Princes of the Universe

This is an earlier post to an earlier blog, that maybe one person knew about.

I have a friend, Greg, who is traveling down to Florida next week. He's been doing this off and on for the almost exactly two years I've known him, gone weeks at a time, caring for his ailing mother. His siblings are on it year-round, and he goes down there whenever he can manage it to spell them for a bit. Because, as another friend was remarking in this same conversation, it positively sucks having to be responsible 24/7 for the care and well-being of another (parent or child, although it is perhaps more taxing in the former case for a plenitude of reasons) without relief or assistance.

This time, it's different. Greg couldn't specify a return date; he'd gotten the call that his mother was close to passing on, and it was his stated intent to go and to stay until the end.

My mentor was frank, even blunt to the point of harshness, about the real tragedy here: "We were never meant to live this long," he said. And he's right. Our bodies have not had generations to adapt, on a Darwinian level, to the ridiculously long leaps forward we've made in health care over just the last few generations. It really wasn't all that long ago, in the eyes of evolution, that we were leeching each other, that doctors were more often than not alchemists or mystics, each a faith-healer in his own right. (Hell, we didn't license doctors until sometime in the early-mid 20th.) We married at what is now middle-school-age; these days, most parents are afraid of allowing their 8th-grade children to recognize their own sexuality, much less anyone else's. "Birth Control" would have been a thing unheard of; nine times out of ten, the harshness of life took care of that - miscarriages aside, the chances of a child living to the age of five were dwarfed by the chances of a child dying long before.

And now, in some of the most ridiculous nonsense I see in this country, we're not allowed to end the suffering that comes attached to this longevity. Our bodies give out before we die. Our brains, lightning-quick to adapt and regulate to keep the organism alive, go into crisis-management mode, triage-ing conditions left and right; and, though our bodies are well past useful in any real sense of the word (y'know, like, walking is useful), like the song says, our hearts will go on.

But heaven forfend we simply terminate that triage process. No, we'll keep Aunt Shirley supplied with ever-increasing doses of morphine, until that becomes a crisis for the body to manage; we'll intubate, have her breathing through and pissing into a tube, shitting into a bag, and breathing with a machine before we allow her to expire. And I'm not just guessing here: it was my Aunt Shirley. Just as my mentor commented that the last time he was at the bedside of an elderly dying relative, she told him "Bobby, I pray every night for the Lord to take me home," my aunt said (and I'm paraphrasing, because she had a tendency to go on) "I've seen all I wanted to, done all I was meant to, and I got to see my niece and nephew grow into amazing adults. I'm ready to go."

And how can we get doctors to assist in this painless passage? Well...has the patient by any chance committed a capital crime? Because while we absolutely will not ease the suffering of the terminally infirm, we can't wait to end the lives of those with fully functional and healthy bodies and minds who have violated our society's most sacrosanct laws. I say, we should start dummying up rape and murder charges for the elderly. Then we can request changes of venue to death-penalty states. Hey, we could even cheapen this process, since you're almost guaranteed a no-contest plea. Then you request summary execution, and bada-bing, bada-boom, mortal coil successfully shuffled off.

When it's my time, if this is my path, there's only so long I'm going to want to fight the end. If there's no substantial hope of me getting back on my feet and continuing to offer whatever gifts I possess to society and my loved ones, then it's time to pack it in. My mother has the complete opposite view (for now; I suspect that if she was actually laid up in bed with no hope of getting up, she'd frustrate herself to death): "Keep my ass alive, I don't care how much it costs," my sister and I have been exhorted often. Of course, she's also given us all manner of other instruction on her geriatric care, that I'm sure we'll ignore or she'll rethink; but I'm hoping that we won't have to be responsible for that for very long. Shirley was in her mid-sixties when she fell infirm, but my mother has been - if not a model of physical health - than much healthier, now, in her mid-fifties, than Shirley was a decade ago.

But I digress - my point here is that Bob put the hammer to the point. We currently aren't built to live as long as we do, and our society treats our elderly and infirm like millstones about its collective neck. My ethnic studies teacher is fond of noting that anyone below the age of thirty is essentially paying into his Social Security, since we'll never see a penny of it - it'll have gone bankrupt long before our retirement, at this pace. (Especially if Congress votes to use it to pay off some of our massive debt...but that's another blog for another time.) My point: since evolution is pretty much never going to catch up to advances in modern health care - by the time the human body will be pretty much universally able to function with reasonable utility at the age of ninety, we'll be keeping people alive until their mid-hundreds - society must find a better way of filling the gap.