Death with dignity

I recall reading somewhere that when you die your bladder and bowels void, and men get an erection.

Death with dignity?

How do you arrange that?

Reading The Locked Room, Sjowall and Wahloo, perhaps their most tediously leftist novel.

[That is to say it has more langue de bois than the others so far in the order of the series.]

Chapter 11, about Martin Beck's 82 year old mother and her terrible isolation and deterioration in an old folks' home.

Pessimists consider such things and conclude they illustrate, support, or even prove the meaninglessness and vanity of existence.

As to the first, it is true that life in general has no meaning, though in the sense of purpose some lives might, just as some deaths might, have meaning; though neither is any the worse for lacking it, which is by far the normal case.

As to the second, something is futile, unavailing, or vain only relative to a posited aim.

Life cannot be thus vain if it has no such aim to begin with.

But in fact life is what happens while you are thinking of, aiming at, or doing other things.

Or even sleeping.

Such aims, doings, thinkings, and sleepings do not testify, however, to the meaning of life, but only to the meaning, or meanings, of you.

A propos, in its own way, Henry Sidgwick said mere conscious existence is in some measure recognizably agreeable in course of rejecting Schopenhauer's hedonistic pessimism.

A pretty silly thing to say, I agree, of which only a Don would be capable.

But there's a hint, there.

Given fairly clear sailing and the right brain chemistry .  .  .  .

Death comes as a blessing when and only when life has become a curse.

When that is so it is not death but life that betrays us, that is our enemy.

When I was young I was sure I would never commit suicide.

Now that I am older I have seen and taken to heart the crappy hands life can deal us at any age, and what hands are dealt many as they become older than I now am. 

I think again.

But I also consider the impact of my decision, either way, on my wife and others who would survive me, or continue to be stuck with me.

It's not as simple as it seemed when I was 25 and in sterling health.