Death and dying; part five....
I want to let you know that I'm not deliberately putting off discussing the emotional and spiritual aspects of having a good death. My problem is that it's such a hard topic to write about when the audience has such varied worldviews; I need more time to organize my thoughts and try to put them in decent order. While I'm doing that, there are three subtopics proposed by mixophrygian that we could turn to, and about which you may have things to say. I'm going to just list them here, offer my opinions briefly, and return the conversational floor to you. Here they are...

1. Assisted suicide for those that are terminally ill / Dr. Kevorkian.

I believe that those who are sound of mind, who are terminally ill, and who want to choose the moment of their death, should be allowed to make that choice. I also believe that a whole set of insoluble problems arrives when a culture makes that decision. There is the problem of people who pressure a dying person -- sometimes for the sake of the dying person, sometimes for the sake of others -- to hasten his or her death, whether those pressures are blatant or subtle. There is the problem of people who choose to hasten their own deaths not because they are ready to die but because they want to spare other people trouble or expense or grief. There is the problem of being certain that a dying person is sound of mind. There are the legal problems that face caregivers who help a dying person hasten death. And there are other problems. I have no solutions for any of those problems; they have to be thrashed out by the culture, and there are high barriers to that process when the culture is a youth-worshipping one that tries to hide away everything to do with death and dying.

2. Ways to educate young children about death, and mourning.

I don't think there's any way to do this properly in the culture I just described -- a youth-worshipping culture that tries to hide away everything to do with death and dying. The majority of deaths in the mainstream U.S. Anglo culture are deaths of elderly people, and the children are brought up to think that old women and old men are ugly and a nuisance and inherently inferior to young women and young men. Even when parents try hard to counter that ethic, it's trumpeted incessantly by the media, and the children grow up inundated by images and messages that support it. We don't say that people have died; we say they've "passed away" or "passed over" or "been called home to Glory"; when a beloved pet is euthanized, we tell the children that it was "put to sleep." How children are supposed to reconcile all of this with the way death and dying are handled on television programs like CSI, not to mention the way they're handled in videogames, I cannot even begin to imagine.

Ideally -- in my opinion -- we would treasure our elderly (and our terminally ill of any age), and they would die peacefully at home or in a loving hospice; children would participate in caring for them and in memorializing them in whatever fashion had been requested; and children would learn that death and mourning are normal parts of life. Instead, we have this very hard world to deal with, in which all of those things are made difficult or impossible for ordinary people to achieve. I can say only that we have to do the best we can with the resources that are available to us, and that there are some models in other cultures that we could learn from.

I had to tell my own three young children that their father had died suddenly; I did that straightforwardly, and I hope I did it adequately. And then, immediately, I failed them; I went away somewhere in my mind for a long time. (I've written about that period before in this journal, and won't repeat myself here.) I went through the motions -- I saw to food and clothing and medical care and education and so on, as I always had -- but I wasn't really there. I let other people take the children away on the day after their father died -- for a day at Disneyland -- because I was told that that would be best for them. I let other people persuade me that they must not be allowed to go to their father's funeral, and I went to it without them. I was young, and ignorant, and traumatized, and -- because I had grown up in this culture -- totally unprepared to handle the situation. I made some very bad decisions. Ideally, someone wise would have stepped forward to help me behave more competently, but this is the real world, and that didn't happen. I don't torment myself about this; I understand that ignorant and traumatized and unprepared young woman, and I know that I did the very best I could. I am sorry about it, nevertheless, and wish I could have done better.

3. The death penalty.

Here I really can be brief. I'm a radical pacifist; I am totally opposed to the death penalty. I find utterly irrational the idea that the way to demonstrate that killing another human being is evil is by killing another human being. I believe that we are commanded to return good for evil, and I perceive no way to fit the death penalty into that commandment.