Journal Entry – 22JUL18 – Death

I have not posted in a while.  I am in the last days of the summer semester and I’ve been writing a lot, just not for the blog.  This will be changing soon.  You have been warned.  I do want to share something I posted for my final entry in a class’ (Psych333, Abnormal Psychology) discussion board.  The topic of the week was Alzheimer’s disease and I took a tack that was well outside the bounds of the class material or anyone else’s response.

This topic is one of many that I have planned for future posts.  I think this is an important subject that unfortunately, though somewhat understandably, makes people uncomfortable: death.  In this specific case, the right to choose the manner of our own passing.  I do not mean an ill-considered or emotional reaction, I mean a well thought out decision to choose a graceful, dignified, and peaceful end rather than descend into dementia or illness, slowly watching everything we once held dear be washed away.

Below is what I posted in class and I will revisit this topic much more in depth in the weeks to come, along with how psychedelic-assisted therapy was integral to my finding peace with and accepting my mortality.

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I poked around more discussions than usual this week but noticed a lack of conversation surrounding a topic that always comes up for me when thinking about dementia- a compassionate, early end. We are so afraid of death in the West, even though it is something we will all experience, that there is little reasonable discussion on the topic.

Death is an intensely personal and necessary process. I am not faced with this choice yet but were I diagnosed with Alzheimers I feel that I would rather make my arrangements and peacefully pass surrounded by family and friends before I lose the ability to even recognise or connect with them. Why should we hold on to every last breath at any cost when, by the time we get there, all of who we were is gone? It is a senseless indignity to those who would rather express their agency over their own existence and choose the manner of their passing.

In my personal spiritual journey I have re-evaluated my relationship with death. I do not yearn for it but neither do I live my days fearing it as I once did. I fear the slow, terrible decline into senility, losing all the victories, joys, loves, losses, griefs, and failures that made me who I am today, more than I do the passage into oblivion.

Many would surely prefer to stay and live as long as they could and I fully support that choice, but a choice it should be. Fearing and avoiding death only makes it more painful when it comes. Fearing it too much can even take the flavour of life out of our mouths and will do nothing to forestall the inevitable.

Older societies understood that all that lives must die. The universe is built on oppositional concepts- darkness could not exist without light, up without down, emptiness without mass, life without death. We live for a time and then we stop. It is the way of all things.

I hope that if I ever sit across the desk from a doctor and I hear the dreaded word “Alzheimer’s” that I have more legal options than to face a long, dwindling end in which I lose even the ability to face that end as myself.