Let My Mother Go

On the way to visit my mother one recent rainy afternoon, I stopped in, after quite some constant prodding, to see my insurance salesman. He was pressing his efforts to sell me a long-term-care policy with a pitch about how much I'd save if I bought it now, before the rates were set to precipitously rise. I am, as my insurance man pointed out, a "sweet spot" candidate. Not only do I have the cash (though not enough to self-finance my decline) but a realistic view: like so many people in our 50s – in my experience almost everybody – I have a parent in an advanced stage of terminal breakdown.

I didn't need to be schooled in the realities of long-term care: the costs for my mother, who is 86 and who, for the past 18 months, has not been able to walk, talk or to address her most minimal needs and, to boot, is absent a short-term memory, come in at about $17,000 a month. And while her insurance hardly covers all of that, I'm certainly grateful she had the foresight to carry such a policy. (Although the carrier has never paid on time and all payments involve hours of being on hold with its invariably unhelpful helpline operators – and please fax them, don't email.) My three children deserve as much.

And yet, on the verge of writing the cheque, I backed up.

What I feel most intensely when I sit by my mother's bed is a crushing sense of guilt for keeping her alive. Who can accept such suffering – who can so conscientiously facilitate it?

"Why do we want to cure cancer? Why do we want everybody to stop smoking? For this?" wailed a friend of mine with two long-ailing and yet tenacious in-laws.

Age is one of the great modern adventures, a technological marvel – we're given several more youthful-ish decades if we take care of ourselves. Almost nobody, at least openly, sees this for its ultimate, dismaying, unintended consequence: by promoting longevity and technologically inhibiting death we have created a new biological status – a no-exit state that persists longer and longer, one that is nearly as remote from life as death, but which, unlike death, requires vast service – indentured servitude, really – and resources.

This is not anomalous; this is the norm.

The traditional exits, of a sudden heart attack, of dying in one's sleep, of unreasonably dropping dead in the street, of even a terminal illness, are now exotic ways of going. The longer you live the longer it will take to die. The better you have lived the worse you may die. The healthier you are – through careful diet, diligent exercise and attentive medical scrutiny – the harder it is to die. Part of the advance in life expectancy is that we have technologically inhibited the ultimate event. We have fought natural causes to almost a draw. If you eliminate smokers, drinkers, other substance abusers, the obese and the fatally ill, you are left with a rapidly growing demographic segment peculiarly resistant to death's appointment – though far, far, far from healthy.

by Michael Wolff, The Guardian |  Read more: