6 views of death – some measures of life

6 Views of death – some measures of life

Torrey Orton
May 31, 2009

“You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. . no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you.”

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death’s nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death. I have a stake. I’m old enough (66) to know that I’m nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I’ve outlived my father and his father by 2 years. I’m pretty clear I want to die when I want to if I can and have taken steps to encourage its probability.

I share this view and intent with my wife. We’ve signed the necessary papers to ensure (there’s a wondrous claim these days) that the ‘life support’ technologies are turned off, or left off, if we’re incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of my confidence, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. These stem from their meanings of life. Some of them are catastrophically confronting for people like me. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too? This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films.

This series of views is undertaken with intellectual wonderment at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertain fulfilment of my preference to choose my own death time as much as that’s possible. Some of the pathways to the views may traverse the following terrains.

Some initial takes on life-death

For instance, there is the common notion of a ‘good death’. Dying on one’s own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one’s time had a limit and making ways for others was both necessary and honourable. A next-best ‘good death’ may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way.

Then we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned comprehensively for).

The handmaiden of this feeling, this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life, is the philosophy of ‘nice’. It has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face of pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).

So, we are not to see death or damage in public (my ex-countrymen took this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country). Nor even should we speak them. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but ‘dead’, ‘body’ or similar explicits. Rather we are given ‘the deceased’ who ‘passed on’ (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly ‘passed away’ (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just ‘passed’ (like a train in the night?). Yet all are “tragedies” (with the exception of registered crims and malefactors by acclamation) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.

Politics of life-death

The politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight to the death to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. They get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair.

The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train. So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. One of these facts is that we cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – life is death and death is life; we are living-dying beings; we live for a while, and, however long it never amounts to how long we have not existed.

In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere And, as the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I’d have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.

A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. This would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine supposedly stands as one for all life-death matters.

So here’s a contents page for some views of life-death to come at this site in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The rest are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I’ll be learning as a I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view.

1) Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – for example:

Cathy O’Dowd’s Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May ’09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. “The general public don’t get this: they think, ‘As long as she’s alive, you can’t leave’. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can’t do that on Everest.” The same story was reported in 2007 with a more extended treatment, and the same ending.

High risk sports – not tennis, basketball, net ball, bowls - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping (?), base jumping, peak bagging, have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers. These are the actions of people whose meaning is tenuous enough to require excitement-enhanced expression.

In Australia we have our own (but don’t others, too?) sport - binge drinking: specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfillments every weekend. These are called “tragedies” when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness. Some don’t even apologise for the damage to others it occasions – both male and female (e.g. -Maria Makridakis, 26; THEAGE May 23, ‘09).

2) Beginning of life and ...rights to life.
Why is IVF a government sponsored medical alternative whose clients believe it is their right – namely the right to have a child even when it’s not naturally happening for them?

3) ‘Normal’ end of life and...death is for embracing or defeating?
What is normal in life-death matters? What’s a good life-death in various cultures? Well-beings on offer.

4) Martyrs and those who serve and...
People join armies and police forces and fire brigades around the world with a heightened prospect of having to pay with their lives for the safety of their fellows (and, in the case of armies and police, by intentionally taking the lives of Others). How can this be integrated into the meanings of life-death.

5) Suicide attempts, successes and failures...
A story of coming to life by attempting to die...
The reporting of suicide ( if at all) as an individual problem while the social settings are seldom mentioned, as factors; and never mentioned as pre-conditions.

6) Near deaths and...insights from those who passed over and back again.
How it feels to have a stroke - Jill Bolt Taylor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

Right to die / right to live and...so, what’s it all mean to me?