On Death and Dying

‘Life is an uncertain adventure in a diffuse landscape, whose borders are continually shifting, where all frontiers are artificial, where at any moment everything  can either end only to begin again or finish suddenly, for ever and ever ,like an unexpected blow from an axe. Where the only absolute,coherent, indisputable and definitive reality is death’. ( From The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez Reverte)

 Temporality is the fundamental law of existence. Anything that is living today has to die a death sooner or later.  Yet we are so obsessed with the business of living that we hardly situate a thought on death in a narrative that is understood by all. This existential question is often considered as an old age luxury.  It is because of the belief that an awareness about the uncertain length of life may be a hindrance in the ascent of man whereas, on the contrary, many who sense impending death have hastened their contributions to humanity.

 Oddly enough man is the only creature who lives in the perpetual shadow of death. He is the only creature who is aware of death in the scathological sense of heaven or hell.

A quest for death merely for some metaphysical experience is rather rare although our myths are ridden with altruistic suicides. What we ‘modern’ men call euthanasia is still a hotly debated issue across the world.

On the other hand a search for the fountain of youth and immortality has always fired the imagination of everybody. Greek legend tells that Eos, the Goddess of the dawn married a mortal Tithonus. But while the Goddess remained eternally young (Even without using Pond’s Miracle),Tithonus began to age . So Eos begged Zeus to make Tithonus immortal. But Eos forgot to ask for the eternal youth that had to accompany the immortality. Zeus granted her wish. Tithonus became a shriveled cripple who incessantly babbled to himself. Gods became so disgusted with him that he was changed into a Cicada. So it follows that an immortal life without the attendant vigour and vitality is a real curse.

What happens if nobody dies? Saramago has given a very good description of such a situation in  his ‘Death at intervals’. In a nameless country all of a sudden people achieve immortality. Hospitals are full with terminally ill patients ;but they do not die. The patients and their relatives have a harrowing time. People met with terrible accidents yet never died.  Insurance business collapses and the Church became irrelevant as there was no death ; there has to be no resurrection or kingdom of God. Alongside a syndicate emerges who smuggle, against hefty amount, the terminally ill patients to the neighbouring countries so that they die a quiet and unknown death there.

However, in reality nobody can achieve such an eternal life( however useless and boring that might be). The physics of aging and dying tells us that as we age our ‘entropy’ increases in accordance with the Second law of Thermodynamics. Also we age and eventually die because of the ‘oxidative damage’ that the business of living inflicts on our body and mind. If the ‘entropy’ is decreased and the ‘oxidative damages’ can be minimised, human beings one day might not age and die. This idea  is,of course, still in a nascent stage.

A man can die in a variety of ways. Does not it remind us the fact that in a game of Cricket a Batsman can be out in a variety of ways?

Above all a man can kill himself. Sometimes the reason for killing oneself remains unclear. Every man( woman too) has a deep and dark recess of his own self to which access is not allowed. Sometimes a strange fear can be a reason for killing oneself. Jack London committed suicide by hanging himself from the ceiling because every night he dreamt that he drowned in sea and died. He did not like the idea of dying by drowning. So he killed himself in a way he liked ( I found this information in Murakami’s After the quake. So still I am unsure if it is fact or a highly fictionalised account).

Can there be a romantic idea of dying? If there were one, I am sure it is not a sudden ;but one surrounded by dear and near ones. And that too in a ripe age and after a brief illness.

Personally I have always liked Sudhir Kakar’s statement that I always tell my friends who are in medical profession:’ Medicines exists to fight disease; not death. When death comes holding hands with disease, it is the duty of the physician to prepare his patients for its arrival’.

A kind of peaceful and collaborative death.