A Good Death
What does it mean to be alive when we change what it means to not be?
I'm a science geek in my free time. For the longest time, my primary interest was physics, because it went to the root of everything in existence. Although I still like reading about physics, I have developed an even deeper interest in anthropology. It's hard to define what it is, but simply put, it is the study of what it is to be human.
Both physics and anthropology have something in common - they go back in time, and back to the fundamental building blocks of everything we know. Physics tries to make sense of our world, and anthropology tries to make sense of ourselves.
It's a fitting combination, because in quantum physics, the observer is very much part of the equation, and the very act of observation changes what is observed. Humans do this to themselves too. We look at ourselves, our families, our tribes, and our societies, and we change things - sometimes deliberately, but more often, because we just can't help ourselves. And when we do, we change what it means to be human.
To start understanding this, we need to go to the end of life. We need to understand death, if we need to understand life, just like we need to experience darkness to understand when there is light.
Over the last few days, I had the difficult job of explaining death to my 3 year old daughter. Her great grandmother passed away. She used to call her grandkids Kukkilu, and so of course, the kids named her Kukkilu because they never heard that word before. At the age of 88, she was humorous, unafraid of death, and had a mad laugh my daughter loved. They would meet at my wife's house, and cackle at each other right on the porch.
I'm not tongue tied usually, but for once, I didn't know what to say. How to explain it, or whether I should at all. I looked it up, and ChatGPT said it's best to tell kids the person died, rather than telling them they went to sleep or went away. The advice matched my belief that my job as a dad is to prepare her for the real world, instead of hiding it from her. But such things are easy in theory, and hard in practice. Just a day before, while we were on vacation in Wayanad, I was explaining insects and sticks in a stream to her. It's not easy to switch to a topic like this.
I decided to tell her Kukkilu passed away, but everyone else was already telling her she's asleep, or that she's gone to be with Yeshu Appacha (Grandpa Jesus). My wife pointed out that in a Christian family like hers, everyone would say this and you can't really stop it, which made sense.
In the end, I weaved a story that combined everything - I told her she passed away, and now she's asleep, and she'll go to Yeshu Appacha the next day, when the funeral happens. I told her Kukkilu is happy now, and others will be sad, but that's OK.
Was this the best way to do it? I don't really know. She asked a lot of questions and I tried my best to answer it. I wondered if I'm being fully truthful, but then I thought, we hardly know what's true anyway. We live our lives believing the stories told by our eyes and ears are true, even though we are looking at the world through half closed eyes and a limited part of the visual spectrum.
But I had questions of my own. 'It was a good death', I said, and so did others. She didn't suffer, it was quick and painless, and most importantly, she didn't have to be half alive on a ventilator. I found out that for most people, that counts as a good death.
Many of us agree that for all the wonders of modern medicine, we have a problem at the end of our lives. Our medical science will neither let us die, nor live. To me, it seems crazy to go on a ventilator after a certain stage, but others said, 'What if it would help you get better?' But better to what? A full recovery, or just to be conscious and bed-ridden? I think the latter is worse than death. So do most people I know.
But why can't we choose it more often? I suppose the answer is simple - we aren't wired to choose death at all, at least, not with the more primitive parts of our brain. We need to override it with the more rational parts to do it, and as anyone who struggled to stop eating ice cream knows, easier said than done.
To be honest, I think we as a species are still children playing with grown up toys we don't really understand when it comes to such big existential questions. We get a handle on them, through philosophers and religions, but then we drastically change our world in 5 years, and become clueless again.
Some people say the first humans who will stop or reverse ageing are already alive now. We think that's progress, but it's the ventilator again - artificial life support, that keeps your body functioning but makes you question if it's really life.
We will barrel on towards that future, like a rock falling down a hill, crushing or skipping over the small obstacles kept in its path by the cautious few. By the time they put a feeble stick in its path, they too will not know if it's right or wrong to stop it.
Most are oblivious to the fact that there is even a question at all. The billionaires who send giant phallic symbols to space in their name are too busy trying to scale this peak, convinced they are demi-gods reaching for full godhood.
For those of us who stop to question, there are no answers, and not even the prospect of answers. We know there are more questions being born every day, than hypotheses that can stand in as answers. The race is lopsided.
Perhaps all we can do is to bear witness, and share our thoughts, fears, and angst. Maybe someday, when the race has slowed down on its own, people with answers will outrun the questions. Perhaps they will have better source material to study their ancestors than we do, like when I stared at cave art from millennia ago in Wayanad, wondering what went on in their minds and what they would have told us if they could. That one cave had rock engravings by people from 6000 years ago, 3000 years ago, 2000 years ago, and by some idiot called Sebastian who scratched his own name there. Maybe they would have told us there's a reason people kept going back to the safety of that cave and rock art, for all their adventures and progress outside of it over thousands of years.
Maybe some day we will envy our grandparents, at least a few of whom got to have a good death, before we hyper-optimised it with modern tech. They played a game which had identifiable rules, and a reasonable duration. Not everyone won, but at least some could, before the game itself got changed, by kids with new toys.
Instead of 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds', maybe we will say 'I am become life, the destroyer of life as we know it'.