On Living and Dying

I've made it very clear to my sons even at their young ages that when I'm to go on to be with Jesus it had better not be from a damned nursing home with piss running down my leg.  I expect to be taken up into the wilderness of the Stillwater valley and left with my 45 and a bag of beef jerky.  They can come get me in a few days if they want to bury me.  If that's the case then I'd prefer a Viking pyre with torches and lots of booze but it's pretty hard to dictate your burial ceremony from the ever-after so that will depend on who's planning the funeral.  Let it be known to the world then my will and testament.  A pyre, torches, flowing barrels of beer into big mugs and lots of poetic annunciations.  Maybe a hymn or two but only if they're manly hymns.  Make it something I'd like to be at.

I thought of this when I read Jonathan David Price's post Advantages Of Dying Young on The Front Porch Republic yesterday.  Here's a great excerpt.  Read the whole thing.

In the modern health system, life can be extended beyond one’s capacity to live. The listlessness of modern death—especially for men—is that you might not even get a chance to show courage before you forget who you are.

That should be a hit upside the head.  Of course Wendell's already been here.  His short story Fidelity probes this idea with great clarity.  The story is much more complicated than I can really illustrate here.  That's the joy of story.  You can't boil it down to its component parts and expect it to have the same impact.  It's the complete package or nothing.  But I'll summarize so you have an idea and maybe you'll go out and read it.  If you've read any of Wendell's fiction then you'll recognize these characters because he uses them throughout his story lines. 

Uncle Burley is an old man.  I believe it was set in the early 1980's.  His health declines and his family doesn't know what to do so they take him to a hospital out of desperation.  The old man is dying and they soon realize this.  The hospital sterilizes him and puts him on life support and the tragedy of this separation from the land and everything Burley loved becomes immediately apparent.  So Nathan Coulter steals Burley from the hospital and takes him back to his place to let him die in peace on the land that he loved.  Then the story gets good.  The family and community of Port William back him completely and stymie the investigator sent to prosecute the case.  They cover up and mislead  and mock his ignorance and in classic Wendell style make you feel completely and utterly connected to this community and the way that it understands itself.  It's an amazing story with a lot of interesting commentary on hospitals, healthcare, community and of course dying. 

I work in healthcare.  I'm not directly clinical.  I fix and tinker with medical equipment of all types.  I enjoy my work for what it is with its simple technical intimacy.  I like taking stuff apart and figuring out how it works and what's wrong with it and I'll say with only a mild hubris; I'm good at it.  There's a lot of that going around at the hospital.  We are damn good at what we do.  Sometimes I wonder, when I see patients on the edge of death, very old and feeble, what the hell are we doing this for?  Have we no dignity in death?  Are we that terrified of the dark?  What terrifies me is the prospect of ending up on one of the machines I service everyday.  You live life and then you die.  I don't want any hospital purgatory getting in the way of either of those complimentary aspects of being. 

I make my claims on life receiving what it gives me even to the end at death.  These are our limits and in them we are free.  Let me be a free man.  If nothing else then grant me that.