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‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

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Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#121

Post by Clubber »

brianjking wrote: post #2

This article seems like something I should read, but I'm not sure if I want to. As someone with parents and inlaws who are in their early to mid 70s and quite worried about losing them, I'm not sure if I'm ready to read this. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

>Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with the pre-loss anxiety?

Spend as much time with them as you can, especially closer to the end. Make sure you go out to dinner with them if they are still able. Help when they need it. Tell them you love them. When it's over, it will leave a hole in you for the rest of your life, so spend the time while you can so you don't regret not doing that.

My dad died when I was recently out of college. He got colon cancer and died 3 months later. Watching him decline was hard. It still hurts 23 years later. I've had uncles and aunts and grandparents I was close with die in the past few years. My mom is declining fast, so I spend at least one day a week with her, and do all her chores that need doing. She'll probably need to move in with me soon, which I'm fine with, because there's only a few years at best left.

The one good thing about it, if I had to declare one, is nothing else in your life will ever be as bad as that. It really puts things into perspective. All your problems now will seem insignificant. I was lucky enough to have a really good childhood and really loving and supportive parents.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#122

Post by wanderingstan »

htag wrote: post #91
Kye wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to really work at it to truly die alone. Someone somewhere is going to remember you fondly unless you were a complete asshole. This is often the fate of lifetime narcissists who no longer have the energy or presence of mind to maintain the façade. Even the most vicious of bigots have well-wishers at their funerals. You have to mess up hard to be less liked than a Fred Phelps type.

I think living a long time can go a long way in increasing levels of 'alone' when you die. Age of death is probably the single most predictive variable for how many people attend a funeral. Let's discuss someone that lives a long time above the median lifespan. Maybe 95. Almost all of their former classmates, colleagues, siblings, cousins, partners, and peers are either dead or too sick to travel to the hospital/fune…

My dad is 95 and this is his experience. We just did a trip to California to visit his college friend; one of only two people from his youth still alive.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#123

Post by unmole »

wucaworld wrote: post #117
sudhirc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be this is why Bhagwat Gita suggests living like a Yogi. Dispatch all your duties, do everything but never get attached to anything, not even your kids. नैव किञ्चित्करोमीति युक्तो मन्येत तत्त्ववित् | पश्यञ्शृण्वन्स्पृशञ्जिघ्रन्नश्नन्गच्छन्स्वपञ्श्वसन् ||5.8|| प्रलपन्विसृजन्गृह्ण्न्नुन्मिषन्निमिषन्नपि | इन्द्रियाणीन्द्रियार्थेषु वर्तन्त इति धारयन् ||5.9|| Those steadfast in karm yog, always think, “I am not the do…

Any resources (e.g. YouTube videos, books) you can suggest? At a challenging point in life and this resonates.

Winthrop Sargeant's translation of is very accessible: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-Winthrop-Sargeant/dp/93...

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#124

Post by Balgair »

dsign wrote: post #63

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I hav…

One interesting thing I've tried to understand is emotions.

They are deeply personal and deeply physical. It's hard to talk of strong emotions in ways that don't reference the body's reactions along with those emotions. Emotions are tied to our physical bodies, chemistry, etc.

We also know that animals have emotions. That they are mostly guided by emotion.

But try to imagine emotions that, say, a sperm whale has, but that humans do not have. We know that the sperm whale has emotions outside of our own. They hunt at tremendous depth where the partial pressures of sodium and potassium change the chemistry of nerve conduction. We can try to think about the emotions that a hunting and hungry whale has in the abyssal darkness miles away from air. All attempts at it are just shoehorning our own emotions onto theirs though. Try feeling it, try having empathy with it. Who has any idea of the extra emotions that mammals with such radically different lives have, or what emotions they may lack. I may be a special case, but I just can't even imagine what a diving sperm whale is feeling.

Emotions in other animals are something that we know must exist, do exist. But that we can have no real insight into. A forbidden box, outside of logic and our great minds, sleeping in a dog on the floor beside me.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#125

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

derbOac wrote: post #110
labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

Thank you for your anecdote. It's interesting and valuable to think about. What's frustrating to me in my own position in life is this feeling that so much is out of my control. So in a sense it's like seeing others stealing my life from me or some such thing. Through ignorance, or bias, or malice, or whatever the case might be, it's not knowing how to do what you'd like, even when it seems relatively modest. So this…

> It seems to me that the pain that accompanies euthanasia, suicide, and natural death are all the same pain at some level. And in all these cases the discussion is focused on that endpoint, not how to prevent it over the long run.

It’s the pain of loss. You can’t prevent loss.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#126

Post by theusus »

ip26 wrote: post #89
theusus wrote: post #47

Seneca - "Make a goal to have already lived enough" I emphasise, and so some degree agree with the takes of the doctor. Being sick with some threating disease and then live with it for years or till death is painfull. We should be given a chance to cut it off.

I take umbrage. Has there ever been a parent who loves their children but would feel content in leaving them behind before they were grown?

No one. That's why the appeal is for choice not compulsion.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#127

Post by _8j50 »

labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

Plenty of people don't die of old age or disease in hospitals.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#128

Post by sudhirc »

wucaworld wrote: post #117
sudhirc wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be this is why Bhagwat Gita suggests living like a Yogi. Dispatch all your duties, do everything but never get attached to anything, not even your kids. नैव किञ्चित्करोमीति युक्तो मन्येत तत्त्ववित् | पश्यञ्शृण्वन्स्पृशञ्जिघ्रन्नश्नन्गच्छन्स्वपञ्श्वसन् ||5.8|| प्रलपन्विसृजन्गृह्ण्न्नुन्मिषन्निमिषन्नपि | इन्द्रियाणीन्द्रियार्थेषु वर्तन्त इति धारयन् ||5.9|| Those steadfast in karm yog, always think, “I am not the do…

Any resources (e.g. YouTube videos, books) you can suggest? At a challenging point in life and this resonates.

I can understand your pain. I too recently lost a loved one who passed away much young. Now I seek refuse in this book. I feel ashamed that I didn't read it despite being a Hindu till I turned 40.

You can refer to the following link. True philosophy begins at shloka number 2.11. However, I will recommend reading from the beginning to understand the context.

https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#129

Post by cableshaft »

m463 wrote: post #86
ip26 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had two related revelations. First, all my most important pictures have people I care about it in them. Second, I watched family-in-law going through old family photographs and discarding objectively wonderful but unmarked photos of people that no one could identify anymore, and heavily filtering photos of family members that were identifiable but no one still alive had known. I had not put two and two together bef…

I might have to reframe my photographic thoughts... A long time ago (during the film era) I remember taking all kinds of photos on vacation. I would routinely take photos of mountains and rivers and other beautiful landmarks. But in the end, when I would get the batch of photos back from the lab, having people in the image made it more interesting, and people I knew much more so. I wonder if time will invert things a…

Personally I'm more interested in pictures of landmarks without people, and that's most of what I take pictures of (although I take some pictures of people as well).

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#130

Post by antman »

labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

In my family we all have read grandpa's memoirs and has been a huge motivation. How much time would one spent to read them? For most of the people less than a weeks social media consumption time. I would write memoirs for myself but life has become easy and safe and busy but not meaningful for anyone in the past and hopefully in the future.
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