Opinion: The final hurrah

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

I wrote final week about why our nationwide financial system can’t endlessly develop, and neither can people. That has viscerally hit house for me after soldiering by way of 4 cancers.

My unease intensified after studying an previous article in Atlantic Journal by an oncologist and bioethicist entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” He argued, “that society and households – and also you – shall be higher off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly.”

He accuses Individuals of in search of immortality by way of our obsession with everlasting progress, “exercising, doing psychological puzzles, consuming numerous juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping nutritional vitamins and dietary supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat demise.” Sadly, this marketing campaign has failed. Over the past 50 years, “well being care hasn’t slowed the ageing course of a lot because it has slowed the dying course of.”

Earlier than the appearance of contemporary drugs, individuals, as a rule, handed shortly, thus avoiding lengthy, painful deaths. He quotes from a turn-of-the-century medical textbook, “Pneumonia could be known as the good friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, brief, not typically painful sickness, the previous man escapes these ‘chilly gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his buddies.”

I’ve already skilled a few of these ‘chilly gradations of decay.’ Listening to aids and a synthetic knee are poor substitutes for the true factor. And my cancers, now fortunately in remission, have taken a long-lasting toll by way of surgical procedure, radiation, and chemotherapy.

Don’t get me mistaken, I’m grateful to be nonetheless kicking and in comparatively fine condition, in no small half due to superior care from Harmony Hospital. I nonetheless hike, backyard, and minimize my firewood, albeit at a slower tempo. Nonetheless, I shall be reluctant to undergo extra heavy-duty medical remedy sooner or later due to the extra toll it’ll tackle my compromised physique, coupled with the hardship of tolerating one other prolonged and painful restoration course of.

Nonetheless, I see a shiny facet. My journey has helped me make peace with my mortality. In 1988, Barbara Ehrenreich, now sadly deceased, wrote a searing ebook on this topic known as Pure Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Dwell Longer.

“We might purchase costly anti-aging merchandise or beauty surgical procedure, get preventive screenings and eat extra kale, or throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality. However all this stuff supply solely the phantasm of management. The right way to dwell properly, even joyously, whereas accepting our mortality – that’s the vitally necessary philosophical problem of this ebook.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Dwelling out our lives as if demise didn’t exist is a tragedy. That’s as a result of, within the phrases of Serge Daney, the acclaimed film critic, it’s demise that bestows our lives with “gravity and significance.” He mentioned that the filmmaker’s position, and it’s true for all of us, is to interpret “The load of life by way of the knowledge of demise.”

Sadly, as Ehrenreich factors out about up to date society, as a result of we’re in denial about demise, we’ve made no preparation for leaving it. “We deal with ageing as an outrage or, worse, as a sin. In our dependancy to betterment, we’ve changed “well being” — an absence of illness — with the amorphous “wellness” and a flurry of overtesting, fad diets and pointless “various” remedies.”

Ehrenreich makes the purpose that reasonably than investing the vast majority of our medical assets on the aged, as our nation does now, we must always make investments as a substitute within the well being of our youngsters and youthful of us, who’re of their productive years.

It goes with out saying that we might all prefer to dwell longer and more healthy lives. “The query is how a lot of our lives ought to be dedicated to this undertaking, once we all, or a minimum of most of us, produce other, typically extra consequential issues to do.”

She would reasonably take a stroll in nature than make a journey to the hospital for a screening check.

I really feel the identical.

I’ve lived a protracted lifetime of striving. Striving to get good grades in class, grasp a significant occupation, elevate my household, and, hopefully, make a slight, optimistic distinction on this planet. At 77, I’ve no need to proceed striving to dwell so long as doable. As an alternative, I’d reasonably sit back and really feel the solar on my face, take heed to the birds sing, and revel in my buddies whereas having a beer.

I’ve been made conscious, nevertheless, if I do make it to at least one hundred, sure exceptions open up, as informed on this anecdote by Nir Barzilai, the director of the Institute for Growing old Analysis.

Barzilai as soon as visited a centenarian. She was smoking a cigarette when she opened the door.

“I mentioned, ‘Helen, no person informed you to give up smoking?’”

“And she or he mentioned, ‘You recognize, the 4 medical doctors who informed me to give up smoking? All of them died.”

So it goes.