11-10-2008: Mortality (Past Post)

When I was younger, I'd spend a lot of evenings with my father, driving around in the van and listening to NPR. My father and I have always been lucky enough to be able to subsist on a comfortable silence; we rarely feel the need to feel a space with words, when the space itself is enough. We'd often listen to programs like "Fresh Air," "All Things Considered," or the "BBC World News." I learned a lot about politics, about geography, history, society, and ethics.
There were many times when a program would begin to talk about new drug trials, or the rising cost of health care. My father and I would both become animated during these programs, both arguing with the radio about the social systems of our country that allowed people a basic human right, life, based upon their income.
I would often make the argument that "Well, what can you do?" After all, a person with a chronic, debilitating, or terminal illness needs the medication to stay healthy, or even alive. No matter what the price is, it has to be paid. My father would invariably disagree. I remember once he told me quite bluntly, "You know I'm sick. And my medication is expensive. I've lived a good life, I think. And I don't know, I'll keep taking it for now, but maybe one day, once you kids have all graduated and are out of the house..." He stopped there, and silence settled down again between us. But my father and I, both experts at reading silence, knew what he meant. It is my life, and my choice.
In high school, a friend who had been battling a rare form of cancer died our sophomore year. At our Senior Candlelight, his sister read an essay she had written about his death. More specifically, about how he decided he was going to die. The family had known for a long time that the expensive, time-consuming, and painful treatments were only doing so much. The cancer was not going away. One day he told them, "I'm done." There was too much pain, both for him physically, as his body succumbed to both the cancer and the ravages of the chemotherapy, and psychically, watching his family and friends suffer, watching himself suffer. He died shortly after.
Dylan Thomas once wrote:
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
And it does appear to be human nature, and an evolutionary imperative, to fight against death. Recent research has shown that human beings are unable to imagine a time when they are no longer here. We can not picture our own deaths, and believe death to be possible for ourselves, no matter how much we see it happen to others.
But death will happen to us all. Like it or not, it is the final chapter of a life. We are born, we live, and we die. A person can not always know when, where, or how they will die. Death is often an accident, or a violent event that was not seen coming. But sometimes we catch it, stalking us. For some, Death does not wait patiently, it actively seeks one out.
People have the right to live as they choose. And as death is the final act of a life, they have the right to die as they choose, if they are given a choice. We may not always agree with that choice; we may fight for a friend, feeling that they are not fighting hard enough for themselves. We may rage and rail against them in anger, frustration, and fear, as they refuse to take medication, refuse to stop damaging habits like drinking, smoking, cutting, promiscuity, or other self-injurious behaviors.We may not understand their firm belief that the quality of their life is far more important than the quantity of years they live. We may decide that they are wrong, that they have made the wrong choice, that perhaps they are crazy as well as sick, to choose not to fight with every last breath.
Our opinions do not matter.
It is not our choice.
A friend's death is haunting, terrifying, and debilitating to those left behind. And those left behind will invariably wonder if there was something they could have done to prevent it. It will hurt, and it will scar, and it will affect us in ways we can not yet begin to imagine. Yet it is not our life, and it is not our death. I firmly believe we have not the right to dictate how a person lives, or dies. I firmly believe this is a decision that lies with the person making it, and no one else, no matter how close to them we are, how much we care.
If you truly want to help a friend live, then help them live. Support them, love them, laugh with them, hold them, cry with them, live with them, hope with them. But you can not die with them.
You can not stop death. Death is not an illness, and there is not and never will be a cure.

"You can not give somebody joy; but you can find it by trying.
You can't save someone from death, but you can love them while they're dying."
-Gratitude, "The Greatest Wonder"