Thank you for the opportunity to discuss these issues of life and death. I send in my thoughts with this final P.S. which I will call “Four Comments and a Movie Reference”, in reply to the letters which came in after my original letter on October 3rd. And here I will finish and leave these pages to others for another ten years.
Comment one. Regarding Doulas. Ebenezer Scrooge famously said “if they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.” An excellent example of the eugenicist and Death Doula side.
Saint Francis of Assisi, upon seeing a suffering leper, kissed him, then clothed, fed and cared for him. That is firmly on what I will call the Life Doula side. More on this later.
Comment Two. Regarding “fear of death”. One letter mentioned we should not be afraid to die (I guess he has read “The Problem of Pain” by C.S. Lewis, and loves the two poems “Death Be Not Proud” by John Donne and “The Convert” by G.K. Chesterton, which are also favourites of mine). Excellent, we have that in common. I would further suggest we should also not be afraid to keep living, to find positive good in each day we have. Let’s prepare ourselves better for both life and death.
I highly recommend the video “Fatal Flaws” (www.epcc.ca) to answer the comments about death in the letter of October 17th. This video details the increasing pressures of the “culture of death” being put upon vulnerable people to succumb to euthanasia.
Comment Three. In both letters October 10 and 17, references were made to bringing God or faith to these issues of life and death. Can we discuss these a bit also? Sayings like “you cannot give what you do not have” and “joy is not the absence of sorrow, joy is the presence of God” come to mind, but perhaps the best way I can describe this is to say in my own words, faith is not a crutch, faith is a superpower. There are no reasonable answers for the big questions of pain and suffering to be found in our mortal brains, other than despair and death. How can there be? How can we dispel darkness…except with light? And we cannot give light, unless we are connected to light. So yes to the Superpower, thank you.
Comment Four. And of course we all have a choice. We have the right to make our own choices. Of course we do. But what if it is about two warring kingdoms after all? One with the death doulas and the Ebenezer Scrooges and one with life doulas and the Saint Francises? These two kingdoms will never agree, they cannot. So yes we must choose. And yes, there is a battle, and so we must fight.
Finally, for my promised movie reference, I propose “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. In one of the scenes near the end, there are a few dozen goblets all of which bring death if “chosen poorly”, and only one which will bring eternal life. The old Crusader monk advises both the Nazi officer and Indian Jones to “choose wisely.” Indeed.
For life,
Nathene Arthur
Cochrane, AB
