What Would Jesus Do About Those "Death Panels"?

I am pretty clear about how I'd like to die.

First of all -- later, much later; but if I had my preferences, not as late as my father, who suffered through a long dementia. Now he was the quintessential brave man and he soldiered on, even with increasing sweetness, as his disease progressed. He was enough himself that he knew what was happening at each sad stage. I would rather not have to bear that burden as long as he did!

I think though that at the far end of the journey, he could no longer figure out how to surface from the confusions that pulled at him. It seemed like that to me, and it seemed that he chose then to dive off the cliff into that dark night, cooperating fully with what was coming. He showed no sign of fear, and when I think about it the same words always come to mind: He died expeditiously.

I am not expecting that much fortitude from myself, and I hope I don't have to watch my mind shatter in stages as I go, but I would like to meet the process with what faculties I still have. I hope for a short illness, a little time to see the Reaper coming, and prepare; and then to die in the daylight, preferably in sunlight, to see what It Is, that last experience in a body's weight of sensations that I have pulled along with me through life.

I'd like a short illness, not too many pain-killers and quiet.

What I don't want is: To be still taking vitamins and cholesterol meds at the end, or that high blood pressure stuff that seems a little silly in the face of multiple organ failures.

I don't want to be in the throes of chemotherapy, or to die after consuming an expensive course of treatment or a grossly expensive series of tests. I hope my doctor sees my death coming too, and after he tells me, revises my meds to avoid wasting them on vain struggle.

I REALLY don't want to leave my widower a huge hospital bill that he can't pay, for treatment no one expected to restore me to a decent, aware life.

Are you hearing euthanasia here?

Not so much. I have taken gravely to heart the Christian insight that it is our mortality that forms our whole being. I believe it and I am, in that small sense, not afraid of it at all. After a life brimming with kinesthetic awareness -- I may have been a lawyer, but I used to dance -- I could not love my physical being more, nor be more intensely curious about that last grotesque experience. I see this as a former dancer's way of thanking God for the gift of physical life, and if I want to go to it by a more direct path than modern medicine wants to offer me (not talking suicide here; just judicious selection of alternative therapies) I will not have the duller of my purported co-religionists stepping in to tell me that I must cling to life in some other prescribed way instead.

I have taken to heart as well the American Dream; and I will not be denied the right to direct my own passing, as much of it as God leaves to me that is!

{ Shame on Sarah Palin and Charles Grassley for lying (Sarah) and dissembling (Charles) about things like this, the Things of God. }

Queen Anne's Lace

I see my last post was in winter.

Some things don't change. The weather has continued odd. The financial crisis has worsened.

Some things do change. One thing to note is: Even in a "Cold Summer," lots of things grow well. Grass grows nicely when it's wet -- never fully reliable in Wisconsin any more, but most of this summer has been adequately lubricated.

Weeds almost grow better in the cold; profusion, really. I think they must be more cold tolerant than what we Europeans brought with us. Anyway, they grow, while tomatoes hang sullenly green or refuse to fruit at all and corn pushes skyward without cobs. A cold green paradise without appealing foods till the berries thrust up in mid-summer, and suddenly the richness began -- swollen blueberries, a rich garnet setting of mulberries on every mulberry tree and the Queen of All Berries, the tangy and succulent raspberry.

After that, I sensed it -- the crops are beginning to come in and though I longed for richer things, I can see that the land is productive even if not quite in what I prefer.

The truth is that what I prefer in Summer is Heat, yet here on August 15 was the first of the Hot Summer Nights we need before the next winter sets in.

I guess there were a few before, although I know it wasn't many. Maybe 5. Every time it got hot, a front came in and the temps rocketed back down, but there were those few nights. I missed most of them, busy with work and long commutes.

Tonight though I finally had the time to take a walk, in air thick with moisture, leavened only with an insistent breeze.

I tell you, it's not enough. I'll need a month of these -- not likely, either! -- to be ready for the annual freeze-up, and yet I felt myself opening up and threatening to be lost in the sheer physicality of friendly temperatures, in the human body range. A suggestion that the moisture in the air and the water in my veins and skin might well find a way to merge and give me for a moment a god's-eye glimpse of how it all hangs together on earth.

All the beautiful things amid their tragic short endings. Me thinking that even if I died tonight, I couldn't say it was a life cut short. All the muscles still work well enough too, and the aches and pains are far from overwhelming for my age. Luckier than I have had a right to ask; I think luckier even than I ever did ask after my short list of demands on the universe was met when I met my husband.

I think I have a summer spirit, easily pleased, here in this frosty land; and I think that will have to remain our little secret because my business, really, is sterner stuff.

I am a financial lawyer, after all.

But in this late summer, when Queen Anne's lace pushes up joyfully on every untended bank and the garden begins to gallop toward harvest, I've got a secret that most of the time I don't even dream of: It is enough.