My grandfather on my mother’s side—who I loved dearly—was one of the funniest, toughest, most optimistic people I have ever known. One day, at age 83, decided that he wanted to die. He stopped eating and drinking. He didn’t exactly commit suicide, but he might as well have. Now, he was struggling with late-onset Alzheimer’s and complications from wounds he suffered in World War II, and I have no doubt that he was suffering, but I have no explanation for his existential crisis. Maybe I would if I were 83. Maybe you just get to a point where you have had enough. I don’t know. But that is not the way I want to go.
I know others who have died in such fashion. They get to a certain age, and then they just decide they’re going to check out. There is a school of thought that one should be able to choose the time and place of his death. That is not my belief. We do not get to choose—once we have learned everything we need to learn, then our time is up.
Why would someone choose to die? In the vast majority of cases, to avoid experiencing pain. I have never had cancer, or Parkinson’s, or any other incurable disease, obviously. I don’t know what it’s like. I’m sure it is painful. But dying with dignity does not mean avoidance of pain. Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth, and we must grow spiritually all the way to the end. Easy enough for me to say at the moment, having just engorged myself on a dinner of Thai green curry and typing this on my laptop while lounging on my couch.
But I have been there. In December 2003, I tried to take my own life. I could be glib and say that I was suffering from bipolar depression, but that doesn’t quite capture it, does it? When you contemplate suicide, it is because the psychic pain becomes so great that you just want to make the pain stop. You will do anything to make it stop. To say that I was sad would be a colossal understatement. It was the lowest moment of my life. And trying to kill myself was a big mistake.
This might be apocryphal, but I have heard that occasionally the Coast Guard motor life boats from Golden Gate Station that pull jumpers out of the bay occasionally find someone who is alive, having survived the fall. And they all say the same thing—they knew they had made a mistake the second they let go of the bridge. In 2003, I couldn’t withstand the pain, but in the future, I will. And physical pain is junior varsity compared to psychic pain.
Back in the early 90s we were having these debates on euthanasia, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and assisted suicide and all that. You could surmise that I am not a fan of euthanasia. The idea behind euthanasia is that you should prevent unnecessary suffering. We euthanize our pets, after all, wouldn’t we want the same for ourselves? Suffering is not unnecessary. It is entirely necessary. It is what makes us human. Euthanasia is a shortcut around spiritual growth, and all the resources, financial and otherwise, that we spend to keep someone alive for another day—is money well-spent. Now, that is a contrarian view.
By the way, we don’t euthanize our pets because we don’t want them to suffer, we euthanize them because we don’t want to suffer. And that is a fact.
Dying is perhaps the most important thing we will ever do, yet we spend most of our lives trying to avoid thinking or talking about it. Speaking for myself, when I die, I want to die without fear. And it’s funny—when my Cologuard results came back positive a few weeks ago, which meant that I had a tiny chance of having colon cancer, I did have a shot of fear, that lasted about a day or two. The chance of me getting colon cancer is very remote. I will find out for sure in about a month. In my case, I’m not really afraid of what’s beyond, I would just be pissed that I didn’t get to do everything I wanted to do.
Most people are afraid of death. When I wrote Memento Mori a while back, I had two people write in that they were paralyzed with fear about death, to the point of experiencing panic attacks. I don’t fear death, but it doesn’t mean I drive like a maniac. I’m careful, because I haven’t finished my work here on Earth. From a professional standpoint, I have two books that I want to get out the door. There is more money to be made, and more things to buy—there are real, material things that I want to experience before I die. I have never flown on a private jet. So that is a goal of mine, someday. I have to finish building my house. But also, I want to deepen my relationships with others, especially my wife. We are celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary very soon, and I would like to celebrate a 50th as well. I’m not one of these dickheads that has to go skydiving to prove that I’m not afraid of death. That’s just bad risk management. I’m not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of dying before I’ve done everything that I want to do. Does that make sense? The actual process of death, whether it’s cancer or decapitation, is unpleasant, but the one thing we all have in common is that we must one day experience it. Would you rather experience a lot of pain all at once, or spread out over the course of six months? I choose the latter, but it is simply a matter of personal preference.
I do think at some point in your life you get to a point where it is checkmate, there is nothing else to do, and you accept the possibility of death, and you start thinking about your transition to the next life. But I think we have an obligation to fight it as long as possible. Time is the most precious commodity in the world. I abhor waste in all its forms, but especially when it comes to time. If you have six months to live, you can do a lot in those six months, and you can especially do a lot in those six months when you have the knowledge that you have six months to live. But imagine if you always had that realization—imagine if you lived life with the knowledge that your time here was limited, and could end at any moment? You’d probably spend a lot less time watching stupid TV. As Morgan Freeman said in The Shawshank Redemption: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” One of the most famous quotes in movie history, and nobody pays any damn attention to it. There are a lot of people out there who are not particularly busy living or dying. What happens when you get to the end? Nothing but regret.
I fuck up shit all the time and I have plenty of regrets, but the last thing I want to regret is being on my deathbed and thinking about all the things that I could have or should have done. I want to have given it my all, and say, wow, what a ride.
It has been a ride already. As Clark Griswold once said, it has been so much fucking fun that I am whistling Zip-a-dee-doo-dah out my asshole. I will never stop learning and growing, and you shouldn’t either.
Go fuck yourself,
Jared
Music Recommendation: Over ten years ago I really liked the music of Solarity—two guys that made some really incredible progressive house. But then, around 2011, they rebranded as Dusky, and were pioneers in what was an amazing deep house scene for a few years. I came across their 2016 track Ingrid Is A Hybrid recently in my library. It’s terrific, and I might play it out sometime—and the video is amazing.
P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Feel free to forward to whoever you like.
Death With Dignity
Another way of putting this, as George W. Bush said while eulogizing his father, "The goal in life is to die young as late as possible." HW went skydiving on his 80th, hauled ass in his powerboat at age 85, losing his security detail, and skydived again on his 90th.
We DID NOT euthanize our beloved baby Roxie, a Golden Retriever we loved dearly because WE didn’t want to suffer. She could not move to eliminate, even if we carried her outside. If you can’t eliminate you will die. She panted excessively, her way of showing distress and anxiety. We miss her dearly. Just sayin