Total denuding process of terminally ill; (Mar. 17, 2010)
The hardest part for an incurable dying person is not necessarily being reduced to nothing after death; it is to be consciously reduced to a totally dispossessed non-entity before his death. Willingly or coerced to, an incurable dying person is forced to undergo total stripping of all his material belonging and his mental and physical potentials. For example, in the article “Befriending death”, Pierre “the fix it all”, had to finally ask specialized companies to do home repairs and finish off works in progress; he had to desist doing research work at his physics research institution; he had find capable replacement researchers to resume his projects; he had to give up positions in associations and organizations; he had to stop computing from statistics the exact date for his imminent death; he had to teach his wife and grown up children how to fix and repair things at home.
Pierre had to give up reading, listening to music, communicating, surfing the net; he had to forget what he accumulated in tools for home repairs. Pierre had to accept loosing possession of part of his body, his strength, sensations, taking interminable time to getting out of bed, unable to eat, to talk, to walk. Pierre had to be resigned to let go controlling and managing his family.
The last phase in dispossession is to let go of praying: come what come; the dying person is already “a prayer”. It is not only totally useless to pray by the dying patient’s bed; it is also frankly infuriating to the patient and family members: the dying person is already in another dimension and care less of what’s going around him. Pierre is entering a sort of “no man’s land of the mind” in silence.
It is entirely naïve and insane for friends to tell a dying person “You still can decide for life!” People usually lack the burning pains of what the terminally ill is experiencing. There is a time when living and dying is same different. Suppose a person has reached the final phases of total dispossession and then was told “Congratulation, you are cured. You can recapture your former job and get your previous activities back.” Do you think that this completely denuded person would still have the heart and energy to restart life from scratch like a newborn baby?
Note: this topic was extracted from “When befriending death” by Sylvie Garoche.
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