Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
So, oddly enough I had a conversation yesterday with a friend about a similar topic. I wasn't thinking of this thread when this came up btw, but after the conversation my mind did jump back here and made me think of GCW's grandma.
The person I was talking to is at least somewhat religious. I don't know her well enough to know exactly how she practices, but I know she feels God is very important and worship is a big part of her life. I didn't outright come out and say I don't believe in such a thing, though I'm sure by the way I have spoken in the past, or how I didn't respond to her comments about worship, she could figure my stance out.
Anyway, she told me that she believes life is fair, you just have to understand the purpose of events and adjust your thoughts. Which goes against all of my beliefs. Life had a nasty way of being unpredictable, and i don't believe we as human beings should have our powers of interpretation stretched to such a degree that we justify anything cruel that is out of our hands, in the name of faith. For me, a death is always cruel, whether committed by murder or by natural cause. Even predictable death has an element of unfairness to it for those who are close to the deceased.
An example of my feelings on the matter: A few years ago we had to put down a lovely dog we had. Not because he was dying, but because his back was irreparably out of whack and couldn't be fixed. As a result, he could barely walk. Our vet was surprised he was able to remain on his feet for as long as he had. It would've cost thousands of dollars to attempt major back surgery, and since he was so old, it just wasn't worth it (he was 15 or 16). So, he lived a good life, and we didn't think it was worth having him suffer through the remainder of it.
Now, I'm not a big dog person, but I do respect animal lives, and for a while, I couldn't get past the fact that this of all things was what had to kill him. He was healthy otherwise; had his back been better, he would've still been running around, barking way too much at the neighbor's dogs and generally being annoying, but that's what made him who he was. Maybe i'm being optimistic, but until the very end, I feel like he had the desire to be his old self. He still had some drive left. During the last weeks of his life though, he could hardly walk. He'd still bark halfheartedly when he heard other dogs, but he couldn't run and provoke them like he usually did. Therefore I thought the decision to put him down was a bit premature; I didn't think the dog was quite ready yet. But my mom saw more than I did, so maybe she could see he was giving up. I wasn't there when he was put down, but apparently my mom could tell that he somehow knew his death was coming, and he seemed ready for it. So, maybe he had given up after all but was just being a trooper. It wouldn't have surprised me.
For a while, I felt like we gave up on the animal more than it gave up on us. I mean in the end it probably doesn't matter, his life would either have been cut short by something else eventually, probably sooner rather than later. And it's very possible that if we had waited a week or two, he would've given up on his own anyway. That in fact was very likely, given how quickly his ability to walk had deteriorated. These facts helped me accept the decision when it was made, but it did bother me that his death was deliberate.
The strange part of this is that deliberately inducing death wasn't what bothered me most at the time. That's only part of it. What was hardest for me to take was that his life was cut short by a non-lethal issue. I suppose that's because I have a selfish curiosity. When people or animals die, I want to know the cause of death, because I like medical knowledge, and am a bit morbid sometimes. So, if he died of heart complications, I would've been satisfied. If he had given up and stopped eating, I would've said "Sure, makes sense." But a bad back? That doesn't kill, it doesn't make sense medically. It only makes sense if you put the emotional element in there, the thing that activates our compassion and sympathies. Maybe it's an autism thing, but as much as I'm able to understand the deciion and agree with it, there's still some sort of gap in there I have to step over in order to get firm footing if that makes sense. I haven't quite worded it like that before, but I'm also a little more confident at the keyboard than I am speaking, so yeah. I imagine most people will find me at least a little strange for thinking of it that way, if not heartless.
In the case of GCW's grandma, it's different. Not only is she mercilessly left hanging on through pain, but her mind is even caught halfway between being able to or not being able to decide if she's ready for death. The flip side of this, though, is that intervention or not, she will eventually die of her ailments. Dimentia and cancer are both ruthless killers and one will eventually get her if not something completely unrelated. The question I ask now is whether she, or her closest sane living relative speaking on her behalf, should be allowed to end it prematurely like we did with our dog. Had I been the one finalizing the decision, I honestly would be okay with her saying "Please just end it," because her death is already predictable, we're just making her suffer less while she's alive. But as we all know, society frowns vigorously on putting people out of their misery. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just gets really messy for me and I suspect most others.
I do know that if some people are imminently close to death and are in hospice care or something like that, they can pretty much say "I'm done suffering" and in those cases it seems okay to make them comfortable and unaware of the world for the last remaining days of their lives. I know a couple people who died that way. So far as I know, their death was unassisted, they were just left to die of natural disease without aggressive resuscitation.
I think cancer is one of those diseases that tends to go like that. I knew someone with lung cancer who, when she became extremely ill and was too weak to do anything, was asked if she was ready to go. Her simple response was, "I'm ready, I'm done." And within 48 hours she was gone. I fortunately was not there to see this, but I had known her during earlier times when the cancer was developing, and I could tell her days were numbered by the sound of her breathing and her voice. It really saddened me, even though we weren't particularly close.
IN that particular case though, one could argue that her death was in a sense, fair, as she was a heavy smoker. I have my own feelings about that, but even if such a death is cruelly logical and could be called fair, the feelings of grief are never fair. Nobody deserves to feel that kind of grief in my book, so I don't understand how someone could say life is fair and it's on you to see the purpose of things which don't initially seem fair.
So yeah, just my additional 5 cents on this thread lol
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