Skip to main content

Death and Dignity



The last of my maternal uncles breathed his last yesterday. A cousin of mine has been tethered to a ventilator today after a fall. The uncle was 93. The cousin must be around 80.

I am 64. I have lived twice as long as an average Indian of 1947. When India wrested independence from the British, the average life expectancy of an Indian was 32. Today the average life expectancy in India is 70 years, according to Macrotrends. My uncle, who was a teacher by profession, defied the national statistics. My cousin, who is a nun, is being assisted by one of the innumerable multi-speciality hospitals in Kerala to keep going and defy the national statistics.

Would she want to keep going? My inextricable perversion raises that question merely because I have always had a soft corner for her. She is a tender person. Someone who believes that love is the only purpose of human existence. She wouldn’t do anything that would give even the littlest trouble to others. I felt sorry for her when I was informed that she was sent to the ventilator. Would she want that? I have serious doubts.

I don’t ever want to be plugged on to a ventilator in any event. Haven’t I lived long enough?

There must be dignity in death just as much as in life.

I don’t want to lie in a hospital bed looking like a corpse that will be gawked at by friends and relatives.

Have you seen the last moments of bedridden people? If you have, you wouldn’t want to lie like that at all. One final dignified fall is what you would want.

I have written many times defending euthanasia precisely for this reason: dignity in death.

Since we are at it, let me also state my wish on what should be done after my death. I want my body to be cremated in an electric crematorium without any religious ritual. Let there be serenity too in death in addition to dignity. 

Comments

  1. Make sure your next of kin knows your wishes. My great-grandmother stated her wish not to be put on a ventilator. When she had her final attack, she called paramedics, and they put her on a ventilator (as she had called for assistance). She was shortly thereafter taken off of it (as my mother knew her wishes), and she passed. She was in her 80s.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. As of now, my wife knows. But I may have to think of someone more.

      Delete
    2. know about reincarnation read my blog
      https://felixanoopthekkekara.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-reincarnation-of-cameron-macaulay-i.html

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    🙏 I recently made similar requests of my sister. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good to know there are others who think this way.

      Delete
    2. Interested in knowing about what happens after death read my blog to find out and feel free to express your views
      https://felixanoopthekkekara.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-reincarnation-of-cameron-macaulay-i.html

      Delete
  3. How nice would it be if we don't fear death and we know when we would die.
    we can complete all the things we need to do before our death.
    sir, when free please visit my blog too. I have posted a new one
    https://felixanoopthekkekara.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-reincarnation-of-cameron-macaulay-i.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I did visit your blog and will do in future too. It's good to read what a student writes.

      Delete
  4. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could control the time of our departure from the world like we have managed to control births (at least to some extent)? I understand your wish and I agree being on the ventilator shouldn't be an option. I'd never ever want my children to face the dilemma of if/when they should let me go. To be honest, my greater fear is to live a half-life like that or a life of dependence rather than that of dying.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Living a half or more dead life is worse than hell!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...