Enough Life - how long?

Modern medicine has enabled six generations to co-exist at the same time. In the hundreds of thousands of years humans have walked the earth, this has never happened before. Yet, here we are. It's an amazing and wonderful thing. But for families, it can be confusing and exhausting. Particularly when it comes to end of life issues. 

It’s tough being in your seventies making medical decisions for your ninety year old parent. The choices are fraught. Grandad demands French fries but he may choke and die. His Parkinson’s requires pureed food. Granny won't stop sneaking cigarettes even though she has COPD and is on oxygen. What to do?! 

In his superb book, Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande says such decisions are “a consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. [We don't ask the ultimate question:] how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves anymore.”  
We people of faith say that our times are in God’s hands,  yet, so often we cling to life for fear of death.

As we age, enough life might mean choosing to say no to the relentless effort to keep us alive. It might mean deciding that at the mature age of X, we will refuse vaccines or medications that prevent sudden death. We'll support prevention, not intervention.  We'll let nature run its course. 

This is not a common approach to aging and dying in American culture. But considerations like the well-being of our descendants, the toll on families, health care pollution and its effects on our planet, and our own commitments to quality over quantity of life make it one worth considering.

Alternatively, enough life might mean that we choose to prolong our lives as long as possible accepting that we may die by a thousand diminishments. We learn strategies for sustained meaning, for graciously giving away control of our lives and we practice blessing those who will support us during our prolonged dependence and confinement.  

We Americans are likely to survive longer than we  expect.  So, let’s make a choice. Let’s not end up in extreme old age because we capitulated to medicine’s fetishizing of survival. Let’s not arrive there because we didn’t want to think about it and suddenly it happened. 

We can decide in advance how we want to live our last days. Hear me now, I'm not saying fret about it, I'm saying look with clear eyed candor at your mortality and make decisions. Consider what abundant life will look like when you are frail, dependent and weak.  How do you want to approach it? How will you live enough life?

In God’s created order, death is a gift, not a curse. We can approach our death with courage and confidence, trusting God’s infinite generative powers. We can say with the Apostle Paul, "Death where is your victory, grave where is your sting? Indeed, death has been swallowed up in victory!" (I Corinthians 15:55) With that hope,  death has the appropriate place in our story. 

-- Pastor Rebecca