This is a rant, plain and simple. This is a method of coping with difficult news. This is a personal, emotional diary. This is a political soap box moment. But, mostly, it's a rant. And I hope I don't offend anyone by bringing politics into the discussion, but living and dying is, perhaps, the most political topic anyone can come up with.
Edit: Changed the title to something simpler.
I received news a little while ago that a friend of mine is going to lose her father tomorrow, maybe the next day. He's dying of complications from brain cancer. My thoughts are with her and with her family tonight, but I'm going to spare a couple of thoughts for myself.
Why? Because 11 years ago, almost to the day, my mother died of the same disease, an aggressive glioblastoma. My mom's death was more directly the result of the tumor. My friend's dad is dying (from what I understand of the situation) from complications caused by the treatment. But both of them will have died from brain cancer.
My mother died in a country with semi-socialized health care. She received magnificent care and treatment. The tumor was just too strong, too bound up in her brain's tissue. We were very lucky to have the time and money to pack up a large part of the family to visit her, thousands of miles away from our homes.
My friend's dad will die, barring some extraordinary turn of events, in a country with a magnificent private health care system. He's lucky: he has the means to have access to the very best treatment available. And his family is lucky to have the time and the money to come home to say goodbye.
Death is inevitable. I don't have any notion that we can live forever. I hope I go with the dignity and humor my mom showed. Our particular manner and time of death are, for good or ill, not up to us. Some might say that death is God's will, that our parents, friends, and neighbors are called home. And I do hope that they find comfort in that. "God's will" is even a handy shorthand for the semirandom nature of dying. We don't usually choose how or when we go. We die when it is our time.
But.
We may not be able to live forever, but we can live longer and better. We can cure diseases. We can invent medicines to treat uncurable diseases. We can help poor families travel to visit sick relatives. We can provide care to ease people into death with dignity. And we do that now. The doctors and researchers in our world work miracles every day. Today, almost routinely, they can do things to save lives that would have been utterly unthinkable when my grandmother was born in 1904. The intelligence and creativity that we have applied to living and dying is one of the greatest achievements of our global civilization.
But.
We could do more. We could give our children and our poorest citizens access to the same health care our presidents and senators and representatives enjoy. We're the wealthiest country on earth, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to give that care to all of us, rich or poor, legal or illegal, young or old, not because it is the liberal thing to do but because it is the right thing to do.
But.
We could do more. We could educate our young people about the dangers of sun exposure, bad diet, stress, and the many ways we voluntarily damage our bodies. We could clean up our environment to remove carcinogens that we have introduced. We could export health care the way we try to export democracy, but with far more success and, I would hope, far more appreciation.
But.
We could do more. We could explore the untapped potential of stem cells. We could regrow organs and limbs. We could repair severed nerves. We could provide new skin for burn victims. We could discover unknown compounds growing, literally or not, on trees in rain forests.
Some of those things might be impossible today. Going to the Moon was impossible. Breaking the sound barrier was impossible. Human flight was impossible. Freeing the slaves was impossible. Democracy was impossible. But we did all of them because we tried.
Instead, what do we do? We spend billions of dollars on a war nobody wants (and I am emphatically not talking about hunting down the perpetrators of terrorist attacks here - I'm talking about Iraq and only Iraq). We elect men and women who want to replace the unbounded capacity of human reason to find solutions with the unbounded capacity of human minds to hope God or chance will fix our problems. We choose the easy route: destruction, inaction, chaos. We ignore the one thing that has allowed us to grow from banging rocks together in a valley to walking on the moon: our minds, our reason, our special gift of intelligence and problem-solving.
But. But. But. It's all we say. We could cure cancer, but it's hard. We could replace injured organs, but it's hard. We could make my story and my friend's story history, rather than a threat we all live with. And to the blessed few men and women who are working every day without enough resources to do those things, I have nothing but the deepest respect and admiration.
We're at a threshold. Maybe we always are. But the decision we face is whether we grow as a species, all of us. Whether we embrace our talent and apply the resources of our civilization to improving how we live and even how we die. This is not about political parties at its core, but today's Republicans want to deny us the fruits of our brilliance as a species. Today's Republicans want to tear down the vast resources available to us to invest in research, whether applied or pure, in the name of individual selfishness. They are wrong, fundamentally so. They are, perhaps ironically, condemning us to live just as animals, living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. They are wrong.
There is a time when it is right to say "but." When we are faced with a system that wants to hold us back, we can say "but we can do better!" When we are faced with politicians who pander to beliefs that would keep us in a civilization that was last fashionable 2,000 years ago, we can yell "but we can do better!" It's time to make a decision to do better: to guarantee health care to everyone, to pour needed resources into research that will not be hobbled by patents and secrecy, to make it our national mission to make sure that we live as well as we can and die with the dignity that comes from a life lived fully and well, not scratching simply to survive.
We can do better, if we have the will.
PS. It's late, so I may disappear to sleep, but thank you for reading.