end stage, they end up exactly like they said they didn’t want to. The reason for that is either practical or profound. The practical answer is that they have lost the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves and, consequently, they’re made by someone else. It’s certainly not rare when this happens that these decisions are made by family members who were fully aware of the person’s wishes before they suffered mental deterioration. But because they either don’t share their loved one’s sentiments or feel guilty about doing something their loved one can’t decide on their own, they keep them alive for as long as possible, often using any means possible.

But sometimes it’s the very people who made these declarations earlier in their lives who change their minds as they get older, even though their thought processes are the same now that they used to be. What causes this change of heart is profound because it’s so simple. We don’t want to die. We want to be kept alive as long as possible using any means necessary because we’re afraid of death. We’re afraid of death because we’ve never been dead before. We have no recollection of anything before we were born so this life we’ve been leading is all we have to compare it with. Because even though death is the logical ending to life and something that happens to all of us, we don’t get to talk to those people who died before us. We can’t take any comfort in their experiences after death because we don’t know what experiences, if any, they had.

One of the biggest fears all human beings have had is the fear of the unknown. We were terribly afraid of the unknown when we were children. We always wanted to sleep with a light on somewhere in the house because we were afraid of the dark. We were afraid of the dark because we couldn’t SEE in the dark which once again manifests itself in the fear of the unknown.

And there’s no greater fear of the unknown for most people than death. We can’t imagine not being here any longer because, in our limited minds, we’ve ALWAYS been here. We can’t imagine leaving behind our work, our hobbies, our friends, and our families, sometimes in a heartbeat.

Many of the people who died last night had plans for today because they had no way of knowing that death was about to knock on their door.

The only solution to this fear of death most of us have is to have certain knowledge of what lies beyond. Will there be another life, will we be reincarnated, will we spend eternity in heaven or do we just cease to exist, like we did before we were conceived?

It’s an issue that has plagued theologians, philosophers, and doctors forever because they don’t have any proofs either other than the religious beliefs they hold that are based on faith rather than proven fact.

I hope when my time comes that my life will be celebrated rather than mourned. That people will laugh and joke about the times we spent with each other rather than mourn my loss. I hope my favorite blues music is played rather than funeral dirges. And I hope that people stand up and talk about the good times we had rather than a preacher trying to save souls.

That’s my wish but since I won’t be here any longer, whether it is fulfilled or not will be left up to someone else.

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I’ll be in Arkansas on vacation next week so my next column will appear on July 21st.