Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Monday, August 30, 2004
Life
"The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood."
~ Freya Stark
Sunflowers, by my brother Joe
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Life: a fate worse than death
What can I tell you? I’m a middle-aged man trapped inside the body of a middle-aged man. At best, I fear, the situation can only get worse. One day, if I live long enough, I’ll be an old man trapped inside the body of an old man. Such is life.
But let’s not dwell on that fate for too long. You see: we’re doomed to live squalid, deceitful lives. Our bodies betray us.
Our eyesight fails and we make spectacles of ourselves reading the back of cornflakes packets in the supermarket to check if they have harmful ingredients that will make us even more overweight. But what’s the point about worrying about weight? Once, when we were eleven years old maybe, we were slim, svelte supermodel material. Now we’re in what some people call a persistent vegetative state and others call a total couch potato. And, of course, our hair’s gone to hell in a handcart. The truly tragic among us try to comb over the one last strand of cat gut that’s left. It’s about twelve centimetres long but it fools nobody. Wake up and smell the coffee: you’re bald.
It’s ghastly, isn’t it? You wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror then you think: where did I go? What happened to me? Who is this old person I see in front of me? Who is it?
You see: the tragic truth of life is that life’s simply a fate worse than death for many of us. This damn human condition of ours is a never-ending cycle of decline. Until it ends, that is.
For a short period we grow, develop and (some of us) even mature. Then the biological clock starts ticking loudly. Before you know it, the rellies are carting you off to the nursing home on the Central Coast so they can sell off the block in the Eastern Suburbs, divide the proceeds among them and not worry too much, maybe not worry at all, that some shark is putting up 15 tiny units that not even a town mouse could swing a cat in.
Thinking about it, I don’t know why someone doesn’t just put me out of my misery! I ask you, what kind of quality of life is that? And look, I’m only trying to ensure we grant the right of vision impaired, heavier than average, hair-challenged citizens entering their twilight years to find peace and rest with dignity. After all, their suffering has incapacitated their thought process, decision-making skills and manual dexterity. It’s only civilised that we should allow loving friends, neighbours, maybe the local postman, the right to assist the old, bald farts to drop off the perch.
You know, I don’t think so somehow. Not this louse.
Here’s a thought that persists in my tiny wee brain, which is about all that functions properly in this crippled, fat, middle-aged body of mine: I’m not dead yet, just not dead yet. Get it?
I know what it’s like to watch a loved one suffer in the last few days (moments too) of life. Believe me I know. And I want to believe that, if just one of those I’ve known who died in pain had asked me to assist them to ‘leave the building’, I would have helped. I hope I could have helped because, if I ever find myself needing to follow Elvis into the universe of celestial petrol pump attending, I want to know how to leave or how to ask my loved ones to help me leave.
But there’s a world of difference between the realisation of how slender is the thread that holds us in this place and the rush to deem the lives of people with disability, our lives, as somehow not of sufficiently high quality to warrant intervention, support or what Australians call a fair go.
Me? I say let’s give life the benefit of the doubt.
That means, in my book, giving the benefit of doubt to the life in babies who are just days old but seem unlikely to survive the week; to ‘victims’ of road traffic accidents in long term comas who some folk say are in that persistent vegetative state (how do these people come up those terms?) and giving the benefit of doubt to former Presidents and little old ladies with advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Civilised societies need to get this right. It’s simple. Here we all are. And we’re not dead yet.
.
But let’s not dwell on that fate for too long. You see: we’re doomed to live squalid, deceitful lives. Our bodies betray us.
Our eyesight fails and we make spectacles of ourselves reading the back of cornflakes packets in the supermarket to check if they have harmful ingredients that will make us even more overweight. But what’s the point about worrying about weight? Once, when we were eleven years old maybe, we were slim, svelte supermodel material. Now we’re in what some people call a persistent vegetative state and others call a total couch potato. And, of course, our hair’s gone to hell in a handcart. The truly tragic among us try to comb over the one last strand of cat gut that’s left. It’s about twelve centimetres long but it fools nobody. Wake up and smell the coffee: you’re bald.
It’s ghastly, isn’t it? You wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror then you think: where did I go? What happened to me? Who is this old person I see in front of me? Who is it?
You see: the tragic truth of life is that life’s simply a fate worse than death for many of us. This damn human condition of ours is a never-ending cycle of decline. Until it ends, that is.
For a short period we grow, develop and (some of us) even mature. Then the biological clock starts ticking loudly. Before you know it, the rellies are carting you off to the nursing home on the Central Coast so they can sell off the block in the Eastern Suburbs, divide the proceeds among them and not worry too much, maybe not worry at all, that some shark is putting up 15 tiny units that not even a town mouse could swing a cat in.
Thinking about it, I don’t know why someone doesn’t just put me out of my misery! I ask you, what kind of quality of life is that? And look, I’m only trying to ensure we grant the right of vision impaired, heavier than average, hair-challenged citizens entering their twilight years to find peace and rest with dignity. After all, their suffering has incapacitated their thought process, decision-making skills and manual dexterity. It’s only civilised that we should allow loving friends, neighbours, maybe the local postman, the right to assist the old, bald farts to drop off the perch.
You know, I don’t think so somehow. Not this louse.
Here’s a thought that persists in my tiny wee brain, which is about all that functions properly in this crippled, fat, middle-aged body of mine: I’m not dead yet, just not dead yet. Get it?
I know what it’s like to watch a loved one suffer in the last few days (moments too) of life. Believe me I know. And I want to believe that, if just one of those I’ve known who died in pain had asked me to assist them to ‘leave the building’, I would have helped. I hope I could have helped because, if I ever find myself needing to follow Elvis into the universe of celestial petrol pump attending, I want to know how to leave or how to ask my loved ones to help me leave.
But there’s a world of difference between the realisation of how slender is the thread that holds us in this place and the rush to deem the lives of people with disability, our lives, as somehow not of sufficiently high quality to warrant intervention, support or what Australians call a fair go.
Me? I say let’s give life the benefit of the doubt.
That means, in my book, giving the benefit of doubt to the life in babies who are just days old but seem unlikely to survive the week; to ‘victims’ of road traffic accidents in long term comas who some folk say are in that persistent vegetative state (how do these people come up those terms?) and giving the benefit of doubt to former Presidents and little old ladies with advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Civilised societies need to get this right. It’s simple. Here we all are. And we’re not dead yet.
.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Déja Vu
Travelling in the unknown
with nothing
but hope
which might simply be
an optimistic word
for inexperience
I often wonder
if a time will ever come
when I ask questions
I’m not the first
to ask
isn’t this familiar
have I been this way
before?
.
with nothing
but hope
which might simply be
an optimistic word
for inexperience
I often wonder
if a time will ever come
when I ask questions
I’m not the first
to ask
isn’t this familiar
have I been this way
before?
.
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