Someone I know -- or rather, knew -- died recently. He was in his nineties, an elder relative of my partner, and my only acquaintance with him was through a handful of random family get-togethers. For privacy reasons I will refer to him as "R".
Anyway, two things stand out to me in remembering R. One was the way he defied stereotypes about older people. Not that this was really any sort of a shock -- it was just neat, I thought, the way he would be sitting quietly at the dinner table eating his soup, and then something would come up in conversation that compelled a response not many present would have expected from "someone that age".
Memorably I recall an occasion when some other person at the table was going on about some factoid they couldn't remember the details of (related to football or American history or something along those lines) and R exasperatedly piped up with, "Well why don't you just go look it up on the Internet?"
The other thing I remember about R is the way he was failed by the medical system ostensibly meant to keep him alive. Yes, people die. Yes, all of us are vulnerable to all sorts of fatal errors whether in our own biology or in the whims of happenstance and accident.
But my whole outlook on longevity has always been rooted in the acknowledgment that, well, there's no reason to rush things, and every reason to make sure people of all ages have access to appropriate life-saving medical care.
In some cases that means we need to work on developing resources which don't yet exist. This is where research comes in, and funding for said research, and so on.
However, no matter how much research is done, and no matter what resources exist now or in the future, there is always going to also be a need for attitudes to reflect proper ethics. Without this part of the equation, no amount of machinery or medicine will assure people don't fall prey to negligence, ignorance, malice, indifference, or any of the other forces that still (despite all humanity's positive accomplishments) kill as surely as any weapon.
And what happened to R in his last few weeks of life was not informed by proper ethics. Again, for privacy reasons I'm leaving out details, but suffice to say that there was a lot of poor communication between doctors and other folks involved. There was overmedication. There was wrong medication. There was dismissal of R's opinions and comments on the situation.
And R didn't want to die, not then, not like that. But he did, and it was no time of peace and letting-go, that's for sure. It would discredit his memory to romanticize what happened and that is part of why I am writing this -- to contribute in some way to maintaining the reality of what did happen.
The fact that lots of people die before reaching their 90s makes it no less of a priority to take it seriously when someone in their 90s is being ignored, medically mistreated, or anything along those lines. I am sure R had no illusions that he would magically become immortal via being sufficiently peeved at the very notion of death, but seriously, anyone who tries to placate survivors in situations like this with comments like "oh, it was just his time" or "he was old" really isn't helping the situation.
At this point in my life I would not consider myself to be terrified of death, per se. My main feeling about it is that it would comprise a really obnoxious interruption, hence it's more something I am annoyed by than afraid of, if that makes any sense. And I'm certainly annoyed enough by it to want to stave it off for as long as possible, not just for myself but for my parents, living grandparents, neighbors, cats, etc.
I don't know how successful I will be at this or what kind of a contribution I can make on a physical level -- it depends on how my future career path ends up looking, among other things. But for the moment, at least, I can write. For whatever it's worth. Because the idea of being in a situation like R's definitely terrifies me. The way he was treated in hospital. The way so much was disregarded or simply presumed to be part and parcel of his being "old". And so on.
That shouldn't be acceptable in any civilized society, anywhere, anytime.
Anyway, if nothing else I hope this bit of text stands as an acknowledgment of R, who I didn't know nearly as well or for as long as I'd have liked, and who will always stand out in my mind as someone who, through everything, maintained a sense of the ongoing and irrepressible wonderfulness of existence. It is beyond too bad that he isn't here to express that himself anymore.
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