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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (4373)	2/13/2003 5:13:25 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 7720

Let me preface my post with the admission that this is a difficult issue for me to discuss dispassionately or impersonally as I watched both my parents die slowly and painfully from colon cancer. I can only assume that you have never gone through this type of experience to write with such a determinedly intellectual and compassionless view about "lack of fortitude" and "infantilization". I don't believe that anyone who has watched someone they love dearly go through this process, who has sat through endless, pain wracked nights watching a beloved life slowly dissolve into nothing but a skeleton and a breath, who has changed diapers, spoonfed, assisted with the most intimate of tasks, could ever declare with such conviction that suffering is good for character or condemn as cowards those who might choose an early out. A death like that brings much more than pain: it brings loss of control, humiliation, dependence. And older people who have nursed partners, parents, friends, have seen deaths like this, and, unlike you, know much more clearly what they face when the verdict is given, not just their own pain, but the burden and pain they become for the people they most love. My mother's greatest fear was that she would die of cancer as my father did. When she was diagnosed, she faced her death more bravely than soldier ever did on a battlefield. She was incredible. But I would have judged her no less courageous had she ended it at any point in the battle. There seems to me no great benefit in extended suffering. After a certain point, you are incapable of ending it; you no longer have the tools, or the resources. I do think that she might have considered suicide had she not been devout. Die how you chose, and don't participate in anything that violates your own personal ethic of required suffering, but don't speak with such condescension on the proper way to die, or what constitutes dying with character. Not until you have walked much closer to the experience. If indeed, you already know death more than through your books and studies, then I apologize for what might seem to be my own arrogance. I know you are not a man without compassion, but I think you are maybe without true experience in this particular area. The reality is so different from the intellectual musings we all indulge in, and I think it changes the way we view death. It is not always some finite moment, but can be a long process. Both my parents died long before they took the last breath. Often the person who is dying is no longer the person he was. His true character was in how he lived the life he is exiting, not in how long he can manage to keep breathing, drugged on morphine, or wandering far from the conscious world around him. I realize I have not addressed Jewel's and your assisted suicide arguments, which is entirely different from that of unassisted, but I feel you wandered also from that topic and instead focused on the character failings of someone who chooses to die as if our helping them was some sort of spoiled baby indulgence and that bothered me. It is good that we value human life- we should; I just don't believe that allowing a person to cut short his suffering, or avoid it, diminishes that value.