With My Boots On

 Today I was doing a quick Google search on geronticide  or senicide, the killing of elderly people.

Creepy, eh?  I had the misfortune of stumbling across a website, also on BlogSpot that takes, let us say, some rather extremist views about people who are neither Caucasian or fascist.  It is a website that greatly influenced a certain mass murderer and I am simply not going to name either, this mass murderer or the name of this webpage on my site.  I have standards, you know.  What led me to look up something so unspeakably horrid as killing the old was a news program I heard this morning on the radio about euthanasia, or more specifically, physician assisted suicide.  I was thinking why are they having this conversation now, now that we are facing one of the most unbalanced demographics in our history: a swelling population of elderly people in western countries without a corresponding population of young tax payers to take care of everything?  Perhaps I was having a moment's paranoia, which happens very easily these days with all the news in the world being available at our fingertips.  It's really a deluge of too much information for our rather primitive cerebral cortex to sustain. 

     I am one of the future old.  I am well into my fifties and in seven years I will be eligible for my pension.  I would like to continue to work, because I won't be getting much more than thirteen hundred a month to live on, plus I want to be useful.  If my body and mind remain reasonably intact then I intend to continue in my field of work.  I want to die with my boots on.  If my health ever fails because of age I want to be living in a situation where I can still be relatively comfortable.  I have no idea how this is going to look.  Nursing homes, especially for low income seniors. can be dismal and scary looking places.  I also will not have supportive family, and probably not much in the way of friends.  If I manage to stay connected to the church, and I expect to, then at least I will have pastoral support.

     Getting old is not for sissies.  As well as having to confront our mortality we also have stiff joints, arthritic pain, a weakened immune system and a growing vulnerability to cancer, heart disease and other infirmities.  We will be susceptible to slowly losing our minds to dementia.  We will have lost our youth and even with plastic surgery will never recover the vigor and beauty of our younger days.  We will no longer be relevant and no one will want to be bored by our collected wisdom.  We will become invisible, at best pitied.  Those of us who can keep our minds open and stay interested in the world might still have younger friends and if this happens to me I will be very blessed. 

     I am working like crazy to stay healthy.  I get daily exercise, a minimum of five miles daily walking and exercises at home.  I try to eat with care.  I am vegetarian but accumulated some sixty extra pounds over the years which I am slowly losing now as I modify my diet.  I am an avid reader, artist and writer, and I strive to improve my already fluent Spanish.  I also enjoy my work and have some very good friends as well as my church for support.  Having been blessed with a strong gene pool and the constitution of a brick shit house I think the odds are good that I will still be taking long walks and enjoying international travel at eighty-five.  If I'm allowed to.

     I understand that there is a difference between assisted suicide and euthanasia but there is always the concern that that line could become very easily blurred.  My understanding has always been that regardless how intense the pain and suffering that taking life is something only God is permitted to do.  We are not made to take the lives of others.  Not even in self defense.  The only just war is a war of justice waged not with weapons of violence but thoughts and words and ideas of mercy, truth and love.  It even took me years to accept that abortion could be acceptable under some circumstances (woman's body, woman's choice) but I will save this for another post.

     I have worked in palliative care and have witnessed some horrific suffering and in some cases felt tempted to administer one strategic overdose to permanently end the suffering.  What stopped me?  I mean besides not wanting to end up in the slammer?  I knew it wasn't my role to end life even with extreme suffering.  Not because I'm not a doctor but because I am not God.

     I am not a conspiracy theorist.  I am not going to join ranks with the wacko tin foil hat set and prepare for the end of the world as we know it.  I am not going to cower in my basement, well even if I had a basement I still wouldn't cower in it while Armageddon becomes inevitable.  Armageddon might never come.  Bills approving euthanasia and assisted suicide might never be passed, or once they are approved they might never be abused.  I am an optimist and I always try to hope and watch for the best in myself, in people and in the world.  I am confident that a way will be found to accommodate everyone in the coming years without having to kill anyone.  There could also be medically assisted dying and that would be restricted exclusively to those who want it.  Whether or not I approve of it I am prepared to live with it because I am prepared to live.  When it is my time to go that will be decided by the one who determined the time of my birth.  No help will be needed and anyway it's going to be inevitable.  And I'm not going quietly.