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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (41793)	6/25/1999 12:45:00 AM
From: Graystone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Dying is simple or It simply includes us all You and your husband suffer from a common modern day fallacy. You are part of her Universe. Should she reject "us" with "you", you become powerless, even to empathize. She was probably thinking, whass amatter, never seen an ole lady before ?

To: Grainne who wrote (41793)	6/25/1999 1:38:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

I am sure you did not mean to sound condescending in that post about the old lady, Christine, but that is how it came across to me... I remember once seeing a wizened old crone crawl onto a bus, and having a reaction similar to your husband's. I was so horrifed and repelled I went home and wrote a story describing her, in all her decrepitude. However, I was eight years old at the time. I still have the story (I'm a pack rat), and it amazes me that it never seemed to occur to me either that I could become an old crone myself some day, or that the old crone did not think of herself as one... So, here we have a well-fed, well-dressed, confident, happy, healthy, middle-aged bourgeois couple heading off for a fine dinner by the beach, and suddenly, they see -- THE CRONE!! The husband turns away impatiently from this vision of His Future. "I never want to be like that," he says, meaning, of course: "I never WILL be like that." The wife tries to empathize, thinking, that perhaps the pore ole excuse for a human bean is enjoying the (presumably) few things left to her to enjoy, looking forward to her tapioca and her TV. How sweet!....But I tend to agree with Graystone. Maybe she WAS thinking -- "Whazza matter? Never seen an old lady before?" And looking forward to her BEEFSTEAK, and her WHISKEY, and perhaps even to her MIDNIGHT TRYST with the paralytic in the next room (the old and sick DO do IT, you know). And I would hope that if someone were to give her the tapioca pudding, she would throw it in the fishpond, where it belongs. Passions die hard, even in geezers & geezerettes... Sorry, I didn't intend to poke fun at you. I was really just poking fun at my eight-year-old self, retrospectively. I think that if that 8-year-old were to be resurrected, and were to take a gander at me now, she just might react with the same horror she felt when she saw THE CRONE many, many moons ago.... Joan

To: Grainne who wrote (41793)	6/25/1999 10:16:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I think dying is quite a personal and situational thing. Drugged to the gills with morphine, suffering from a heart attack, packed in ice, about have my heart cut, surrounded by my family, I felt very safe and very happy that I had junked my living will. I would have taken life on any terms. Fought anyone for another minute. A few days later, criscrossed with stitches and scars, writhing in pain, I was told by my son that before the operation he thought I was panicked and afraid. What did he know? I know the instinct to live is powerful, almost overwhelming. I've seen people die in agony, fighting to the end for the privilege of just a few breaths more. I remember talking for hours to my hanai son who was suffering from clinical depression. Life seemed meaningless to him. Rationally, he understood that he was sick. He knew people loved and cared for him. It didn't matter. Finally, very tired, 3AM, I couldn't stay awake any more. I stumbled off to my bed, half-convinced that he was right, although I had not uttered a single discouraging word. I had been treated for bi-polar disorder for many years. I was in danger. I left him sitting on his bed, staring into the middle distance. Later that morning, he went out on the beach and hanged himself.