The two experiences felt very different. My Dad died a day before his 95th birthday without a great deal of pain and he was in his own home with his family around him. He felt that he had lived a good life and was more than ready for death. Not out of some religious faith but more simply because he knew it had to happen and had come to terms with it as an acceptable and even welcome event. The nature of his illness meant that he was fully himself for short periods and then tired and needing to rest for increasing lengths of time. The morning before he died he was happily swopping jokes with us all and then simply said he felt tired and drifted away. I found that pretty uplifting and it removed much of my own fear of the inevitable.
I badly needed that fear removing. A year previously my Mother had gone through 6 months of horrible pain and loss of dignity as she was dragged down by bowel cancer. The moment of her death was a pretty haunting thing to witness and she struggled to maintain her immensely positive character under the assault of wave after wave of pain that even the heaviest of drugs couldn’t entirely take away. There is nothing fair about illness and there is nothing fair about death. She certainly didn’t get an uplifting experience. It was hard and watching her go through all that pain still haunts me.
Nevertheless at least I have now seen for myself that it really is possible to have an end of life that is positive and have been able to add good things to my memory of my father from the last few days and minutes that we spent with him. Being around death has, however, led me to ask myself some of those classic questions about what is it all for and what does it all mean.
I was fortunate that when I was called to drive 200 miles to be with my father I was with a bunch of young children. Every now and then I go to the Cliff Castle Museum in Keighley where they have a glass bee hive and spend a bit of time explaining to children what the bees are doing. I couldn’t have wished for a better experience at a better time. Watching young kids get excited about looking inside a hive and having their picture taken wearing a bee suit was great fun. The simple joy and pleasure of life that those kids were showing was a really helpful thing to remember whilst being in the presence of the other end of life. The obvious truth is that we can’t have young life unless we also have old age and death.
So on one level the most basic answer to the question of why we all have to die has got to be that if we didn’t then there wouldn’t be room for the next generation. But then if all that happens is that we replace one generation with another and nothing changes it is pretty hard to find any great meaning in life. I have therefore always believed that we should be trying to use our lives to improve things. If there is any point at all in our existence then I think it is to strive to make the most out of life and to maximise every moment of it for both ourselves and for others.
For me that means trying to be physically and mentally as capable as we can be by developing ourselves to our maximum potential. It means trying to know and understand as much as we can and it means trying to experience as many positive or interesting things as possible whilst we are still here. I also happen to think that if it makes sense for an individual to try and be the best they can be then it also must make sense to try and do the same thing for society. Locally, nationally and globally. It also goes beyond our own species. I believe that we should be leaving the environment that surrounds us in a better place than we find it. When we get to the end of life and look back on what we have achieved I think there is great comfort in believing that we have contributed to improving ourselves, our community and our environment.
Given the way we are treating our society and our environment at the moment it is hard to see how any of us can be at peace with the legacy we are leaving. When I look at what my generation is leaving behind it simply isn’t realistic to convince yourself that we’ve been doing well. In my 67 years on the planet we have stripped the sea of much of its larger forms of life, cut down huge areas of forest, dumped a layer of plastic across the planet and pumped so much carbon dioxide into the air that we’ve started to change the climate. That is not exactly a track record to look back on with pride.
So if I we are looking for a meaning in life then to my mind there is a lot to be said for being able to say that some of us stood out against the selfish exploitation of the planet and fought to improve our community. And even more to be said for the fact that many of us have had a lot of fun and friendship out of doing so. There is more to life than how much money you have made!