Walt and Ram, chapter 7

The morn­ing was already begin­ning to feel some­what sul­try as the tem­per­a­ture approached sev­en­ty-five degrees and the humid­i­ty hov­ered near six­ty per­cent. Walt approached the bench that he and Ram occu­pied briefly almost every morning.

“Another inter­est­ing cane,” offered Ram, admir­ing the lat­est one with a carved ivory glob­u­lar hand­piece and know­ing that Walt would want to tell him about it.

“Bocote,” was Walt’s response as he hand­ed it to Ram to exam­ine.  “Wood native to Mexico, about as hard as Maple.  I like the brown­ish col­or­ing and the dark­er streaks in the wood.  They say it can be hard on cut­ters while it’s being worked and, odd­ly, they claim it has the aro­ma of dill pick­les when it’s being worked.”

“Very nice,” said Ram, hand­ing the cane back to him.

“So, what uni­ver­sal prob­lem shall we solve today, Walt?”

“Well, we nev­er seem to actu­al­ly solve any of them because they seem to be there the day after we’ve talked about them.  I keep won­der­ing when the rest of the world is going to catch up to us and start lis­ten­ing to our obvi­ous­ly per­fect solutions.

“Anyway, I want­ed to get your opin­ion about some­thing that came up while I was watch­ing an old movie last night.

“You ever see an old sci-fi movie called Soylent Green?”

Ram thought for a moment.  “Yeah.  Isn’t that the one with Charlton Heston and the gov­ern­ment is recy­cling peo­ple into food because the pop­u­la­tion has got­ten so large?”

“Yeah,” respond­ed Walt. “You remem­ber the scene near the end when Edward G. Robinson is dying, and he’s allowed a choice of how to ‘mean­der off into the great beyond’ — and he choos­es to have scenes from his child­hood shown to him. It’s a time when the world was filled with green mead­ows and blue sky and serene ani­mals graz­ing and flow­ing rivers.  All the things that were now gone.

“And he’s lying on a … gur­ney, I guess, with a sheet over him, bliss­ful­ly tak­ing in the scenery as the drugs they’ve giv­en him to end his life grad­u­al­ly work on him and he’s lis­ten­ing to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 Pastoral.  That was a beau­ti­ful piece of music, so calm­ing, so serene, so per­fect for the scene.

“Robinson, who’s play­ing a char­ac­ter called Sol, is allowed his final life choice, how he wants to end things, with­out pain, with­out all the weep­ing and moan­ing, with­out the expense of cas­kets and vaults and funer­al ser­vices and all the oth­er fatu­ous cer­e­monies that go along with the way most peo­ple end their lives today.

“And I got to think­ing.  While this is sci­ence fic­tion, it also illus­trates a very humane choice for peo­ple who are com­ing to the end of their life.  Of course, we don’t want to par­tic­i­pate if we’re just going to be ter­mi­nat­ed so that we can be ground up and made into food but hav­ing a choice like Robinson’s wouldn’t be so bad.

“The prob­lem with most soci­eties today, cer­tain­ly in America, is that we seem to want to cling to life inter­minably or to require some­one we love to do so.  We think it’s the com­pas­sion­ate thing to do, but is it really?

“What’s the point of main­tain­ing some­one in a veg­e­ta­tive state, some­one who the doc­tors know has absolute­ly no chance of ever regain­ing any sensibilities?

“Of course, a lot of peo­ple make a liv­ing will, but about the only thing you can put in one is that you don’t want to be resus­ci­tat­ed if your heart stops and direc­tions for after you’re pro­nounced dead.  But you can’t put any­thing in there ask­ing that you get help in dying.

“And part of that is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of the med­ical pro­fes­sion with their Hippocratic Oath and that do no harm part.  They feel oblig­at­ed to do every­thing in their pow­er to keep a per­son alive and out of pain, even if it means putting some­one into a coma.

“But don’t they also have some oblig­a­tion to make the pas­sage from life as easy as possible?

“I just wish we had some sen­si­ble euthana­sia laws here.  Maybe if that were the case the prospect of death wouldn’t be such a ter­ror for so many people.”

Walt paused.

“You wor­ried about dying, Walt?” ques­tioned Ram.

“Me?  Nah, not real­ly.  Oh, I’m not look­ing for­ward to it, and I’ve made a liv­ing will so my fam­i­ly knows how I want things to end, as much as I can con­trol it.  But I sure as hell don’t want to be a bur­den for some­one while I linger in pain or even with­out feel­ing or men­tal capacity.

“It’s just frus­trat­ing that we all have so much con­trol over every­thing that hap­pens dur­ing life but are denied that con­trol when some of the most impor­tant deci­sions we’ll ever make aren’t ours to make.”

“I can’t say I dis­agree with any of that, my friend,” opined Ram.

He con­tin­ued, “Well, it’s start­ing to get pret­ty warm.  I guess we’d best call it anoth­er day…along with anoth­er prob­lem that we can’t solve.”

They both rose from the bench, nod­ded to one anoth­er, and set off in oppos­ing directions.

The humid­i­ty seemed to be get­ting worse.