A Lesson About Dying: Know When to Fold ’em
Last year, I lost a dear friend to a long and painful bout with lung cancer that then metastasized into her bones and finally her brain. It was a horrible way to die, and reaffirmed my own determination to go with a reasonable amount of comfort and as much of my dignity as I can hang on to, even if it means going earlier than nature intended. In other words, I have once again considered the merits of assisted suicide when facing a painful and terminal illness.
In the hours after learning of her death, I wrote this essay:
“Yes, go gentle into that good night.”
That’s not the way Dylan Thomas wrote it, but sometimes a great poet gets it wrong. After all, even he called it “that good night.”
Maddi Gutfreind, as an educated woman with two degrees that I know of, would have known Thomas’s famous instructions to his dying father, and she certainly did “rage against the dying of the light.”
She kept fighting, even after her doctors and everyone else gave up. That fighting spirit is commendable. That sort of courage and strength was needed to raise her son alone after her marriage disintegrated. And it took more courage than I’ll ever know to leave her career, her means of support, to go back to school to pursue a new life as a UU minister.
But when life dealt her a losing hand, she refused to fold. She kept throwing in more chips in exchange for one more useless card. It cost her everything, including the easy death that hospice wanted to give her. It made her end that much harder to bear, and that much harder for others to witness.
There’s another metaphor I would draw on. In one of the Columbo episodes, there was a character who controlled his drinking by scratching a mark on the bottle and saying, “This far and no further.” And when the whiskey got down to that mark, he pushed the bottle away.
I would like to do the same thing with life. Accept the inevitability that there will be an end, no matter how much you rage against it. Set a mark at a point where the sweet wine is used up and nothing lies below but the bitter dregs. Set that mark and say, with the same determination with which you lived your life, “This far and no further.”
And then, when you get to that mark on the bottle of life, stop drinking.