Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The End of Reason

For those of us on the downward slide of dermal deterioration and progressive organ failure, Mortality is just the ticket: a sort of how-to about dying. No sugary, maudlin advice about the correct attitude toward the inevitable. No encouraging tales of the will to live. And no suggestions about mitigating the distress involved. Just a number of handy things to keep in mind about the roadblocks we’re all likely to meet on the road to peaceful non-existence.

Here’s the scoop: Barring accidents, and disclaiming by the insurance company, most of is are going to end up as drug addicts. We’ll be looking forward expectantly not to a cure for whatever terminal bug or virus or faulty organ we might contain, but for the next fix of Codeine, or OxyContin, or Morphine (for me it’s Gabapentanine, which provides blissful spinal pain relief and is, of course, highly addictive). The prospect of a remedy in the offing for what ails us isn’t nearly as significant as the supertanker of pain bearing down on us in a very narrow channel elderly existence.

This is where the human species has a maladaptation which is probably necessary for the continuation of the species. Memory can conjure up the events, emotions, and significance of the distant past, but it has no clue about the toothache repaired last week. Until, of course, it returns and we recognise once again another major design flaw in the human body.

If women could remember the pain of childbirth, I doubt that the fertility rate would exceed one. I also doubt that many people would submit to multiple chemo or radiation treatments, or the dozens of other medical solutions that require us to starve, vomit, excrete, secrete, and otherwise suffer intensely. No one tells you how bad it’s going to be - either because they’ve forgotten, or more likely because they presume the trade off between pain and an extra day of life is always stacked in favour of life.

This is, of course, nonsense. It is the selfishness of the living who are, for the moment, without pain and who want to avoid it by forestalling death at any cost. The terminal patient can be a victim of both the disease and the relatives who think their encouragement is justified by the extension of life. The medical profession will experiment endlessly, or at least as long as it is profitable, with one’s body. But it’s the family who think they own the soul, and they ain’t giving it up. Pain is an unfortunate side effect and really isn’t important in their moral calculus.

The point is that the medical treatments for the kinds of conditions from which most of us die today are forms of torture. I don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want to suffer. I don’t even want to suffer ‘significant discomfort’ for any extended period of time. I would like to remain conscious and intellectually active for as long as possible but not if such activity is inhibited by the threat 0f constant pain. I would like to experience the presence of my loved ones but in the knowledge that I can consider them, and they me, without pain even if this involves a certain trippiness.

In short, I far prefer sleep to suffering. I think Hitchens did as well. This seems to me quite reasonable.

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