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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’

#131

Post by [deleted] »

walterbell wrote: post #6
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?

Short (25m) wordless art film, https://nbhap.com/sounds/the-national-mike-mills-i-am-easy-t... > We are born, we live and then we all die. And in-between a lot of spectacular things can happen. Or maybe not. Sounds harsh when you put it like this, right? But there’s an undeniable and for many people uncomfortable truth in this and I Am Easy To Find is a film that transports that feeling pretty well.

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by Eliezer »

oldstrangers wrote: post #54

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream. Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so di…

Too late now, but this sure does sound like what cryonics is for.

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

#134

Post by theaussiestew »

flangola7 wrote: post #41
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?

I recently learned I have - at best - 2 years to live. Prognosis is fatal in 100% of cases, no known cure and only weak compensatory treatments of any kind. I'm in my 30s. Not religious either so I don't have the comfort of expecting an afterlife. I've been through a lot of hard things but I was always taught how to be resourceful and make it through hard times to the other side. No one teaches you how to die. There…

What’s the condition?

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

sudhirc wrote: post #128
wucaworld wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by hklgny »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #109
hklgny wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is reductive in that it implies if the answers are yes you won’t be the one sitting in bed screaming or drugged up. I’ve seen this situation enough (whole family works in hospice) to know it’s not the case. Do the best you can, but at the end of the day you either go super fast or it’s super scary and often painful. Drugs help.

> This is reductive > at the end of the day you either go super fast or it’s super scary Ironically, I find this statement reductive and unnuanced, not the Jack Kornfield quote. You have no idea how the people you observed screaming in fear lived and loved in their lives.

In that moment, I also don’t really care how they did. It has absolutely nothing to do with how they end up passing, the pain they’re feeling or the level of stress they’re under. To suggest otherwise is crazy and disrespectful.

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

#137

Post by robocat »

Dalewyn wrote: post #108
robocat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Our cells are spaghetti code, the worst technical debt created by the random chances of evolution. There are multiple competing systems (e.g. telomeres) at cross purposes. Think trying to patch up bad software: you can perhaps make some small improvements to reliability, but overall there are so many thousands of errors due to design flaws that you cannot fix the system overall. To fix cancer would requir…

All of us have some amount of cancerous cells at any given point in time, we just don't notice most of the time because our body is quite adept at detecting and neutralizing cancerous cells before they become a problem. What we call "cancer" are the cancer cells that managed to slip past the body's defences, so "curing cancer" doesn't necessitate addressing all cell copy errors. We just need to figure out how to deal…

I agree we all have many benign cancers. But chronic cancer is not really cured cancer.

You seem to be suggesting we could find a way to detect harmful cancers and ignore benign cancers, but I am fairly sure that any “detection” couldn’t be discriminating enough (~100% true positive) to say it was a cure for cancer. Also cancer is often noticed once it has already caused damage, perhaps harmful damage, so your cancer is “cured” but the patient would sometimes get loss of function.

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