On Death and Dying

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

--T.S. Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"The situation is an ambiguous one. Observed from without, human beings obviously have a natural lifespan and cannot live much longer than a hundred years. A man's sense of his own experience, on the other hand, does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future, containing the usual mixture of goods and evils that he has found so tolerable in the past. Having been gratuitously introduced to the world by a collection of natural, historical, and social accidents, he finds himself the subject of a life, with an indeterminate and not essentially limited future. Viewed in this way, death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive possible goods. Normality seems to have nothing to do with it, for the fact that we will all inevitably die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would be good to live longer. Suppose that we were all inevitably going to die in agony -- physical agony lasting six months. Would inevitability make that prospect any less unpleasant? And why should it be different for a deprivation? If the normal lifespan were a thousand years, death at 80 would be a tragedy. As things are, it may just be a more widespread tragedy. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for us all."

--Thomas Nagel, "Death"

I have chosen this morbid topic because it seemed there was no better time. Yesterday, after excusing myself from the home of my friends to return home quickly to drop my things off before going to the pub to watch the Champions League fixture, my landlady of 81 came to me with a rather distressed look on her face, saying "I think Danny's dead. Can you go into his room and see if you can get a pulse?"

When I first moved in at the beginning of March, I was told that there was an individual 'Danny' who was living for free in the house in return for being a 'handyman' but, they told me, he really didnt do much. I only ever saw him once before, an instant where he had made his made to the kitchen one afternoon. A very frail individual, I wasnt sure what had been expected of him. My landlady kept me informed of his worsening condition. He had gone to Groote Schurr hospital and both he and the landlady herself had been rather put out by the conditions. It was Danny's wish that he shouldnt go back and that he should be simply left with his whiskey and cigarettes to die in his bed. So there was plenty to say that this was going to happen. Later, she would tell me what basically amounted to admitting that he had been in his death throes recently: evacuating his body at regular intervals and general in a great state of weakness. She had brought him the Fanta and Sprite he had requested, went to feed the cats and dogs, and then returned to watch television with him, only to discover that in that short span, he was no longer.

As for me, I have been to a few funerals in my day. Not just of 'older' individuals, but of young ones as well. During my first few years of school, I had a best friend who was a year older than me, and I would always spend a lot of time with him. He eventually moved away and I never heard from him again until I saw a large article in the newspaper: he had been a poster child for cancer research for the past few years, and had done his utmost to battle on, but eventually succumbed. I had spent some time doing Muay Thai between about 9 and 12 to keep my fitness up, and at the time there was a fighter named Roy Lilley that everybody looked up to and idolized. The night of his last fight, which I had been present at, he was killed running into the middle of the highway, supposedly he had wanted to get out of the car he was riding in because he was 'going crazy' from LSD that he had taken. I went to his funeral too. And then when I was in university in Edmonton, I came home one day and turned on the news. They had announced that there was another motorcycle fatality in the city. I thought to myself 'Why can't these people before more careful??' Then they cut to the person in question. It was a guy from my soccer team. I remember a particular moment at the funeral when me and a bunch of teammates were at the internment; we were huddled together in a collective gloom when the guy's mother came over and said, in the most matter of fact way, "Don't worry. Just have faith and God will take care of you all." I don't know what moved me more, the mother's stony demeanor, or the manner in which she dealt with her pain. (Everything seems to remind me of Fanon these days, but) as Fanon describes one means to deal with hardship: "A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate. In this way the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm."

But it was rather strange walking in on this frail old man, sprawled on the bed, head tilted back, mouth open as if he had died in a moment of catatonic rigidity. I had not seen him in the weeks leading up to this moment, so I didnt know whether his face had a deep purple tinge to it because of these sudden death throes, or if it had slowly grown on him as his condition worsened. I walked around the bed and leaned down to feel first his wrist and then his neck. What does having no pulse feel like? It is difficult to know when it is too easy to think that the pulse of another is only the blood moving through your own fingers. I had never really done this before, and worse I had just come out of the cold, wet weather, so my hands were freezing cold, whereas, almost ironically, the wrist and neck of this man was still warm. I tried jostling him a bit. Nothing. What does one do in such a situation without some sort of understanding of what to expect? You are used to waking stubborn people from their sleep but death, one could say, is the most obstinate sleep of all. I couldnt be absolutely sure, but it seemed to me that if he wasnt already dead, he was past any sort of state where a return to even a semi-conscious state was possible. I went to comfort the landlady as much as I could. Trying times, especially for one so vulnerable. As with everything that happens to her: people not paying rent, thefts, verbal abuse, she proceeded to rationalize it away: "I should be used to death by now," she told me, and showed me a picture of her son at his grad night. He had been killed that night by a drunk driver at the age of 17. She told me of others that she knew, her husband, some that had resided in the house, Danny's fiance who had died of cancer. She put her hope in her metaphysical assessment of a spirit world, cosmic nudges, etc., to hope that their souls were now free to mingle in some ethereal plane. Such as it is.

As Thomas Nagel says in his assessment, there is not much to say about death if one does not go into conjecture about immortality, reincarnation, etc. It is the ultimate judgment. I recall from my Junior High School health class that we would always walk into the class to see a quote on the board that we would have to copy down. The only one I really remember was "Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" (well... I also remember the quote "Objects in the rear-view mirror are closer than they appear", but only because I remember commenting about how it was very close to the title of a song by Meat Loaf and asked if she knew of this song). Permanent indeed.

And there are other issues. I recall a brother and sister from Australia that I befriended during my time in Oxford. I was told that Huntington's Chorea was present in their genetic line. Basically, if you have the proper genetic inheritance (and it is autosomal dominant, so you have a 50-50 chance of inheriting it), you die around the age of 50. There is a test that tells you immediately whether this is the case or not. From what I understand, neither of them wished to take the test. It is a double-edged sword: take the test and get a negative, live 'normally', take the test and get a positive, live in fear. I don't know if I could do it.

But one must be careful. The head of the philosophy department here at the University of Cape Town has published a book entitled 'Better Never To Have Lived', where he argues that people are actually doing their children a disservice by bringing them into a world of suffering and strife. The reactions that he received from critics was idiotic: they made the leap that equated 'dont bring people into the world' to 'take everybody out of the world', i.e. saying, for example, that 'it is of his opinion that we should all be dead'. And, of course, that is not it at all. If you are not brought into the world, then you cannot know what your missing; you maintain 'ignorance' in a void of non-existence (if that makes any sense), whereas if you are killed, this ends certain prospects that are now achievable. It is a fine line that sometimes borders on absurdity, but a line that must be considered nonetheless.

It is like the argument I put forward with respect to animal ethics: these mice are being bred for the sole purpose of being sacrificed at the bio-altar; is it 'better that they not have lived'? Perhaps. It all depends on which species' well-being takes priority. They are being utilized, yes, but utilized by a group of overseers that 'puppetize' them. A form of oppression? Also a possibility.

But the idea of death and various thought experiments that may go with it provide interesting philosophical insights into teleological assessments of humanity. If humans' purpose is to procreate the species, then, if it would be possible to slow down the 'telomerization' of DNA and allow us to live to be closer to the age of Methusaleh, yet were still only given a window of 20 to 30 years to reproduce, what would this say about purpose? And wouldn't overpopulation became a major problem? The birth rate wouldn't change, but the turnover would be a lot slower: imagine the brunt of the population from the past 600 years still living? It seems chaos would reign. But perhaps not. Perhaps, like everything else, the need to curb such problems would have been dealt with earlier before they reached a critical stage. Who knows?

At any rate, as morbid as death and discussions about it sounds and is, it really is also a very interesting topic of discussion. I also seem to remember something else in health class when we were talking about the topic of suicide: that those who are more likely to talk about it are much less likely to take it as a valid 'way out', whereas those who tend to avoid the issue may have it in close quarters in the back of their mind somewhere. But of course, this fatalistic psychological assessment shouldn't be universalized past 'the vulnerable', i.e. those that one has a genuine concern for the personal safety of.

As is evident from the quote from Nagel (or, for that matter, Eliot) at the beginning, many simply dont want to discuss it because it reminds them of their own mortality.