Not everyone considers it so, dear man. Death is never an end? It seems to be... another transition?
One in which I take yet another form. My energy, dissipates toward another node. My body begins to decay, to change to yet another configuration of material it was not in before.
Pain and suffering we think of as being always with us. Perhaps the degree of them that we can accept and live with are different to us all.
I know that my paternal grandmother lived and worked down to ten days before she died. She was making breakfast one morning in 1950 and passed out at her stove. Taken to the hospital she had tests performed and a determination made that she had been having excruciating abdominal pains that finally caused her to pass out.
A surgeon performed an exploratory investigation. Sewed her back up. Abdominal cancer that was estimated to have eaten her stomach to about 90%. She never left that hospital.
She had never stated her pain to either of my two aunts who lived with her. Just passed out and then passed away. I have never been able to quite understand her ability to continue through what must have been horrible for her. You see, my threshold for physical pain is much less than her's must have been.
I admire that ability she had. And when my grandfather died in in 1940, in a car accident, he left her with five children -- the youngest was six and the oldest was twenty. But the oldest was also developmentally delayed. My grandmother finished the raising of those children over the next eleven years. I'm sure she never expected to be doing that alone.
I don't know exactly what she had expected. Her father had been well-off and doted on her. I have a picture of her when she was eighteen. She was lovely and from all I have heard one might have expected her to be other than a housewife and shopkeeper. I have another picture of her made six months before she died.
Her body was still thin; her features were still delicate and lovely. Yet, I can also see where the years had worn themselves into her. They had moulded and changed her, the lively spirit of youth had been tempered by work and childbirth and death into the features of a different woman, perhaps a much older sister of that girl.
I wasn't around to get to know her at all. So, I cannot frame answers to your question based on her life and death. It was a different time and place. I have a different view of things.
I know this. You have touched me and I have no sense that you are already 'dead and cold inside.' I doubt that she was either. The similarities I see are that there are strengths you both shared. A willingness to give of yourselves and to help others, to live with pain and to arise each day and hope that in some way today will be better than was yesterday.
I have read her diaries. Mostly just struggles to make ends meet and to raise as best she could children who she worried about. She had few worries about herself. But, it was a different time and place. I imagine that I couldn't do what she did. I have doubts that most anyone these days could. Life in Middle Tennessee for her was what she knew: a sense that to struggle and try to succeed was somehow an ultimate test of one's mettle.
I know that I would have you remain in-touch with me for a longer period of time than we have been in-touch. I know I would learn more from and about you than I know now. It's not that I feel death does not become a rational choice. Reason has no part in my desire. Emotional attachment has much to do with my desire.
It's strange. You are a set of words, a series of BB interactions that I have come to feel and know as Nero. Someone I have come to care for and to appreciate for his strength and resilience. She was a set of diaries, a rumor almost, about whom I heard stories when I was young. She was someone whose bone-structure and features I share in. Someone who managed to give life to my father and so, later, to give life to me.
You I find so much more important.
I wish I had some sort of answer for you, Nero. I wish I could show you your possibility and pass along some ultimate hope to you that would take away your doubts and pain. Alas, I am incapable. I can only say to you that you matter, very much, you matter as someone I am coming to regard fondly and with affection. You are for me, a brother, a friend, a strength.
Is there a point at which life becomes untenable? Is there a point at which we should allow another to go due to the pain and exhaustion with struggle they experience? I suspect that there is. It's difficult to say when I arrive at that point, when they arrive there. For my struggle on this end is not a struggle with established equations and logical process, with weights that can be scientifically compared and evaluated.
Instead, my struggle with your question is this. Would I have this person live on and continue to help me make it through days and days? Would I want this person somehow gone so I could never speak with him again, never hope to see his face and hear his voice?
The answer to that question comes through and from my heart, my dear man. The answer is 'no.' For, you see, in that regard I am selfish and filled with my own sense of loss in simply contemplating your questions. You see, I am not as strong and as selfless as that Katherine who once made my life possible. I do not wish to feel the pain I should feel were you no longer here or somewhere I could not reach. I have no wish to give up the hope of hugging you someday
In some ways you have managed to touch me, and I have enjoyed that touch. I would not have it go away. But those are all heart reasons. No logic, no fantastic argument from reason can I apply to your questions. All I can apply to them is my heart, my care and, yes, my love.
I will answer then, no, death is not merciful, not when I am thinking of yours.
Hugs,
Nichole
Quote from: Nero on December 27, 2007, 03:29:35 AM
I ask you - If death is considered mercy for physical pain and suffering (we put mortally wounded animals out of their misery, even when they'll die in less than an hour), can it not be merciful for mental suffering?
Even moreso for one suffering from both physical and mental agony?
If the pain is too great and the individual is already dead and cold inside...
