Eventually? In some countries? It's happening here and now. As baby boomers age, it will escalate.
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Posted on 06/29/2006 10:14:07 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Eventually? In some countries? It's happening here and now. As baby boomers age, it will escalate.
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In her world, if you can make abortion and co-murder sound honorable, then they are honorable. It's a lace doily over a corpse.
Surely Satan delights when we decide that we know better than God, and act accordingly.
Well said and worth repeating.
The atheists have a better understanding of life than she does.
That's what always dumbfounds me. I personally know three (three!) prolife atheists who unhesitatingly morally reject abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and suicide. They are not pacifists (they see the justness of repelling aggressors) but somehow they don't think that human beings are Absolute Masters of Life and Death.
They are invariably irritated when I say this, but I honestly think they are implicitly respecting the rights of the One who IS the Lord and Giver of Life.
I've got to pray for Anne Lamott. She's got to get past this lethal sentimentality of hers, this Jesusy Feelgood delusion. Someday she'll realize that life and death are not hers to command. She'll have to answer for her crimes.
I'm thinking that though Anne Lamott is guilty of betraying her friend to his deathwish (like giving a gun to a depressive) and likewise legally liable for homicide, she might also be, in a way, partly excused on account of an appalling ignorance. She is reliant (as so many of us are) on a culture that does not show us the dignified, human way to die.
Skr, you're a believer; and Yaelle, you are too (a believing Jew, if I remember correctly?) and we have at least some remnants of a God-pleasing tradition on how to behave at the very end.
In the Catholic tradition (more honored in the breach than in the observance, sorrowfully) you've got your family around your deathbed saying the Rosary; the priest comes and you have your last Confession --- if you're able to speak --- and Communion, the Viaticum; you're anointed and blessed; you have a crucifix in your hands so you can think of your sufferings as united to His, you think of the great Being who welcomes you: a good death, a blessed death.
I'm sure other religious traditions have something like this.
But people don't know this anymore because they have been raised without traditions. They know that the most common venue for death (alone in a medical facility attached to machines) is inhuman; so they devise something that seems more merciful, more personal.
But Anne belongs to some wackadoo West Coast church where they make it up as they go along; they have no ways to fold the hands in death, no blessings for these passages; and poisoned applesauce (in a tiny Asian bowl) is no substitute for the Real Presence.
Fantastic observations!
I'm very much conflicted about this subject...
I've had a friend from high school, whos mother had terminal bone cancer. She begged him for a gun, or to kill her, because of the pain. Needless to say, he was badly screwed up from the experience before I lost contact with him.
During the times she was somewhat coherent (even the morphine drip didn't completely ease the pain when she was concious), she would cry about making the pain stop. The last three weeks of her life were the worst for him. For about two weeks, she would go in and out of consiousness, and cry and wimper from the pain. The last week of her life, she was unconcious.
Like I said, I'm conflicted here. On the one hand, the thought of a doctor going against the first rule of the Hyppactatic (sp?) oath, "Do No Harm," is frightening, but at the same time, in a situation like this, I can understand it.
Mark
Hey, they're dying anyway! You're just doing them a favor, keeping them from suffering needlessly!
You're doing them a favor! They just don't realize it, the unappreciative bastards!
Mark
No kidding.
but I heard an Eastern mystic say it was like slipping off a pair of shoes that never fit well.
I hear people say stupid stuff all the time too.
We discussed a story in the paper once, about a man who gave his wife an overdose, and then sealed her upper body in a plastic trash bag with duct tape. Then he had done this to himself, and they died holding hands. What love!
ahh yes, what love. Treating Gram-Gram like a bag of trash. Lovely. Great post in #66, Mrs. Don-O. I've never heard of this writer before but I'm not impressed at all by this article and her story should be investigated.
And if anyone wants to read a good writer with intelligent things to say on suffering and death, please read "The Story of a Soul" by St.Therese of Lisieux.
I've had a friend from high school, whos mother had terminal bone cancer. She begged him for a gun, or to kill her, because of the pain. Needless to say, he was badly screwed up from the experience before I lost contact with him.
During the times she was somewhat coherent (even the morphine drip didn't completely ease the pain when she was concious), she would cry about making the pain stop. The last three weeks of her life were the worst for him. For about two weeks, she would go in and out of consiousness, and cry and wimper from the pain. The last week of her life, she was unconcious.
Like I said, I'm conflicted here. On the one hand, the thought of a doctor going against the first rule of the Hyppactatic (sp?) oath, "Do No Harm," is frightening, but at the same time, in a situation like this, I can understand it.
Mark
As a Christian, I cannot and will not condone assisted suicide in any form.
All I can say is, death is terrible because death IS terrible. It's not the way it's supposed to be. It is not God's Plan A:
"God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome. And there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the nether world on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24
On the other hand (maybe I don't say this directly to you, but to women): We give birth, don't we? And is that the easiest thing in the world? I remember Dorothy Day (1897-1980) wrote that the pain of giving birth to her daughter was fully comparable to a WWI soldier being caught in barbed wire and bayoneted. But she thought it was worthwhile a hundred times over in the joy of bringing a new life into the world.
So pain is something you can take, if you have a notion of the joy that awaits you.
Read Brave New World again. They had it set up so everyone could die smiling, with the equivalent of Anne's Compassionate Applesauce. They had no pain; but it was so inhuman because they had no hope of new life, no joy awaiting.
Well said. And the Catholic tradition and rites of dying are indeed very beautiful and give meaning and ceremony to the end of one's life. Yes, in the Jewish tradition, one is NEVER allowed to give up hope, which is very hard to reconcile of course with some diagnoses and conditions. One is ALWAYS to pray for healing and life. But that is just it; we are not G-d and we are not meant to understand His world the same way He does.
The old tapestry paradigm comes to mind here. We lowly humans see only the back of the beautiful tapestry of life: we see the tangled knots and jumble of colors and threads. Every great once in a while, we are allowed a teeny glimpse of a small portion of the beautiful tapestry on the other side, the side G-d sees perfectly. We have only the barest IDEA of the beauty of creation.
This spoiled, misguided "Christian" writer, Anne Lamott, only wants a G-d who lets her be in charge. She knows better than Him when her friends should pass. And how. And in which room, with which guests, and supping from which Asian bowl.
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