In 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society reminded Americans that, for the first time in human history, we lived in a civilization where a majority of people did not have to worry about basic subsistence. More than five decades later, we find ourselves belonging to the first human civilization where sudden death is the glaring exception, not the expectation. The novelty of our position is all too easy to forget; it is even easier to assume without questioning that the present state of affairs reflects progress. After all, which of us wouldn’t rather die well-prepared at ninety than suddenly at fifty-five? And yet, the more I see of death, the less convinced I become that, in this medical and social revolution, we have not lost something of considerable value. I certainly don’t mean to glorify premature death: I suspect both “dying with one’s boots on” and “living fast, loving hard and dying young” are highly overrated feats. I do not believe that it is either dulce or decorum to die at twenty-five for one’s country. My concern is also not with the economic effects of the long goodbye: the percent of Medicare dollars spent in the last six months of life, the prospect of every gainfully-employed worker supporting two retirees. Rather, my disquiet is principally for lost human dignity. Canadian right-to-die activist Gloria Taylor, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, recently wrote: “I can accept death because I recognize it as a part of life. What I fear is a death that negates, as opposed to concludes, my life.” Sudden death is a conclusion. Too often, I fear, the long goodbye devolves into a negation.
The contrast between the death of my grandmother’s father and that of her husband fifty-eight years later is highly revealing. Grandpa Leo, a Belgian refugee who earned a comfortable living in the jewelry business, developed prostate cancer in his early seventies, survived a mild heart attack at age seventy-seven, and by his mid-eighties had trouble remembering the names of his sisters. And then, at eighty-six, he developed a metastatic lesion on the surface of his brain. In 1950, the cancer would have killed him in a matter of months. In 2006, a skilled neurosurgeon managed to scoop out the bulk of the tumor, enabling my grandfather to survive to a series of small strokes a full year later. Once again, these cerebral insults—as the medical chart termed them—would certainly have ended an octogenarian’s life in his own father-in-law’s generation. But after a two-month long hospital stay and tens of thousands of dollars in high tech imaging, modern anti-coagulants enabled Grandpa Leo to roll into a nursing home that he actually believed to be his mother’s apartment in prewar Antwerp. I visited him one afternoon and he announced how much he loved his wife—but he was actually referring to the young West African woman assigned to change his bed linens. It took two intubations, weeks on a ventilator, multiple courses of dialysis and a month of unconsciousness before my grandmother finally cried uncle and brought the process of her husband’s dying to a halt. By then, the man I’d worshiped as a child for his vigor and independence had gone nearly a half a year without responding to his own name. When Grandpa Leo died—after the best nursing care imaginable—his entire torso had become one enormous bedsore, his back and shoulders assuming the color of a side of tenderized beef. Is my grandfather’s longevity a triumph or a tragedy? On the one hand, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to know my grandfather well into my own adulthood—an opportunity that my father never had. On the other hand, faced with the prospect of following in my grandfather’s footsteps, I’d much rather drop dead in front of a firehouse at sixty.
by Jacob M. Appel, The Kenyon Review | Read more:
The contrast between the death of my grandmother’s father and that of her husband fifty-eight years later is highly revealing. Grandpa Leo, a Belgian refugee who earned a comfortable living in the jewelry business, developed prostate cancer in his early seventies, survived a mild heart attack at age seventy-seven, and by his mid-eighties had trouble remembering the names of his sisters. And then, at eighty-six, he developed a metastatic lesion on the surface of his brain. In 1950, the cancer would have killed him in a matter of months. In 2006, a skilled neurosurgeon managed to scoop out the bulk of the tumor, enabling my grandfather to survive to a series of small strokes a full year later. Once again, these cerebral insults—as the medical chart termed them—would certainly have ended an octogenarian’s life in his own father-in-law’s generation. But after a two-month long hospital stay and tens of thousands of dollars in high tech imaging, modern anti-coagulants enabled Grandpa Leo to roll into a nursing home that he actually believed to be his mother’s apartment in prewar Antwerp. I visited him one afternoon and he announced how much he loved his wife—but he was actually referring to the young West African woman assigned to change his bed linens. It took two intubations, weeks on a ventilator, multiple courses of dialysis and a month of unconsciousness before my grandmother finally cried uncle and brought the process of her husband’s dying to a halt. By then, the man I’d worshiped as a child for his vigor and independence had gone nearly a half a year without responding to his own name. When Grandpa Leo died—after the best nursing care imaginable—his entire torso had become one enormous bedsore, his back and shoulders assuming the color of a side of tenderized beef. Is my grandfather’s longevity a triumph or a tragedy? On the one hand, I am grateful that I had an opportunity to know my grandfather well into my own adulthood—an opportunity that my father never had. On the other hand, faced with the prospect of following in my grandfather’s footsteps, I’d much rather drop dead in front of a firehouse at sixty.
by Jacob M. Appel, The Kenyon Review | Read more:
