(Maybe) Death is a Privilege

Consider the alternative

We don’t want to die. We don’t want those we love to die. We hate and fear death so much that we spend our lives distracting ourselves from this universal truth.

Everyone dies

This has been something of an obsession of mine since Mom and Daddy woke me up when I was, I think, four years old to tell me that our cat, Gypsy, got hit by a car and was dead. Yes, the Death Talk in the middle of the night when I was four.

And then they wondered why I began having nightmares every night, turning bedtime into a protracted battle for years.

Over decades of writing, thinking, worrying, contemplating, railing against, and despairing over the oncoming death of me and those I love, I’ve developed an alternate narrative. What if death is a privilege and the immortality that people have craved since time immemorial would be a vile, miserable, and inescapable curse?

Probably the fondest and most immovable human wish is to live forever

Fiction is ridden with the stuff and has been for millennia. The Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to 2100 BC and exhaustively charts our hero’s, Gilgamesh’s, search for life immortal. Spoiler alert: he fails. Long before literature was called literature or that fiction was (wrongly) considered to be made up and false, people were sitting around fires on stormy nights telling stories about beings that lived forever.

Enter Bram Stoker and we can’t get away from the undead. With a tip of the hat to Ann Rice, yeah, vampires are here to stay. Forever.

And if you think stories about immortality are just for kids sitting around campfires, consider Ponce de Leon. He was the first European to lead an expedition to what we now call Florida. Although he was in it for the gold, the glory, and the land, later stories attached the ancient legend of a fountain of eternal youth to his name after he was dead and it’s been stuck to him ever since. There’s irony for you.

The masterstroke of Christianity was to introduce eternal life to every man Jack whoever plowed a field, tanned a hide, cleaned a dungeon, or slaughtered an ox. Even lowly women, those not-quite-humans, would have a place in this eternal bliss-out. In the centuries when most people lived short, miserable lives without enough to eat, whose children regularly died, who were illiterate and seldom more than beasts to their betters, this was very good news.

Moving from the ridiculous to the really nutzoid, some (insanely, obscenely, absurdly) wealthy people, having taken all the money away from everyone else on the planet, have turned their sights to something they believe is really valuable… they think. They think they can live forever. They think they want to; that it’s a good thing. There are any number of researchers and machine learning programs and vast resources going into this mad quest for life eternal.

No one seems to be asking if that’s a very good idea

It’s a terrible, horrible, stupid, short-sighted, not smart, greedy, half-baked bad idea. Clearly these guys, because yes it’s nearly all rich white men (surprise!), have already presumed that eternal life will be only for the chosen few. Even these schmucks can see the disaster of millions of babies being born every day and no one leaving the party to make room for them.

So these Einsteins think that living forever is going to be some kind of endless party. I won’t be around to see it and neither will you but, boy, are they in for a really bad surprise.

Think about it.

No deadlines. You’d never have to get around to doing anything you weren’t in the mood to do right now because you have forever to get around to it. And so you probably would never do it. You’d forget about it. Or you’d eventually get around to it, but so what? Can you even begin to fathom the deadly, miserable, stultifying boredom that would inevitably settle in after, oh, seven or eight centuries of kicking around the same old place, doing the same old things with the same old people?

It’s not like you could make many new friends. You sure wouldn’t want to get mixed up with those pathetic mortals and have to watch them sicken, age, and die. Sure, you could invite some new people to the party, but that would be strictly policed because you if get too many new immortals someone’s going to get some unsavory ideas about offing some of the old duds; the guys who aren’t any fun anymore.

Deadlines are our friends

There’s a reason people respond to the pressure of a deadline. I’m a big fan of deadlines and, can if needed, impose my own. Although there’s nothing quite as effective as an impatient client, boss, or professor to bring out our best. And death, well, that’s your ultimate deadline and deadlines are limits.

Limits are vital.

I don’t know about you but I’m keenly aware of the ticking cosmic clock and there are things I need to get done. However, I don’t kid myself. I’m reasonably committed to this idea that death is a privilege (although no one’s reported back one way or the other) but we can all agree that the dying part needs work. Dying is terrifying and with good reason. We’re flesh, blood, and bone animals, after all, and no animal suffers sickness, pain, helplessness, and loss of function gladly.

I learned an important lesson when hospitalized with a raging, out of control autoimmune disorder in 2003: I’m vastly more resilient than I’d ever expected. Maybe the worst day of that whole ordeal was when I was wheeled down for tests before getting lunch and while spiking a fever. I was left on the gurney in the hallway for over an hour while the staff had their lunch. Shivering and faint with low blood sugar, the first test was a series of small electrical shocks administered to my hands and arms. Bad but tolerable. Then they brought out this long, thin wire that they explained they were going to insert into the long muscles of my legs to determine something about reflexes, I think.

One wire in and I was done. I flatly refused to allow them to do another thing and demanded to be returned to my ward.

That night the woman in the bed next to mine died. Her curtains had been kept drawn and I never saw her conscious. As anyone who’s spent time in any hospital will tell you, sleeping isn’t a given, and I lay awake that night listening to her machines beeping and feeling pissed off at God and sorry for myself. Then the beeps began speeding up. The room filled with nurses and the beeps stopped.

“I think she’s got some relatives in Michigan. I’ll follow up on that.”

The woman’s body was quickly wheeled out and someone thought to stop and remove the tube from the empty antibiotics bag from my arm.

Having survived that I feel less paralyzed by terror at the prospect of what’s coming as I age. I don’t expect I’ll sail through with dignity and stoicism, but I also no longer lie awake at night conjuring visions of prolonged and agonizing sickness and gradual decline. I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.

Maybe we’ve got it all wrong about death. Maybe it’s a privilege that we try to eliminate at our peril.