Tag: death

Kossack Stranded Wind has a diary on the rec list today entitled Contemplating Human Extinction, wherein he offers charts and graphs and doomsday projections about the upcoming “extinction event” and it’s already too late to change it. Now Buhdy has an essay here on the recent passing of his mother, and it made me cry because it’s as beautiful as it is sad. Here I’d like to note a few things wrong with the Doomsday View of Life, and hopefully touch on something beautiful too.

My hubby and I decided way back in the dim recesses of the late 1960s that we’d only have two children, not wishing to contribute to what was apparent even back then about overpopulation and increasing stress on resources plus pollution issues. That’s just what we did, too – had a girl and then a boy, then purposely joined the ranks of the non-reproducing. That way I didn’t have to spend my life wondering if I’d get cancer from birth control pills or ever have to face the hard question of abortion (which I wouldn’t have chosen, I don’t think). From there we went on to adopt three children no one else wanted yet were already housebroken, and ended up with a long line of other people’s troubled teens who decided our house was better than their own. Some of them grew up okay, some of them are still messed up, and a few of them died along the way (including our son). Life is like that. I was never the best of mothers, I suppose, but that’s okay too.

Now that our grandchildren are well into reproductive age and we’re looking to finally do what WE want to do with the rest of our lives, I have thought a lot about the unsustainability of humanity’s current crazy lifestyles and self-imposed anxiety and depression, whether or not any of us will survive. I’ve pretty much decided it doesn’t matter, and that it’s going to be someone else’s problem when I’m gone. They’ll either do what needs doing for themselves and their own progeny, or not. No skin off my teeth – or rather, the few teeth I’ve got left.

I will say that it’s always bugged me that the doomsayers always want to appeal to “But What About The Children!?” canard when trying to motivate people to do something about the mess. As if the people who pull the strings – and spend their lives polluting the planet, stealing the wealth, and otherwise trading gold on the several huge futures markets in human suffering – give a shit about anybody’s children (including their own). The sciencey-types keep telling me that the reproductive urge and tendency to have so many children they can’t be supported is some sort of ‘natural’ evolutionary drive controlled by complex macromolecules in our cell nucleuses that are “selfish” and want to take over the world. Since that’s never been true for me – my macromolecules are just physical biochemical pieces-parts, thanks, and don’t run my life – I have a hard time blaming them for anything except my physical nature and its unique peculiarities. And while humans are indeed incredibly short-sighted and stupid about many things, it doesn’t take much neural superglue to simply move to higher ground when the water rises. I mean, if you’re too dumb to do that much, you probably deserve to drown!

Three Self-Evident Truths:

ONE; Fantasy is always better than reality

TWO; Life is always better than death

THREE; Sex is a drug

Who dares to disagree?

David Foster Wallace, famed author of Infinite Jest, committed suicide at age 46.  I’m not going to do a biography.  That’s what wikipedia is for.  Rather, if you know his work or not, I share this with you.  Which is profounder than any biography.  And way profounder than any suicide (of which he speaks):

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings [“parents”?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [“thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

More below.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

On Sunday morning I went into town to gas up my car.  While I was pondering the blue sky and the ridiculous price of gasoline, a man I know, a one-time client of mine, approached me and asked me if I had heard the bad news.  I hadn’t.  He told me that on Saturday, a friend of mine, another lawyer, a colleague in the public defender’s office, had died of a brain aneurism.  I was shocked.  My friend is about 25 years younger than I.  I told my former client that I hadn’t read about this in the paper or heard about it.  He said he was sure it was true, that he was sorry, and he called his sister on his cell phone.  Yes, she said, it was true.  Four people had called her to tell her the news.

I went home and called our mutual, public defender boss.  I think I woke her up.  She said my friend was as alive as alive could be, that nothing was the matter, but that she, too, had received several calls about his having died.  To put it mildly, reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated.  They were, in fact, false. I called him up.  He answered the phone.

It seems that on Friday he was playing in a golf tournament.  Through a bureaucratic error, no lawyer showed up to cover his cases in City Court, where he was supposed to be.  The judge said in words or substance that my friend wouldn’t be representing his clients, and he sent various people back to the jail or to home.  Apparently, the rumor started after that.

This morning I spoke again to the dead man on the phone.  He was fine.  He’d received phone calls for two days about what had happened to him.  He had visits from the police, the troopers and the deputies. His office had received numerous calls from his clients and friends.  The funeral home next door to his office had received more than a dozen inquiries about what the arrangements were.  A few people pulled into his driveway, some with tears streaming down their faces, to express their condolences.  A few friends of his had called the house from as far away as Florida.  A neighbor spoke to his father– his father was leaving a child’s birthday party at his home on Saturday– to express his condolences.

Today is Monday.  The rumor goes on, undeterred by the fact that the supposed dead guy is at his office, doing what he always does, and that the story is completely false.

Today I heard the story that his family was forced to pull the plug on him yesterday.

Meanwhile, he’s agreed to call a few reporters he knows to see if he can stop this before somebody on a playground tells his young boys how sorry they are that their dad died.