I
have a lot of respect for Hospice. Twenty-four years ago, their
caregivers helped my family deal with the hardest aspects of
my mother's rapid death from untreatable cancer – both in easing
her pain and helping us cope. Now, the organization is doing the
same for another loved one, who has luckily survived to face the
consequences of old age: so-called "natural causes."
The
signs of impending death are as unmistakable as they are
heart-wrenching. When you see them, you begin to comprehend the
incomprehensible, that there are some situations where death is
preferable to living. In such situations, typified by the body's
inability to overcome the forces that are breaking it down, the mind
looks for a way to escape. That escape is withdrawal into an
imaginary reality that at first, like dreaming, tries to sort out
what's happening, then at the end appears and feels like the passage
into another, more benign world. Many of us who haven't faced death
directly, or crave hope for a positive outcome as our loved ones
suffer, find solace in the idea that the imaginary world is real. As
death approaches, for us and for others, we want it to be as positive
as possible, and with luck and help we can prepare the mind to make
it so.
Twenty
years ago, my father had a much different experience. He died alone
of a heart attack in a bathroom at work. There was no opportunity to
save him, no time to say goodbye. Sometimes he would say he wanted
to die with his boots on, but I doubt he meant anything like this.
In retrospect, there were signs: he smoked; tired easily during long
walks after we moved up in altitude from sea level to nearly 5,000
feet; and was stressed by a grueling work schedule (in my early 30s,
I had trouble keeping up). We were on a deathwatch and didn't know
it. I suspect that in the short seconds before my father died, his
always active mind went through its own escape process, a rapid
shutdown that I hope ended with a flash of peace.
These
experiences are part of a continuum, which appears to vary in scale,
age, and time: a single death or multiple deaths; time lived before
death; and an irreversible decline lasting an instant or years. The
global mass extinction event currently underway represents an extreme
part of that continuum: in terms of just humanity, there may be
billions of deaths following a few hundred thousand years of our
species' existence, and a decline of a few decades. Like my parents
who smoked, we're poisoning ourselves and the other species that keep
the planet habitable; if we continue for even a few more years, there
will be so much poison that we can't stop the worst consequences. My
current job, enabling the systematic, sophisticated monitoring of
ecosystems, will then merely serve the purpose of documenting the
death of a planet.
It's
easy to see the growing pervasiveness of entertainment. I've used it
myself to keep my stress level down when I get too caught up in the
bad stuff that's happening. Our species seems to be like a large,
dying patient whose body is overwhelmed and whose mind – aided by
technology – is creating delusions to deal with the impending
shutdown. Science has already shown that time is running out for
deciding whether to cure ourselves or to preside over our own
deathwatch. I fervently hope that we choose to salvage reality.