‘Transhumanist’ eternal life? No thanks, I’d rather learn not to fear death.

Arthur C. Brooks writes in The Washington Post:

Herodotus, in the 5th century B.C., recorded an account of a race of people in northern Africa who, according to local lore, never seemed to age. Their secret, he wrote, was a fountain of youth in which they would bathe, emerging with “their flesh all glossy and sleek.” Legend has it that two millennia later, Spanish explorers searched for a similar restorative fountain off the coast of Florida.

We are still searching for the fountain of youth today. Instead of a fountain, however, it is a medical breakthrough, and instead of youth, we seek “transhumanism,” the secret to solving the problem of death by transcending ordinary physical and mental limitations. Many people believe this is possible. Observing a doubling of the average life span over the past century or so through science, people ask why another doubling is not possible. And if it is, whether there might be some “escape velocity” that could definitively end the aging of our cells while we also cure deadly diseases....

The promise to end old age is exciting and mind-boggling, of course. But it raises a question: Why would we want to defeat old age and its lethal result? After all, as writer Susan Ertz wryly observed in her 1943 novel “Anger in the Sky,” “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”\

...

Perhaps while we wait for the promises of transhumanism, we should hedge our bets with a bit of transmortalism, which has the side benefit of costing us no money. Who knows? Maybe the solution to the problem of death comes not by pushing it further away but, ironically, by bringing it much closer.

At 94, she was ready to die by fasting. Her daughter filmed it.

After a spinal injury, 94-year-old Rosemary Bowen "announced to her family and friends that she had decided to terminate her life by fasting. After saying her goodbyes, she stopped eating, and in the early morning of the eighth day of her fast, she died in her sleep.

But first, Rosemary asked her daughter, Mary Beth Bowen, to film her fast. The final week of her life is now documented, day by day, in a 16-minute film, which was shown publicly for the first time Saturday at the End of Life Expo hosted by Iona Senior Services in Tenleytown."



"Rosemary had seen friends in their 90s who had slowly declined, and as far back as 1979 she wrote about her aversion to an old age with loved ones “shuffling in and out of rest homes visiting me.” When a friend ended her life by fasting, Rosemary decided someday she would do the same."


She asked her daughter to film her death by fasting.

The Failure of Long-Term Care: My family faces an impossible choice: caring for our mom, or building our future

Med student Kristina Brown writes in The Washington Post about the heart-breaking dilemma of long-term care:

Many people assume that having a disability guarantees access to a network of resources. Not so. Because my mother has an income of $36,000 from her divorce settlement, is younger than 65 and lacks a 10-year employment history, she is disqualified from receiving Medicaid (despite its expansion), Medicare and Social Security Disability Insurance. Her private insurance company, like many others, does not cover home care for daily needs. The median cost of this service, for help seven days a week, is more than $80,000 per year. Like many families, we could not afford full-time coverage. This posed a life-altering dilemma: One of us had to stay home to care for her.

With my sister away at college, I went first: At age 16, when our 43-year-old mother lost the ability to walk, my life shifted to sleepless nights and baby monitors. Her disease progressed swiftly; soon she could no longer stand, eat or bathe without assistance. For six years, I provided 10 hours of care every day....

We are starting to run out of options: We could sell our home to qualify for state assistance; I could leave medical school to become a full-time caregiver for my mother. But taking these extreme, temporizing measures would only drive us further into a vicious cycle of financial instability.

Modern Loss: Vilomah

October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and today, the 15th, has been designated a day of remembrance for pregnancy loss and infant death which includes, but is not limited to, miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS or the death of a newborn.

We asked the Modern Loss community what words and phrases they use to illustrate this experience. The responses included "shattered," "homesick," "heartbreaking," and "searching." By far, though, the word with the strongest resonance is "vilomah," Sanskrit for "against a natural order." And, of course, this is the perfect term to describe the shattered dream of an eternal bond.

On this day and all others, we are sending love to all the vilomahs in our lives (and chances are great that you know more of them than you think). In this space, you will always be seen, heard and validated, and your lost loves will be missed by us all.

From Modern Loss

Jack Hamilton Says The Righteous Gemstones is a Comedy About Grief

The most hilarious and unexpectedly moving death scene you will see on television this year opens the season finale of The Righteous Gemstones, which airs Sunday night on HBO. The episode begins with a flashback to the death of beloved wife and mother Aimee-Leigh Gemstone, an unbearably sad moment for those present (her husband and three adult children) that rapidly descends into destructive chaos. The best slapstick has always been rooted in pain and a sense of cosmic injustice, and the scene, in all its uproarious brutality, finds the show’s characters processing death in a way that will feel familiar to anyone who’s lost a loved one: by flipping out and breaking shit.

Underlying the satire of megachurch Christianity is a hilarious but poignant portrait of a family coping with loss.

A Short Autobiographical Film from Matt Zoller Seitz About Loss, Grief, and Bed

Matt writes about it here.

Linda Pasten on Grief

NOTE: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said that there were five stages of dealing with your own death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. But they are most often used in discussions of mourning, grief, and loss of loved ones, as in this touching poem from Linda Pasten, called The Five Stages of Grief



The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast---
you sat there. I passed
you the paper---you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed so familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in detective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing
straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing, though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircse.
I have lost you.