Death and dying; part eight; intermission....
In response to my proposal that the sudden deaths of my first husband and of a relative by marriage were good deaths [at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/358501.html ], fibermom commented:


"I joke about planning to have just that kind of death myself. But do you think it is actually possible to increase your odds of it? For example, by making a point of living each day intentionally, so that you would have a lessened chance of having to know that your last moments on earth were spent being catty about someone or shouting at someone? Or perhaps by taking good physical care of yourself in order to lessen the chances of a drawn-out healthcare experience?"


My first reaction to these three questions was that the answers were yes, and yes, and yes. Respectively. But then I had to set that reaction aside and give them the serious consideration they deserve, and they turn out to be very hard to answer.

Science tells us that there's no way around probability -- that having escaped six ice storms in a row, for example, does not mean that we're certain to be hit by the seventh one. That having tossed a coin and gotten heads ten times doesn't mean that the eleventh time we toss it we'll get (a) tails, or (b) heads again. That every single time we toss a coin the odds of getting heads or tails are exactly the same, no matter what our previous coin-tossing history may have been.

Health -- physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health -- doesn't work exactly that way. It's possible, by smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, to increase the odds that you will die of lung cancer. It's possible, by focusing your attention fiercely and exclusively on everything you dislike about your life, to increase the odds that you will suffer from depression, which is known to increase the odds that you will have other medical misadventures. It's possible, by focusing all your attention on your sins and your conviction that you will suffer for them throughout eternity, to increase the odds that you will have a spiritual crisis; similarly, it's possible that by flatly refusing to acknowledge your sins or the possibility that you might have to pay for them in some way, you will increase your odds of having a different sort of spiritual crisis. [Note: I'm using "sins" here as a cover term for "harming other living things deliberately"; I don't mean drinking or swearing or carousing or "living in sin," or any of the usual list.]

However, that doesn't change the well-known fact that large numbers of people die of disorders for which they have none of the scientifically-accepted risk factors, while large numbers of other people have the risk factors but never get the associated disorders; often people in the second group die peacefully in their sleep of old age. Many whiners and sinners thrive; many people whose attention is focused on good things and good deeds are whacked by one misfortune after another all their lives long. Which seems to indicate that human life is just as subject to the laws of probability as coins are.

And that leads me out onto a perilous cliff. I believe that the lives we live are intended to teach us a set of lessons, and that nothing -- including our death -- happens to us without a good reason; I believe that we perceive things and events as accidents and coincidences, rather than as consequences, only because we aren't yet able to perceive the patterns that they are a part of. I've said that in this journal before. I haven't yet been able to find a way to say it without offending quite a few readers, and I apologize to them once again.

Faith, then, not science, brings me to answer fibermom's questions this way:

The answer is yes, by doing the things suggested, it is possible to increase your odds of having a good death and to decrease your odds of "a drawn-out healthcare experience" -- unless you are participating in a pattern that is more important for the welfare of your soul than "fairness" is, in which case the answer is no. That doesn't change the fact that "living each day intentionally, so that you would have a lessened chance of having to know that your last moments on earth were spent being catty about someone or shouting at someone" and "taking good physical care of yourself in order to lessen the chances of a drawn-out healthcare experience" are excellent practices for living a good life.