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

To: one_less who wrote (4533)	2/17/2003 1:19:01 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 7720

I have been stuck alive and below my threshold of life quality many times, but am not suicidal. Most people I know readily admit that life can, at times, seem like an impossible struggle. Yet, time is a great healer for most things that seem impossible in any given moment. Jewel, tunnel vision is not what I'm talking about. Why do you keep harping on that? I'm not talking about bankruptcy. You're right. People often feel hopeless when they're not really hopeless. That's what Prozac and family are for. I just went through that with my father who, for a period of time, was ready to die just because he was stuck wearing a catheter. The man has never been sick in his life--I don't recall him even having had a cold--and he has no perspective. It was my job to insinuate some perspective into that situation for him or even to have forcibly stopped him from taking rash action if need be. Several months later, the catheter is out. While he is still shaken by the reality of his being old and "circling the drain," as he puts it, he's enjoying life again. What I'm talking about is genuine hopelessness. I've defined my minimum quality of life as the ability to take nutrition through my mouth, eyesight, enough use of at least one arm so I can scratch my own nose and work the TV remote control, and sufficient freedom from pain that I can be distracted from my pain by the TV or other activity. Failing that on a permanent basis, I'm outta here. Life is not worth living. Would you really insist that I stick around for a decade or two in that condition burning up resources that could be put to better use? How would that benefit society? It is hard not to view the subject of suicide as a health issue. Suicide is a health issue. It is also an existential issue, a religious issue, and a control issue. 'Death is a positive outcome for a life worth living.' <g> I wouldn't go quite so far as to look forward to it, but I do think it's natural and inevitable and nothing to be feared. What is to be feared is what immediately precedes it, which is why I make a hobby horse out of making that part of it humane. On Saturday, my father mailed me the paperwork to do his taxes. On Sunday morning when I called him, he was in a stew--something about how he had been doing his taxes wrong for years. He had been awake since one trying to rough out his taxes in preparation for my doing them, why I don't know. He was struggling terribly with the process and really upset that he couldn't figure it out anymore. He's really fighting to be able to do things as he used to while knowing that he can't. After I got him off the subject of taxes we talked about basketball. He and I both follow the U of A Wildcats and we talk about the team and the games. Early this season he mentioned to me that he was having trouble following the games on TV because they were up and down the court so quickly. The team is really fast and I thought he was just referring to that quality of the team. Yesterday he said he's even having trouble listening to the announcers because they talk too quickly. That's when I realized that the problem is not just that Hassan Adams has jets in his shoes but that Dad's brain just doesn't process quickly enough for basketball anymore. Getting old is a bitch. I feel for those who find they can't do anything anymore. I'm not about to let my dad go over a lousy catheter, but there will come a point, I know, when it's time to let go. I hope that he and I both have the wisdom to know when that time comes.