Part III of a Life Long Learning Seminar on Death & Dying
Photo by author
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It was another sunny Wednesday morning for our forty souls. This was the third of four Death, Dying, and Living classes. You can read about the seminar here and review our first and second sessions.
Two played hooky.
Photo by the author
Harland (98 and with the microphone) and Will (92 and to Harland’s right) had a prior engagement. They joined out-of-town friends for an annual luncheon.
By the way, fifty years ago, Larry, to Harland’s left, was a student of Will and Harland’s. Will was a Professor of Religion and Classics, and Harland, English.
The assignment for the third session was to watch the film Jack Has a Plan. My colleague Alan showed the movie at 7 a.m. in our seminar room before class for those who couldn’t attend the Sunday screening. My other colleague, Ruth, baked a blueberry coffee cake. If this sounds slightly sexist, you don’t know Ruth.
Jack Tuller, a resident of California, was diagnosed with brain cancer 25 years ago. The documentary, by a friend of his, chronicles the last three years of his life, including his plan to die on a Friday at 4 p.m. Because California is one of ten states that allow physician-assisted death, Jack was able to choose a time to die. You can see the states on the map below.
States: Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, & Washington D.C. on Wikimedia Commons
I’ve linked you to the film’s website, which includes a summary of Jack’s story, photos, awards, and a review of the right-to-die issue.
It’s a powerful and uncomfortable film. We asked our participants to join several others to discuss how this film spoke to them.
Photo by the author
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Alan, Ruth, and I each joined a small group. In my group, people told stories of loved ones who might have selected Jack’s option if they had lived in a state that protected medical aid in dying.
You get a sense of the main case for this position by looking at the names of the laws in each state. (source)
Oregon: Oregon Death with Dignity Act
Washington: Washington Death with Dignity Act
Vermont: Vermont Patient Choice and Control at the End of Life Act
California: California End-of-Life Option
Colorado: Colorado End-of-Life Option
Washington D.D.: D.C. Death with Dignity Act
Hawaii: Hawaii’s Our Care, Our Choice Act
New Jersey: New Jersey Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act
Maine: Maine Death with Dignity Act
New Mexico: New Mexico Elizabeth Whitefield End of Life Options Act
Montana: Baxter v. Montana (The State Supreme Court case that ruled in favor of Medical Aid in Dying)
In the film, Jack throws a party for friends and family on the day he chooses to die. At 3:30, with tears and hugs, the guests depart, leaving Jack and his wife alone. She will help administer the three prescribed drugs. The camera also goes with Jack telling us he “will die a happy man.”
A neighbor of Jack’s said, “Jack did not kill himself. He chose to die before the cancer killed him.” The California law sanctions choice for those who have a six-month terminally ill diagnosis.
So, the main argument in favor of medically assisted dying (notice that no state uses the term suicide) for those in the prescribed condition requires that the government protect their right to choose. Sanctioning their choice is rooted in their dignity as human beings.
In my group, most of us accepted the choice perspective under the condition of a terminal illness. We were glad Jack lived in California and could follow his personal vision.
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But not all of Jack’s friends and family accepted his decision. The same was true in our small group and, as it became clear when we convened the large group, in other groups.
The most compelling counter-argument was that Jack was a part of a community. He was not only an individual. And the community would miss his person, his voice. One member of our group worried that medically sanctioned death was an example of individualism that had gone too far.
Our class read an article by New York Times columnist David Brooks that developed this perspective and used Canada’s law to illustrate how a policy that limits beneficiaries to the terminally ill has been expanded to include those who are suffering psychologically.
One of Jack’s friends, a cartoonist, said to Jack, “It’s almost like you are a character in this movie. But you’re not. You are a real person who is still a part of our lives.”
We invited a retired physician to join our class for the Jack conversation. He told us he disagreed with the Oregon law when it was passed a decade ago. Now, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe he could prescribe for Jack.
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I’ve seen the Jack film twice, one year apart. The second time, a week ago, I wished Jack would change his mind. Part of me understood his fear that he would soon be unable to get out of bed. And that he found it increasingly difficult to do the simplest things. But another part saw that his friends and family would help him up to the end.
A gift for him.
And for them.
What do you think?
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For the last session, we invited a funeral home director and a minister. The theme is Closure.
This Pike’s Peak is in Iowa. Zebulon Pike looked out over the Mississippi River in 1805 and saw a perfect site for a fort. One year later, he explored the southeast territory of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and bumped into the Rockies.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese from the highest point of Iowa’s Pike’s Peak, 1250 feet.
Iowa’s Pike’s Peak State Park is known as Little Switzerland.
This is Rebecca and me in big Switzerland in 2018.
Photo in the Alps in 2018 by Kaspar Bigler
OK, you get the point.
We walk a lot. My phone tells me that over the last 26 weeks, I’ve walked an average of 2.6 miles daily; that’s 6,761 steps per day.
On Sunday’s two-and-a-half-hour hike through Iowa’s Pike’s Peak, my Health app registered just under 12,000 steps. My body, at 74, told me 12,000 had become the step-ceiling. Rebecca is two years younger, but we were equally slumped in our chairs later that day.
My mother walked about two miles a day until a hip replacement at 89 cut that in half. Sadly, it’s no coincidence that five years later, when she was in the early stages of dementia, we moved her into a memory care unit because we couldn’t keep her inside the house she had lived in for 60 years.
What had kept her going was now a danger.
That walk in the Alps five years ago? We hiked for five hours, 10 miles, at 10,000 feet.
Could we do that hike today? Rebecca says yes, of course, we could. And more importantly, “we should think we can.”
I’m not so sure. I’ve started to become comfortable with slowing down physically. Thus, my 12,000 step limit.
Rebecca believes this kind of thinking is a slippery slope. Once you go down that path, it will be too easy to stop.
Two days ago, we hiked in Palisade Park. To get to the park, we walked outside our front door and took a right. I snapped this photo from the summit. The red arrow points to our home. Our round-trip hike to the 112-foot high point was about 7000 steps.
Photo by author
As we sat, huffing and puffing a bit, on a bench looking out over our town, I honed in on a cemetery close to our home. Too close. I’ve planted, Pike-like, a red flag on the sloped place for the dead.
Here’s a close-up.
Photo by the author
The cemetery’s downward contour reminded me of Rebecca’s slippery slope worry.
It’s easy to slalom down to the inevitable when you’re on an upslope.
Alps: 10,000 feet & 52,000 steps.
Pike Jr.: 1250 feet & 12,000 steps.
Palisade Park: 112 feet & 7,000 steps.
Cremation urns
Yet, it’s possible to hold these two thoughts in tension.
Stay active for as long as possible. By doing so, it becomes a part of who you are. My mother kept walking out her dog-scratched back door even after she had forgotten who she was.
But accept the inevitability of the downward slope. The Alps to Pike Jr. to Palisade becomes a natural regression. You remain in control. You can flatten the imaginary hill so it’s not slippery.
You remember your dad bringing home pizza every Friday night. And your mom was more relaxed than usual. And you could serve yourself. And eat with your hands in front of the TV. And instead of milk, Pepsi.
Nice.
Why is ice cream my favorite food?
See that Chocolate Pecan Tornado in the photo.
I took the photo two weeks ago because it would be my last Tornado until spring. I also took this one later in the day. I’m not the only one who would be sad after the last spoonful.
Photo by the author
Do you have pizza every Friday night?
Like clockwork, for sixty years. I’m not surprised.
Ice cream has been my favorite food for about that long, too. After mass on Sunday, my father would have pancakes ready for us. He didn’t go to church. When my mom and he were married in 1948, the priest insulted him because my dad was a Protestant. That was it for him.
During the summer, we would eat breakfast on the patio he built and rebuilt. A few hours later, the five of us (Paul, Peter, Pat, and Mom and Dad) would pile in our station wagon and head down to Iowana Dairy on the Mississippi Riverfront. We would sit at the counter and order an ice cream malt or sundae for lunch. I always ordered a chocolate malt that could only be eaten with a spoon. The straw was for show.
Everyone was relaxed and happy.
That’s why, six decades later, I still feel like a part of me has died with every last spoonful.
Do you feel that way every Friday with that final bite of crust? Like a small part of you has died.
I understand. There’s always next Friday. You are lucky. There are 52 Fridays in a year.
What’s that?
Sometimes 53, in a leap year. And 2024 is a leap year, but only 52 Fridays.
Interesting. Wait a minute. You said next year, there is a February 29.
Why does that matter to me?
That means an extra day before Whippy Dip reopens. It usually starts up again sometime in April, often Easter weekend.
Photo by author in 2023
Easter is early in 2024, on March 31, you say.
Fantastic, but why do you know this?
I see. You fast during Lent and give up pizza. And Good Friday is the last supper without pizza. And during Lent, you replace pizza with fish tacos. But no Pepsi.
Part II of a Life Long Learning Seminar on Death and Dying
Photo by author
It was another beautiful fall day.
For talking about dying and death.
And everyone came back!
If you just added the class today, you can catch up by reading the two previous stories below.
The only prerequisite is that you expect, someday, to die.
The final exam is a take-home.
This seminar, particularly today’s topic, the quality of dying and death, is personal. Everyone had a story. That was clear from today’s discussion. I’ll describe two in a minute, but first, mine.
The best teaching comes from the heart.
My mother died in 2017 at 96. She had been in a memory care unit facility for two years. You can read a fuller account here.
On her final day, she endured two ambulance rides, three rooms, three beds, three gurneys, and three institutions before she drew her last breadth. All of this, despite a Do Not Resuscitate order form.
Dying at home was not an option for my mom. My brother Pat, who lived in her city, kept her in the house she had lived in for 60 years for as long as possible. He reluctantly admitted her to a nursing home when she started wandering outside her home, where she lived for two years. Miserable every moment. That’s where she should have died.
Or
Maybe we should have done what Danny, in Wendell Berry’s short story Fidelity, today’s reading assignment, does for his 82-year-old father, Burley.
Burley Coulter “had begun to lose use of himself, his body only falteringly answering to his will.” His immediate family, son Danny, nephew Nathan, and their wives, Hannah and Lyda, reluctantly took him to the hospital in Louisville. They didn’t know what else to do — “he’s going to die.”
Once in the hospital, surrounded by strangers and machines, Burley “slipped away toward death. But the people of the hospital did not call it dying; they called it a coma. They spoke of curing him. They spoke of his recovery.”
Danny and the others felt “like they had abandoned Burley.” So late one night, Danny slipped into the hospital and secreted Burley to an old barn. He looked at Burley’s face when he laid the dying man down:
It was, as it had not been in the hospital, unmistakenly the face of the man who for eighty-two years had been Burley Coulter.
Danny asked Burley whether he knew where he was. Burley smiled and said, “Right here.”
We selected Berry’s terrific story to serve as a jumping-off point for our group of forty to tell their own stories of the final journies of their loved ones. Most of the stories included judgments about medical care.
You’ve read about my mom. Here are two others.
Rebecca’s grandmother went voluntarily into the nursing home when she was 85. At 99, she had surgery for a bleeding ulcer. A year later, she slipped into a coma, and her family — Rebecca’s mom and a sister — OK’d a feeding tube. Her grandmother never came out of the coma, dying at 106. Rebecca said her mother often said she would like to go to the nursing home, kidnap her mom, and remove the feeding tube because her mom’s physician refused to. Of course, she never did.
Mike’s father was on kidney dialysis. After one session, he was so depleted that his physician said he had begun to die. But after a week, he recovered enough for another dialysis a month later. This weakened him enormously, so Mike put his dad in hospice care, where he died a week later. Mike still feels guilt because this meant no extraordinary measures to keep his dad alive, such as a feeding tube.
On my mother’s last day, when she was having trouble breathing — the death certificate listed COPD as the cause — the nursing home should have turned her room into hospice care. That’s what we were told would happen, given our DNR order.
My brothers and I know our mom would have preferred to die in her home, her “old barn” of sixty years. That’s the power of Wendell Berry’s story.
But her mental and physical deterioration made that impossible. Institutional care, in our judgment, was the best loving choice. Yet, Berry’s Fidelity hurdles another possibility at us. Couldn’t you have cared for her in one of your homes? Or took turns — all three brothers were retired when our mother needed nursing home care — in her home?
Most of our seminar group sympathized with Danny’s lawbreaking effort to steal Burley away from strangers and take him to a “good place.”
And a few others joined Rebecca and my stories about things going wrong in hospitals or nursing homes.
But most described skillful and attentive medical care for loved ones dying in institutions.
I’ll end with my teaching colleague Ruth’s story about her friend Martin’s death in a nursing home.
I am grateful I was in the room at a ceremony when my friend Martin died. There were 12 of us, including Martin’s wife Mary Lou, gathered around his bed, with many touching a part of Martin, commenting on how this part had been used in his life. Martin died during this ceremony.
We have nothing to do with the when, where, why, what, or who of our birth.
You and I are stuck with each other. And the 7,846,000,000 others who, through serendipity, live in this time.
For 74 years, the five W’s of my existence have been less important than the 6th question I learned in grade school geography,
So what?
What do I do with the life I’ve been given?
How do I treat you? And you?
Two weeks ago, I met a new neighbor. Ismail was born in Algeria and owns an online business helping to develop small businesses in Kyrgyzstan. His wife is an administrator at the local college, and their pink-haired teenage daughter attends the local high school. Ismail is Muslim.
Yesterday, across from Hy-Vee grocery, I noticed for the first time a tiny van with this sign: El Salvador Pupusas.
In Postville, Iowa, 15 miles away, Somalians and Mexicans labor at Agristar, a meat and poultry plant.
By the year 2050, 15% of Iowans will be Latino. (source)
Different-looking humans have arrived in this little corner of this little state in the middle of this enormous country.
Of course, human is an abstraction.
Pumpkin, too.
Humans haven’t arrived, but Ismail has.
And Maria.
And Mohamed.
Whether human or pumpkin, each of our particulars matter.
However, if you cut open the pumpkins on that rack, I’ll wager the inners will look the same.
Rebecca and I set off for some gravel road rumbling on a sunny, warm, early fall morning. Sunday was the final day of the Northeast Iowa’s Artist’s Tour. You can take a virtual tour here.
Our second stop was Paul Baughs’ Woodworking, about 10 miles outside Decorah, in the northeast corner of Iowa. If you love this art form, look at Paul’s work.
We pulled into a driveway in a cloud of dust. Two late middle-aged men were sitting in those ancient webbed folding lawn chairs. One guy went into what we assumed was a workshop.
Tom greeted us with, “I always know when guests are coming because their vehicles sound different on the gravel.” It turns out that Tom lives in Decorah, fishes in a stream just down the road, and met Paul two years ago. And, yes, locals drive faster on gravel.
Just off Tom’s right shoulder was this sight.
Photo by the author
So I’m forming an impression of the owner of this property — ancient lawn chairs, this hoop, and concrete slab, not Hoosiers-old but still kept in service. Nothing wasted.
Finally, we walked into the workshop and met Paul.
Photo by the author
Paul studied art in college and learned carpentry at Iowa’s Amana Colonies’ furniture store.
Don’t you love seeing how people work? The configuration of the wall of tools was itself a work of art. After a few minutes of chit-chat, Paul invited us to his house but asked us to give him a few minutes. You see the house in the first photo. And a close-up below.
Photo by the author
Tom walked us down the path and remarked that the house was a 40-year art venture.
Paul filled in the rest of the story. He, his wife, and two young sons moved to the area four decades ago. They purchased the land that included a dilapidated cottage. Paul slowly tore down and rebuilt it while it served sometimes as “barely a roof over their heads.”
Every scrap of the old place was used in the new creation, including this railing.
Photo by the author
I’ve been thinking all week about Paul and the other artists we met last Sunday. How best to understand what they do for us. Because they are all doers.
Artists create and offer gifts that did not exist before. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, calls this love, which he writes is
An activity, not a passive effect…In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving and not receiving.
Artists “have developed a productive character…acquired faith in their powers [and] the courage to rely on those powers.”
It’s easy to forget how most of us are surrounded daily by these offerings.
For example, in the photo below of love objects from our home, Jim carved the phone holder, Pat molded the plate that holds our soup spoon, and Rick threw Rebecca’s favorite coffee mug.
Photo by the author
It’s hard to stop once you look at what others have done for you, and you don’t stop with art.
James Earl Ray shot and killed American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Ray, a volunteer for George Wallace’s segregationist Presidential Campaign, stalked King for weeks, from Atlanta to Birmingham and, finally, to a boarding house room in Memphis, across the street from the Lorraine Motel.
Sighting King leaning on the railing outside Room 306, Ray fired one shot at 6:01 pm 207 feet from a Remington Model 760 with a Redfield 2X-7X Scope. The bullet smashed into the right side of King’s face and neck. He would be declared dead one hour after an ambulance ride and medical treatment at a local hospital.
The Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum site was the first stop Rebecca and I made two years ago on a tour of Civil Rights museums in the American South. I took several photos of the assassination site, but this one is my favorite because its tilted angle illuminates my 55-year-old memory of King’s killing.
Two months after Ray shot King, on June 5, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Senator and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had just won the California Primary. Sirhan, a Palestinian, was angry because Kennedy had supported Israel’s Six-Day War.
I had just completed my first year of college and was living at home. My father, an engineer with the Bendix Corporation, settled after work on the pull out couch in the TV room that doubled as my parents’ bedroom. My mom was downstairs cooking dinner. My brothers Peter and Pat were outside. Dad and I were watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. I was on the carpeted floor in my usual pose, with my right arm and hand propping up my head, tilted upwards toward Walter.
Who proceeded to recap the 18 hours since another Kennedy and public figure had been gunned down. At the first commercial break, my silent American, Republican, and unflappable father said so quietly I asked him to repeat it.
“What is happening to our country?”
The OUR stuck out. I sat up straight.
My political education had begun.
Was there a moment when you wanted to know more about what was happening in the world outside your family and friends?
READERS OF PAULMUSES.COM THANK YOU AGAIN FOR VISITING MY WORDPRESS PAGE. I’M NOW COPYING THE ARTICLES THAT I’VE WRITTEN FOR MEDIUM.COM. THIS STORY REFERS TO A MEDIUM PRACTICE OF GIVING SOME OF ITS ARTICLES A BOOST MEANING IT WIDEN’S THE STORY’S VISIBILITY. I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT.
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“We’ve selected your story to be boosted.”
What a pleasant surprise on an early morning in August.
My reaction went from gratitude to shock as the claps and comments poured in.
This story was still getting read 18 days later, the length of the most extended Space Shuttle mission.
I know many of you get 4K claps & 84 comments routinely. But not me.
I felt like I did after my first Little League home run settled into my psyche. I was 12 in 1961, and it was a line drive shot over the left field wall. I can still feel the bat’s wood against the ball, sweet. And see the ball clear the snow fence in Duck Creek Park’s brand-new Diamond #2.
I had worked hard to become a good hitter, but success at something that mattered to me was new. I had just unwrapped a Christmas morning gift.
And began to play with my new toy.
How do you respond to success?
Have you ever seen the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate? Redford plays a long-shot Senate candidate who has just won the election and asks his campaign manager, “What do we do now?”
You can watch the short scene here. And the film on Amazon Prime. It’s a terrific political yarn that has aged well, but Redford’s dazed look and burdened question has stuck with me for fifty years.
Success, however we define it, is easy when it’s beyond our grasp. We can pour any sentiment we want into it. Yep, if only I get that, I will be happy.
My homerun happiness lasted one day.
The day after, a Saturday, I played pickup baseball with teammates on the McKinely school playground about a block from my house. A few fathers were watching from a house porch across the street. One came over and said about my homer, “That was a nice hit. The first is always the hardest. The second will be easier.”
All of a sudden, my new toy needed to be more. Puff the Magic Dragon was the same. But I was changing.
I hadn’t given a second dinger a thought until my friend’s father acknowledged me. I loved that feeling even more than I loved the feel of the bat against the ball.
Desire to please that man on the porch became a part of my world.
Puff was left behind.
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Sixty-two years later, it’s happening again. Last August, a Medium editor exited her comfortable porch chair, strolled to the playground, put her arm on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear.
“If you can do it once, you can do it again.”
Of course, the Full Frame editor who selected my story said no such thing. But that’s what I heard.
It has been repeated many times since I was 12.
The man on the porch became a part of me — a chorus in the play of my life.
The feeling in my hands when the sweet part of the bat hit the middle of the ball, the perfect swing, was replaced by something outside myself, who was let in through the front door and faded into the woodwork.
You, dear readers, and precious editors are now the culprits.
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Fortunately, I’m no longer a child. I’ve put away Puff and the tendency to try to please you instead of me.
Sometimes, I succeed.
Do I hear a cheer?
When I started this story, my first thought was not crafting a perfect sentence, the writer’s version of a homerun. It was directed at you. I wanted to please you. To get you to come off that porch and acknowledge me. To feel your admiration.
Of course, more often than not, you stay on the porch. And say nothing.
My desire goes unrequited.
But occasionally, I’m reminded of how good it feels on that rare occasion when you do cheer. That first Boost felt so good.
I’m tempted to take my eye off the ball, turn around, and look for the man on the porch in the crowd.
Or, at the keyboard this morning, to think not about the first sentence but an editor with a Boost gift in her pocket.
It’s all an illusion.
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I hit two more Little League home runs. And a bunch more in my mid-teens before the curveball ended my Major League ambition.
I loved the cheers and relished each moment when my teammates met me at home plate.
The man on the porch? I never saw him again but always pictured him in the crowd.
As my professional baseball ambition faded away, other desires took its place.
For each goal, I needed to please others. That’s the way of the world.
It can never be just about the ball or the keyboard, my swing, or my words.
There’s always a man on the porch.
But now I’m older than he is. I listen politely. Hold her judgment lightly.
And then step back into the batter’s box — focused on the ball.
