Death And Choices

[00:00:00] Günstig ohne App. Bei Aldi gibt es einen Preis für alle. Diese Woche, der große Bauer Fruchtjoghurt. 250 Gramm für nur 39 Cent. Oder Gerolsteiner Mineralwasser. 1,5 Liter für nur 79 Cent zuzüglich Pfand. Entdecke weitere Angebote in deinem Aldi Nord. Aldi. Gutes für alle. She sits in her bed. She asks a nurse for a cup of coffee. She removes the cannula and drifts off into the next life.

[00:00:41] Death and Choices. Hello everyone and good evening. I'm Victor M. Sweeney, Licensed Funeral Director and Mortician. Coming to you live from the back of the funeral chapel late, late in the evening. That is where we find ourselves having time these days. And such is life. Happy to come to you, even in the busiest of times, to bring you consolation or comfort or a little bit of diversion.

[00:01:11] From the everyday. And strangely enough, you've come to me to talk to you about death. But it's alright. We're all here together. Or as my good friend G.K. Chesterton says, we're all in the same boat and we're all seasick. But here we are. Before we begin today's episode on choices, and speaking of boats, I guess, I want to read to you a poem, a reading.

[00:01:41] It's often attributed to Henry Van Dyke, who, if you don't know, was excellent. He was a writer. He was a Presbyterian minister. He wrote all sorts of short stories. He was an avid fisherman. He was the ambassador to Belgium during the First World War and gave the funeral sermon at Mark Twain's funeral. So he's written tons of books. I've read a handful. This is attributed to him.

[00:02:11] Sometimes people say it's not. I don't care. I think Henry Van Dyke is a wonderful, poetic, beautiful writer and certainly capable of writing this. Are you ready? Gone from my sight. I'm standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the moving breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She's an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length

[00:02:40] she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, There. She is gone. Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. She is just as large and massed, hull and spar as she was when she left my side. And she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.

[00:03:11] Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone says, There. She is gone. There are other eyes watching her coming and other voices ready to take up the glad shout. Here she comes. And that is dying. Isn't that beautiful? There was an Indian priest we had here in Warren, Minnesota some years ago

[00:03:39] who would recite that from time to time in his just beautifully lyrical, whimsical Indian accent. I always loved it. And it was such a delight later on to find that this reading, when I finally hunted it down, was by an author that I enjoy. So if anybody wants to look up Henry Van Dyke, seriously recommend it. I should also acknowledge, I should have earlier, I'm wearing my pajamas, everyone. I'm not dressed in a shirt and tie

[00:04:08] like I maybe should be. But I thought we could just let down our pretense for a while, have an evening chat, maybe during the daytime when you listen to this, but an evening chat nevertheless. Today's episode on choices, I want to talk about being gone from other's sight. I want to talk what it's like to leave the body behind

[00:04:37] and maybe what it's like to experience it on our end, see other people leaving their bodies behind them. We're going to talk about healthcare directives as I think those are wildly important. I also really just want to talk about end-of-life care, palliative care, hospice care. Extremely important. Something we don't think about all that often. But before we get to that, I've gone on long enough, I want to answer some of your

[00:05:07] wonderful, delicious questions. So here we go. Here's a question from Kevin Pettigue. Last year I went to my godmother's funeral who was bedridden in her last stages of dementia. At her viewing, she was laid in her casket in a tight fetal position, facing the wall of the casket with the lid. That is the left side.

[00:05:37] It was a little traumatizing for me to see, and I didn't want to ask the family why she was like that, as everyone was distraught. Why couldn't the morticians lay her out flat? I've never seen a viewing like that, and I don't know if I'll ever see it again, but it is one of those unique cases that I will always remember. Well, Kevin, I am sorry. That is very curious. So it does happen. Little old ladies die in the fetal position. Actually, little old men, really little old anybody,

[00:06:07] will die often, very often in the fetal position, especially maybe an unattended death. Someone has lain in a position long enough for rigor mortis to really clutch firm and not let go. It gets very challenging to position people. I remember once I was working in another town, and we were doing the calls for the coroner, the medical examiner, removing bodies. And we arrived in the scene. I was just young at the time. I don't even think I was licensed.

[00:06:38] And we got to the house, and a lady had died face down in her cereal. And this would otherwise be kind of humorous, except that when we went to move her, she was in a C shape, like she was still sitting in the chair with her face down. So she was in kind of a zigzag sort of position. And so I asked the undertaker who was in charge, what do we do? And he said, Victor, you hold her down, and I will pull the straps on the cot

[00:07:08] as tight as I can, which is what we did. Part of it certainly is for decorum, right? We don't need to have a strange, inhuman shape under the cot for people to see as we come by. But if we start that process of what's called breaking rigor, that is manipulating, sort of exercising those muscles and joints, the firmness will break down. Rigor mortis will break down from movement.

[00:07:35] It's stored energy, ATP, something like that. I honestly don't remember the chemistry at this time of night, but it doesn't matter because what does matter is you have to do a sort of calisthenic with a body to break down that rigor. So as we eventually did get her flat, okay? And it takes some positioning. Even sometimes when you have someone with a kyphosis or a hunchback, right? They're going to be all bent over, leaning forward. And oftentimes what we can do,

[00:08:05] if their spine is kind of in a C shape, is we'll actually raise the legs because that puts their chest and their head in a flatter position. I think it's very strange. If you saw the dead, we might presume she was embalmed. And it would be strange to me as an embalmer to embalm someone in the fetal position because once you embalm them, they will stay that way.

[00:08:32] So the window of breaking rigor is important. I once buried a MMA fighter who was all muscle. So as you can imagine, those muscles seizing up during rigor mortis was extremely hard to break rigor. And his legs were at weird angles from when he died. And we actually had one leg hanging off the table and I had all of my weight almost hanging on it like a sloth, trying to get his knee to start bending.

[00:08:59] Because it's important to lay people out in a comfortable, peaceful-looking position instead of whatever position they happen to die in. Because people die in a lot of strange ways. Anyway, Kevin, sorry that happened to you. Very peculiar. I'd be very curious to know what went through the mortician's mind in that situation. But thank you for the question. Here's one from Lucy. I'm coming to terms with the brevity

[00:09:29] of human consciousness and the consolation of eternal life. So death doesn't frighten me anymore. I'm still terrified of the process of dying, in particular of being declared legally, medically dead before I'm actually dead, and ending up being interred or buried alive. Could you speak about the procedures that prevent this? Okay. Lucy, you hear about it happening every so often where someone does wake up on the mortuary table or in a body bag in the morgue.

[00:09:59] You know, it's definitely possible. But at least by the time they've got to me, if I've drained all the blood out of their body, there is just no possibility of coming back from that. I have, in my early years, I often thought that. I wondered, what if someone only appeared to be dead? And I embalmed them and killed them on the table. Wouldn't that be terrible? But, to your point,

[00:10:26] maybe if you are worried about being declared dead and waking up underground, maybe you for sure have an embalming. You just double down and make sure you're not scratching at the lid. You know what I mean? Thanks for the question. Thank you for the wonderful questions, everybody. It's a real treat.

[00:10:55] My friends that helped me make the show have collected all of these questions for me. They send me a handful at a time. I get to pick and choose and answer them as I will. And this evening, I get to answer them in my pajamas. So, lucky you and lucky me. If you would like to send a question to have answered on the show or just answered personally, you may reach out to deathandpodcast at gmail.com or deathandpodcast.com. You can also leave a voice memo,

[00:11:25] which is very fun. I also recently started a Cameo account. And if you would like to find me there, you can drop me a couple bucks to support what I'm doing. It's very helpful for buying coffees and foods and children's clothing and that sort of thing. But if you would like to help, you may go to Cameo, find me on there. You can leave me a message and I will answer it with a video. So, that's kind of cool too. Another way, I guess, to pick my brain and find me on the web. Now that we've answered some questions,

[00:11:54] why don't we jump into the topic at hand? Death and choices. When we are talking about choices, we can talk about different types of funerals, sure. But really, I'm talking this evening about the big choice. Oftentimes, at the end of our loved one's days,

[00:12:23] they'll be in a hospital or maybe they are at home on hospice care or a nursing home. And there may have to come a time where a last decision has to be made. Do we continue care? Do we cut it short? Maybe they are on a ventilator and we say, do not resuscitate. Pull the plug, as it were. And these situations can come up

[00:12:52] and they come up oftener than you think. I recently had a friend lose someone and her loved one was on a ventilator in the last several days. And they finally had to make the choice. Do we continue this sort of care? Or do we let nature take its course? Now, I generally, this is what I believe, okay?

[00:13:21] I generally follow the general guidelines of Catholic bioethics, which are, in the simplest possible terms. I do not believe in withholding anything, any of the basics of life. So food, water, shelter, affection, right? Air, I guess. But just these basic things, food, water, shelter, affection, the very basic necessities for life, right?

[00:13:51] Harry Harlow's monkey study. You know the one where he took baby monkeys and he put them on a cloth mother that provided no nourishment and a metal created mother that had food. And the monkeys would go to eat on the metal one and then go cling to the soft one because it showed them at least some semblance of affection. We need affection to live. It's good for our mental health. It's good for our physical health as well.

[00:14:22] And so, like with affection, food, water, I don't think it's wise to withhold these. One, these are just the necessities, right? If your, if your aging grandfather was 85, you wouldn't say, okay, you're getting a little old. We're going to withhold shelter from you now because you're, you have failure to thrive. The doctor said, you're not going to get any better. We're going to withhold shelter. And instead, you wheel them out of the nursing home and you just park them out front

[00:14:52] on the sidewalk, right? You wouldn't do that. Same holds with food and water, even if they have to be given in other ways outside of the mouth. I once had a woman, she's now deceased, call me in the middle of the night that her husband had died. And she'd called me maybe a week before telling me that he was going to die any minute. This is often the case on hospice. Often the case where you hear,

[00:15:22] oh yes, they've got hours and then they linger for days or even a week or weeks. And I get to the bedside of this gentleman that's passed away and he's a hollowed out shell of himself. And I'm not talking about the general wasting that happens when you are laid in bed, right? Not very mobile. You get sick. I'm talking his eyes are sunk deep

[00:15:51] into his skull. Even the eyeballs themselves, not only have they lost the luster of life that you often see anytime I peer into a set of dead eyes, there's no luster. But even the eyeballs themselves were concave. Okay? His tongue was hard as a rock. I checked it later when I got him back to the funeral home and sure enough

[00:16:21] it clicked on one of my instruments. His fingertips, they were just wrinkly. They were dried, desiccated, hard to the touch. And I found out that a doctor had told her, yes, he has failure to thrive. He's never going to get any better. I would suggest withholding food and water, which she did for a week. The only nourishment that man got was like a single ice cube sometimes when he'd start crying but no tears would come out.

[00:16:50] And it was at that moment where I really saw the rubber meet the road. Do not withhold food and water. Now what can, I think, you licitly, what can you withhold when someone is ill, when there's no hope of improvement? And this would generally be termed extraordinary measures, right? You have the ordinary measures, food, water, shelter, affection. But you can withhold extraordinary measures.

[00:17:19] And this can be done for necessity. This can also be done purely for a choice. For instance, my great-grandma, Ruby, the one the original Victor was married to, she was on dialysis I think four times a week and she was 90 years old. So this poor woman clung to life, clung to life. She was going to dialysis all the time. Her kidneys were failing. Her quality of life was poor. She was sick,

[00:17:49] I think, every day of the week. But one, I don't know what she was holding on for. But in a case like that, where a machine is literally keeping you alive, you can say, you know, I've had enough. Now, Ruby never did. But anytime I see someone who does, when they say, you know, I've had cancer a couple times, I think we're done treating it. There's always a certain nobility in that. I have a story for you.

[00:18:19] There was a woman in my town, Marilyn Mattson, who was in her mid-90s, lived a beautiful life. She lived on the block behind me. Every time I'd see her, she'd wave and smile. And she was always dressed up, always matching top and handbag and bright red lipstick with a little smear on one of her canine teeth that stuck out a little bit. Well, during COVID, she ended up in one of the hospitals a couple hours

[00:18:49] away from us. And the story goes like this. So she took the time one of the mornings while she's in the hospital with oxygen, right? She has cannula on all the time. She's having trouble breathing all of a sudden. She takes the time to call each of her children. She tells them she loves them. She wishes them well. Is grateful for them. Thanks them.

[00:19:18] She sits in her bed. She asks a nurse for a cup of coffee. She opens her Bible on her lap. She enjoys a sip or two. Taking black is all Norwegians should take them. She removes the cannula and drips off into the next life. So she had a choice there, right? She removed oxygen,

[00:19:48] right? An extraordinary amount of pure oxygen that was pumped into her lungs. She chose to remove it. Not, I don't think, because she felt she was being a burden, but because she felt there was something else coming. And maybe we'll circle back to that. That's maybe another topic for another day. If only Father Corey Bassettiro were here, he could answer that for us. But my friend Marilyn, who, uh, I really, I really adored that woman.

[00:20:18] She was quite lovely. She was a prime example of saying, you know, I've done what I've needed to do. I've tied up my loose ends. And she had the privilege, I would say, of being able to make a choice about extraordinary care. I have another friend in town who's had cancer, I think, eight times. And a couple years ago, he also made a choice. He told his family

[00:20:48] and he told me too. He said, you know, he was, I seem to get cancer every couple years. He goes, as long as I can radiate it or cut it out, I'll do that. But I'm never doing chemo again. He did chemotherapy one time and had a miserable experience. And he said, what do I gain from this? Right? I feel awful. I feel sick. Sure. They say it's adding years onto my life. Uh, but the days it adds are long. I'm pretty miserable.

[00:21:18] And I think there's a nobility in trying to, to weigh that, you know, and the great scales of life. How do you balance that? Right? Quality versus quantity. And I'm not saying we make everything a qualitative decision. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying when your quality of life is poor, we cut you off, pull the plug, put the, uh, the pillow over your face a la one flew over the cuckoo's nest. We don't do that. You still need food, water, shelter, love.

[00:21:49] But I think there's something to be said if you can make your own decision to think about not just quantity. We get so wrapped up in quantity. Do we not? Quantity of income, quantity of vacation, quantity of time, right? In our day-to-day life, how much time do I have to do my hobbies? Almost none because I have four children. We get wrapped up in the idea of quantity. And I think especially

[00:22:18] as a person nears the end, I've seen again and again people wrestling with quantity. How do I, I squeeze as many days out as I can? Extra days. But then again, how many of the days will be good ones? Or if you come down ill when you are young, is it worth the suffering for the chance of remission and then years and years of life?

[00:22:49] I'm not sure. I was talking to a friend of mine just today. He works for a vault company and his brother and sister were in a motorcycle crash. And I stopped and chatted with him after a burial I did. I told him, I said, I had a dream you died the other night. And he goes, well that's weird because my brother and sister almost did, still might. I said, still might. They got into a crash on their motorcycle

[00:23:18] and both of them are, I believe, still currently in the ICU. And my buddy looks at me and he goes, you know, maybe they'll live. Maybe they'll die. He goes, but everybody dies. Everybody does. The only vault I'm not going to put in the ground is my own. He's come to terms with this. And so we sat, he hanging out the door of his work truck, me hanging out the door

[00:23:48] of my work truck, which was the hearse, chatting about these deep, strange things that I think if you're close enough to life you can talk about very unabashedly with others. Now it might be the case, I told him, I said, maybe you've worked around death long enough where you're a little bit jaded like me that you don't really fear it much for yourself or for others because everybody

[00:24:17] carries on. That's the thing. I think maybe the folks that cling to life, maybe that's the thing they don't think about is that everyone still carries on. Whether you die today, tomorrow, 20 years from now, life will still carry on. It doesn't need you. It doesn't hang in the balance on your slalomism. It's true. It doesn't. But talking

[00:24:47] with my friend, you know, with five feet between us out car windows about how hard do you try to save someone? What will be the quality of life? And at the end of the day, how much choice do you have in the matter anyway? I really do believe that when your time is up, it's up. It doesn't matter how it comes. You can fight and fight and die anyway.

[00:25:17] You can fight and survive and live to a ripe old age and die anyway. I think it's important that you live by your principles first and foremost. For myself, I have to tell you I am not the biggest fan of organ donation, at least as it's practiced now. There's some things about it that I think are a little unsavory. Right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars changing hands and yet if you offer

[00:25:48] the very lifeblood of your loved one, they give you a rubber wristband and a pat on the back. Anyway, as I am not really a believer in it, you know, if it happened to me, what would I do? I needed a donated organ and I tell my wife this and she hates it. So I hope she's not listening to be honest, but I don't, I don't think I would take it.

[00:26:18] I think I would just try to live by my principles and even if I was leaving behind a young family, which I have now, like I've lived a good life. I've lived as good a life as anybody else. I've summarized hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of lives. My life is just as good. Better at times, worse at times, sure, but on the whole pretty nice. And yet, I have also seen

[00:26:47] hundreds and hundreds of people leave their bodies behind them at the end of it all. So why should I be afraid? Why am I special? I'm not special. Or to, uh, to quote the little boy from The Incredibles, if everybody's special, nobody's special. Uh, and that might be half true. I do think everybody's special and everybody's worth something. Everybody's a beautiful gift to somebody else.

[00:27:19] But at a certain point, there are billions of us and the world keeps spinning. Always has. It did when your great-grandparents died. It did when your thrice-great-grandparents died. It will when you die. So maybe you just stick to your principles, whatever those might be. Now, I had some thoughts. Uh, there's a very practical way. If you want to plan ahead, if you want to kind of game out some of your choices,

[00:27:49] I would look into whatever the healthcare directive is in your jurisdiction. Uh, but word of the wise, watch out. My, my parents just had their healthcare directive done and the boilerplate, uh, move. I don't know who gets at them first at these lawyers, but I don't, uh, in the boilerplate, the stock healthcare director that my parents filled out was like, withhold food and water if I'm not getting better. Okay. That's a bunch of nonsense. I've seen way too much human suffering

[00:28:19] brought about by just removing the very necessities of life. So if that's in the boilerplate, make sure you strike it down. I had a very heated argument with my parents lawyer about this. And then I submitted, uh, and a revised draft of my parents healthcare directive and she said it was not materially different and I chuckled to myself because I think I have a pretty good handle on what material difference is when it comes to life and death. Lady. All right.

[00:28:49] Here we go. So if you want to make a jump on it, go to your local health or your local healthcare directive and you're going to be able to appoint an agent to make decisions for you if you are unable to make decisions for yourself. So often this is the case when you are incapacitated. But listen to this. Listen to what questions they ask. Very open-ended questions. What are my goals for my healthcare?

[00:29:19] Think about that. Is it I want to scrape out as many days as possible? Maybe. Is it I want to live no matter what? That's a goal. Right? Is it I want to live with dignity? I'm not a big fan of when people say that they're being a burden. I don't want to be a burden on others. Sometimes when I have people come in, we fill these healthcare directives out together and that's often

[00:29:48] something that comes up. I don't want to be a burden on someone. But here's the thing. You will be a burden on someone guaranteed no matter what you do. Okay? Whether you end up dead in the nursing home, you become a burden to your loved ones, you become a burden to me. Because I have to carry you out. Even if you wander off into the woods never to be seen again, what about all the people that love you? As someone who's lost a friend to suicide, the thought

[00:30:18] runs through a person's head, I do believe. Like, who will care? Right? Who cares about me? And it turns out, I think a lot of people care about you, dear listener. Whomever you are, your circle of influence is wider than you think. The people that care about you are more numerous than you could possibly imagine. So you will be a burden on others. You will, I guarantee you. You were a burden when you came into the world.

[00:30:48] I don't think your mother was particularly happy about your very painful entrance into the world. I don't think your family enjoyed staying up year after year as you were a baby and a toddler and woke in the night. Nobody enjoys changing diapers, I don't think. You were a burden when you were a child, being taught to ride a bike, being taught to read,

[00:31:18] fighting with your siblings, if you have those. You were burdened when you got into high school or given a little more freedom. You were burdened in college when you went off. Your parents didn't know where you were. They stayed up at night worrying about you. You're a burden all the way through, so that you're a burden in your last days. You're simply repaying the favor of everyone else being a burden to you. Be a burden on them. Don't be shy.

[00:31:48] That's what we're here for. The greatest things in life, I think, are sometimes those burdens that are placed upon us, willingly or not. Children, I think, give life a great deal of purpose, and they're very burdensome. Are they not? And I get to work around death every day. Do you think it's a great treat to answer the phone in the wee hours of the morning and drive off into the night?

[00:32:18] No. But it's given me a lot of beautiful gifts along the way, a lot of insight. Maybe it's rounded the corners of my thoughts about death. They're not sharp. They're not jagged. They don't pierce me like they used to when I was a kid. I just accept it. So don't be afraid to be a burden. Let me reiterate that before I go on.

[00:32:53] Listen to this question on the healthcare directive. Think about this. My fears about my healthcare. So maybe that's where you put your fear about being a burden to others. Your fear of being unwanted. Your fear of not receiving love. Isn't that the interesting thing? We're avoiding the necessities. Your fear oftentimes is the fear of being deprived of one of these necessities of life.

[00:33:23] Affection. My beliefs about when life will be no longer worth living. A bold question to ask. A tough one to answer. And then oftentimes there's a section about what you do and do not want. Right? How about this one? If I had a reasonable chance of recovery and were temporarily unable to decide or speak for myself, I would want, well, maybe I'd want someone that I trust to make decisions

[00:33:53] for me. I'd want someone to read this healthcare directive and know that I'm afraid of being a burden. Sure, that I like life, that I want the basics, but maybe I'm not so attached to life that I would want everything possible to be done for me in order to live. Here's one. If I were permanently unconscious and unable to decide

[00:34:23] for myself, I would want. Now, this is maybe one of the terrible choices, right? Having to quote, pull the plug, as it were. We all know people in our lives who have had to do this, who have had to say, no more treatment, no more breathing tube, no more circulation of the blood. Let her go.

[00:34:53] And that's a hard thing to do. I think everybody struggles with that mightily. Those that have to make the decision, those that hear about the decision, those that love the ones that have died, it's a hard thing. It's hard enough, I think, when someone is snatched from us, and you can say, well, at least I have to make that decision is challenging. So, to that point, having a healthcare directive, a living will, you name it, some mechanism of place to

[00:35:23] give your thoughts on the matter, just as guidance or reassurance that when it is my time, do not feel like you are doing me wrong. If you accept your fate when you're 35, like I am, I don't know if much is going to change by the time I'm 75, I've already accepted it, that's out of the way. I could live a lot, I could live decades,

[00:35:53] you guys, and it still wouldn't change the fact that I am just simply not afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of the most common thing in this world apart from birth? Chesterton has a great quote, he says, tradition is the democracy of the dead, right? Those things that you and I do day to day, the small sort of small tea traditions, right? The democracy of the dead because there are so

[00:36:23] many before us that are dead, that have done the same thing, that we just carry on. They outnumber the living, right? So be afraid of what? Something to think on. Other things I think that get really tricky, especially when we're talking about having to make the choice,

[00:36:52] what do I want? What do I fear? What do I do for someone else? What if you're given no direction? There's the real challenge. What if you're given no direction in tomorrow? Your brother is in the motorcycle crash and it's you who have to decide what to do. Do you go by his directives, which are none? Do you cast around and try to guess what he

[00:37:21] would want? And so I think it's really important that you and I talk about this now. We think about this now for ourselves because this is not the golden rule, right? Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Treat others as you would like to be treated. So maybe it's the case if you thought about this and you thought, hey, at a certain point I don't

[00:37:51] need machines to keep me alive. If it's my time, it's my time. If you've reckoned with that for yourself, is it a great ill if you do the same for others? There's a lot to chew on here. At the end of the day, I think there's so many choices that you and I make in this life. I was talking with my middle son, Arthur. He's a very wise little 10-year-old

[00:38:21] boy. And we were talking about choices. And he's like, dad, what if none of us have any choices? Right? He goes, I didn't get to choose where I was born. And so we started riffing on that, right? By the time we were done, we'd broken it down to, you know, is life guided by free will or determinism? I don't know where you fall on that,

[00:38:51] dear listener. But I told him, yeah, think about this. So you said you didn't get to choose where you were born. If my eldest sister, Kate, who died the day she was born, if she would have lived, I would certainly be a different combination of gametes, a totally different person from my parents. And I'd be raised in a different city as my parents were on the cusp of moving before she died, then decided to stay in Michigan where the

[00:39:21] family was. So I'd be a different person in a different city, different circumstances, would certainly have not met my wife. I said, son, there's no chance you'd have existed as you are. Like, remarkable odds that you were born into the world you were born in. A woman has something like 30,000 eggs, which he's conceived,

[00:39:51] and a man produces something, I think I'm like 500, 500 million sperm cells or something in his lifetime. I mean, insane. Like, what are the odds of you coming into this world? So you could say it's pure determinism. You say, oh yeah, I choose nothing. But then doesn't it also remain that you choose how you react to everything? That's where we got down to with Arthur. I said, you know,

[00:40:21] son, there are lots of things you can't choose. Lots of important things you get no say in, but you do get a say in how you react. So what is death but another one of those? Do you get to choose whether you get into a motorcycle crash or not? Do you get to choose whether you will live your last day at home with your family or in a nursing home and die over lunch while everyone's gone? Do you get to choose?

[00:40:52] No, but you do get to choose how you react. You get to choose how you will take it. Right? Follow your principles. And that goes for those of you that have to make the choice for somebody else. When I was working on my parents' health care directive, it was very much on my mind that

[00:41:21] if myself and my brothers are not there to make the decision, at least we have written down the guiding principles, those things we can choose. Because I don't know if my parents will be incapacitated someday. I don't know if they'll be rendered unable to speak. I don't know if I'll get that chance. Maybe my dad will drop dead tomorrow. Maybe my mom will linger into

[00:41:50] the extremity of age. I don't get to choose, but I have my principles, my first things written down. That's a damn good start. I want to make an offer here. If you are listening to this and you've been put in this situation where you've had to choose between life and death, hanging in the balance on your decision,

[00:42:19] do we pull the plug, do we not? I would honestly love to hear from you. Whenever you listen to this episode, if you are feeling particularly interested or moved, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Or heck, make them public. Tell someone you know about it. I know it's uncomfortable, right? Nobody wants to talk about death. I mean, people talk about death to the undertaker all the time. That's easy. But it's talking about death to the general public

[00:42:49] that's a little trickier, is it not? So if you've had to make that decision, you can reach out to me, tell me your story, or tell someone that you wouldn't expect. Find someone today and tell them the story about that hard thing you had to do. And I applaud you for it. It's extremely challenging. It's hard to be put in the middle of things we don't understand.

[00:43:20] And here's the thing, I can sit here and pretend I understand it all the time, okay? I can say, yes, I'm going to be brave when my time comes and principled, but the fact is, there's no way for me to know that but to do it. And I'll only have one chance. So, what do we do? As the old Latin phrase goes, tempus fugit memento mori, time flies remember death. We could do that. We could remember our

[00:43:49] deaths before they happen. Wonderful paradox there. Remember our deaths before they happen, keep it forever in the front of your mind, even though it wants to slip its way to the back. Death is a sneaky thing like that. If you're a total weirdo, you can be like me and go work in a funeral home. That's the easy way to be around death all the time. But keep it in the fore of your mind. I like to think it does guide the way I think the way I look.

[00:44:20] How principled I want to be today and how principled I hope to be tomorrow or whenever it is that the end comes. I want to thank you for joining me in another rambling evening episode of Death And. We talk about death and choices because it's not pure determinism. It can't be. There are too many beautiful, beautiful just pure

[00:44:49] blind chance. It's choices and how lucky we are we get to make them every day. Thank you for being here with me. Until I see you again next time, I'm Victor M. Sweeney and this has been another episode of Death and