To Die Or Not To Die

Okay, let me get this straight —

Medical care costs are over $7,000 a year for seniors who keep on living, and over $37,000 a year for seniors in their last year of life.

That study was done nearly 20 years ago – so adjusted for inflation, that comes to:

$7,000.00 in 1996 had the same buying power as $10,627.64 in 2014.

$37,000.00 in 1996 had the same buying power as $56,174.68 in 2014.

According to this handy-dandy calculator I found online.

Clearly the last year of life is one hum-dinger.

Maybe we should just stop people from dying.  I’m being serious here.

Maybe we should just stop people from spending our tax money or whatever money when it looks like the last year.

Me, I would prefer to keep people from dying.  To say I am a fairly lonely voice in this is a real understatement.  But honestly – who could be against NOT dying?

I am not the only voice.  Ray Kurzweil, an acclaimed futurist, has predicted an event he called the “singularity.”   He defines this as a sort of merging of humans and machines that will permit some sort of immortality, probably sooner than anyone can imagine.

He has all kinds of web pages and magazine interview where he shows the basic knowledge to keep people from ever dying is in place around 2047.

Doesn’t this make you excited too?

Me, I figure it will be within my lifetime, and I have a rage to live — to see what the world does next, to keep going.

Maybe you think this Kurzweil is a looney-coo-coo.  I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know his background.

“Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS selected Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. He is considered one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a 30-year track record of accurate predictions.”

This is the guy who developed the flatbed scanner, the first OCR, the first concert-quality music synthesizer, and most of the speech-recognition software used by computers.

No lightweight – He’s been awarded all kinds of prizes, presidential recognition, and is one of the few people I know of with more degrees than me. (One person introduced me in public as “Having more degrees than a thermometer.”)

Kurzweil is not the only person who has predicted something that sounds like biological immortality in maybe 20 years or so, easily within the lifespan of my husband and me.  I am trying hard to preserve the brain and body I’ve got, and to save my pennies as best I can, since I have a feeling biological immortality, whatever form it takes, is not exactly going to be free of charge.

I continue to be amazed that other people simply do not feel the way that I do.  I am constantly meeting people my age (or younger!) who tell me they have lived their lives, raised their families, done what they wanted, and want to make way for the next generation because their aches/pains/worries are not worth the trouble.

These people have been programmed for failure.

However, human mortality is an unavoidable fact at this time. And when we get into the field of healthcare – and especially PAYMENT for healthcare — we get into a mess.

We are a far cry from the Ethical Suicide parlors that Kurt Vonnegut described in his story “Welcome to the Monkey House”(1958).  He described this as, “A comfy environment in which you might commit ethical suicide, and thereby serve society.”

We have forces like government and religion and — most of all – the Big Money Players that are playing into the decisions regarding, at the very least, that expensive final year.

We have heard the opposition to President Obama’s healthcare programs refer to “Death Panels.”  If you want to “dis” (that’s street slang for “disrespect” but with much more contempt) an idea, I know of no stronger way to do it!

The Independent Payment Advisory Board(IPAB) is a fifteen-member United States Government agency described as an “Independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts, and consumers.”

If you believe such a “commission” could truly be independent, then I think I know where you can get some cheap oceanfront property in Arizona.

The person who should be making a lot of (if not all of) the relevant decisions should be the interested party – the patient or his or her legally designated guardians/conservators.

There has been much made of the inability to get people to discuss what they do and do not want done when they appear to be at the end of life.

Me, if my brain/consciousness could survive, I would want everything — and more – done.  But if my brain were gone — okay so pull the plug.  This makes sense as I have spent most of my efforts in life working on my brain and believe it to be of past and probable future use.

Maybe there are some body builders who feel their body is enough of a work of art that they want it enshrined indefinitely.  Yes, some such folks have actually opted for modern forms of mummification, because they — well, idolize the body.

If I were uncomfortable or “scared” to talk about this, the fact that decisions regarding the end of my life could be made by an allegedly independent commission would be plenty enough motivation to make me adamant about getting my wishes known.

Whatever I want or do not want, I certainly do not want end of life decisions determined by politics.  Or cost.

This is just another way that leaving decisions to others compromises the integrity of the self in favor of “government,”  I don’t care if it is right or left, conservative or liberal.  It is government, making a decision, either directly or indirectly, that should have absolutely nothing to do with government.

“That government is best which governs least.”

Oh, how I wanted to believe Thomas Jefferson had said this!  Nobody (including me) can find it anywhere in his writings, but I can buy the attribution to Thoreau.

Life remains divinely precious.  I believe in the Buddhist ideal of living each day as if it were your last, with all that is so implied.  Living fully, trying new things, using your brain, not following the crowd for the sake of following the crowd, valuing reflection above impulsivity; all of that.

This does not mean that we should let age — or death — destroy us without a damned good fight (says this sixty-one year old woman who takes plenty of Methyl Sulfonyl Methane a.k.a. MSM and is still a bit sore from her wildly energy-demanding ballet lesson two days ago).

My husband, raised on wild-and-woolly movies of cowboys and wars and such, sarcastically quotes a John Wayne scene where he is trying to rally his troops in WWII to charge the enemy with the words, “Come on you SOBs – Do ya want to live forever?”

Yes, Mr. Wayne – I certainly do!  And I have my own favorite quote to contribute:

Sometimes the poet says it better than the Duke.  I cannot count how many times I have quoted this beloved line of poetry by Dylan Thomas (ironically — a man who drank himself to death):

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

THE END