WHAT IS A GOOD DEATH? [R, 12-5-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—WHAT IS A GOOD DEATH? [R, 12-5-24]

 

“It was definitely not a good death,” Al told me.

We met Al and Ann [1] a number of years ago. They were new in town and wanted to get acquainted so invited us over for a meal. We had a lot in common, so that became a regular occurrence. Sometimes, Ann and Helen would go off to hunt for new dessert plate patterns, and Al and I would just sit and talk, and I learned their story.

They met by accident. Both were divorced and middle-aged. Both were afraid to try marriage again. But they fell in love, and managed to meld five teenagers into a good family, so much so that as those children got married and produced grandchildren, they had trouble remembering which baby came from the line of which grandparent.

Then Cy, Ann’s father, showed up.

He just appeared one day. Christmas was coming. He was dying and alone. He wanted Ann to take care of him. She did not want to, but Al persuaded her to take her father in. Cy had no other family, and Al and Ann were good Christians, the real kind, not the sappy or “prosperous” kind. Besides…Christmas.

Cy was a whiny manipulator. Yes, he was dying, but he would not do for himself even the things he could do. He wanted Ann to give up everything else and just stay with him. One day, Ann left his room and broke down. That was when she told Al of how her father had sexually abused her as a girl. “I’ve tried to forgive him. I really have,” she wept. “But I can’t. I can’t even look at him anymore.”

Al was stuck. He was the one who insisted they take Cy in. So he was now the caretaker of a man who was unlikable anyway, and was now revealed to be a really bad person. Very close to death. And unrepentant. Al tried to get him to confess his sins, to “get right with God,” but all he would do was whimper and call for Ann to come back. Frustrated, Al told him, “Cy, be a man for once. Die like a man.”

“It was definitely not a good death,” Al said. “Not for Cy. Not for me. Not for Ann. Not for anybody.”

I’ve thought about that ever since.

The obits I read--for the same reason Mark Twain did, to see if I’m in them—often say “She died peacefully, surrounded by her loving family.” That sounds like a good death.

I don’t know how old Dylan Thomas was when he wrote, to his dying father, “Do not go gentle…” but he had to be young, for he himself died when only 39. What did he know about how one should die in old age?

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should rave and burn at close of day;

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. [2]

Notice, though, that even though it sounds like Thomas is a Jean Paul Satre [3] sort of existentialist--trying for every second of bodily life, because there is nothing else—he calls death “that good night.” If it’s “good,” why should we rage against it?

Is it necessary to die “peacefully” for it to be a “good” death, to enter the “good” night? I hope not, for I’ll probably be telling the nurse a joke and die just before the punch line.

I suspect that a death is good if it comes at the right time. The right time is before you have outlived life.

But don’t worry; I can tell all about it in the column after... Oh, wait a minute… well, that’s a bummer!

 

John Robert McFarland

1] I learned the hard way, by writing novels, to use short fictional names. Al and Ann instead of Alfredo and Annabella saves a lot of strokes when you’re writing 106,000 words [standard novel length].

2] The first of six stanzas.

3] I don’t know Sartre’s existentialism all that well. I just like to be able to point out that I read Les Jeux Sont Fait in a yellow, beat-up old paperback copy in French. Very existential.