Do not go gentle into that good night...
What is death? Is it the end of a life with the last breath that a person takes? Or is it the slow painful decay of a someone's life, to be reduced to a shadow of their old self?
Dylan Thomas might have just got it right when he tells his own father to "not go gentle into that good night" and to "rage against the dying of the light". But how much can a person rage against the inevitable? Especially when the inevitable has slowly eaten up the body: part by part; inch by inch?
When someone close to us is ... dying... the only thing that goes through our mind is to make that person as comfortable as we can. We put up with the irritability, the constant ranting, the snide commentary, believing it will be the end of that suffering either way. Soon. After all, that's what the movies show.
There are times when we would want to pull the plug, quite literally, because we can't bear to see the suffering. Maybe because euthanasia is not yet legalised, maybe because we're too cowardly to do so, we end up sitting up with our dying friend/parent/lover/spouse/sibling and praying that their next breath be their last one. And, then it becomes a chant. We fantasize of putting them out of their misery, when what we really want is to get out of ours. We want that misery to end. Soon. After all, all that feeling is what makes us human.
But how much are we able to "get over" in the face of the eventual end? Wives lose husbands; children lose fathers or mothers... the loss is endless, measureless. We walk around like zombies, just going through the motions of life, carrying around the guilt of wanting them to die without any more suffering, feeling the void that the person has left in our life forever. We want to rant at them for leaving us and again feeling guilty for wanting them around, suffering so much. We want to move on. Soon. After all, we are still alive and thankful about it.
Dylan Thomas might have just got it right when he tells his own father to "not go gentle into that good night" and to "rage against the dying of the light". But how much can a person rage against the inevitable? Especially when the inevitable has slowly eaten up the body: part by part; inch by inch?
When someone close to us is ... dying... the only thing that goes through our mind is to make that person as comfortable as we can. We put up with the irritability, the constant ranting, the snide commentary, believing it will be the end of that suffering either way. Soon. After all, that's what the movies show.
There are times when we would want to pull the plug, quite literally, because we can't bear to see the suffering. Maybe because euthanasia is not yet legalised, maybe because we're too cowardly to do so, we end up sitting up with our dying friend/parent/lover/spouse/sibling and praying that their next breath be their last one. And, then it becomes a chant. We fantasize of putting them out of their misery, when what we really want is to get out of ours. We want that misery to end. Soon. After all, all that feeling is what makes us human.
But how much are we able to "get over" in the face of the eventual end? Wives lose husbands; children lose fathers or mothers... the loss is endless, measureless. We walk around like zombies, just going through the motions of life, carrying around the guilt of wanting them to die without any more suffering, feeling the void that the person has left in our life forever. We want to rant at them for leaving us and again feeling guilty for wanting them around, suffering so much. We want to move on. Soon. After all, we are still alive and thankful about it.
posted by Hedonisia @ 10:54 AM
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