Limitations of the Intellect in Matters Concerning Life and Death

Abstract

She was 74 years and left school at age 14. She married young and thoughtlessly to a local boy from the same tribe, like many do around the world. She was neither pretty nor plain, but there was a spark about her. She bore her children quickly and efficiently. She left school early to work long hours, in the home and outside, keeping the family out of poverty. She neither complained nor whined. She enjoyed life. She laughed at risque jokes about marriage, drank a little beer with the best of them, and held the family together when the second oldest child died of a drug overdose. She had an uncanny straightforwardness and simplicity about life. She did not hanker after fashionable knowledge or art-nouveau films or wait expectantly for delivery of the New York Times book review. Her daughters hovered, practicing love, protecting her, as she once them. She spoke blandly and baldly about death, laughed and cried at once. She was down and up and all around frightened, but she looked fate straight in the eyes with nary a blink. She laughed with black humor and white humor and ribald humor, and her children cried behind her back because this tiny ball of fire and cancer was really a tower of strength and they feared for themselves the day she would not be. In his mid-70s, he was a professor of thought and improbable politics who wrote clever sentences about others. He was molly-coddled by a loving trio who cherished him overprotectively. He was the great academic and advisor to the seats of power. He wrote books like others write letters to the editor. Instinctively, however, the trio saw and smelled his fear even as he bandied back and forth clever words and intellectualized with the doctors, and he fooled them for a while in an effort to fool himself. He was working on another book and travelled hither and dither with pseudo-heroism, all the while avoiding the real meaning of his writings. He could not be disturbed but was terrified and swallowed antiterror pills and mood-uplifting pills and round ones and blue ones. He had created a narcissistic persona for his own moral support and recruited literary lackeys far and wide. The most he could do was talk theoretically about death just as he wrote about other people's death-defying experiences. As the end came near, he panicked and all his words and cleverness could not save him. He died grand-childless because all his life he harbored uncertainty, because he was scared and lacked courage, and he transmitted trepidation into their lives and they hesitated. “The paradox of the end of life dynamic is, that through acceptance of the life one has lived, comes acceptance of death” [1].