The fight to die
well
We will expect more from death than our
ancestors did
By Glenn McGee
We die hard, working to cheat the grim
reaper every step of the way. If any civilization in history
loved to live, our own would surely rank among them.
Obviously, 20th- century western society lives with gusto,
fighting each battle and building each bridge with the elan
of a bloated prizefighter. The 20th century is a testimony
to nothing so much as the will of western societies to fight
against their own dying.
TAKE A LOOK at our technologies:
seat belts and safe cars, environmental
protection, child safety and labor laws, weather
forecasting. We fight to die well, too. 20th
century Americans set up life insurance, invented
Medicare and Social Security, and made up a new
kind of tool called the “advance directive” to
give the dying more power over how they die.
NEVER LETTING GO
Truly, ours is a generation that has
struggled to strike a balance between the eastern tradition
of venerating ancestors and the western tendency to, well,
get them out of the way of progress.
We also refuse to let anything
about us die. I’m not talking about the odd new
habit of freezing heads, bodies, or other parts in
liquid nitrogen so that one day we can awaken,
like Woody Allen’s “Sleeper,” to live
forever in the world of the Jetsons. No, I’m
talking about metaphorical death.
We don’t like the idea of
losing our identity, and we are the first
civilization to make ideas “permanent.” The
library burned at Alexandria and the work of
millions was lost. The first films from the first
part of this century are gone. But these words you
are reading, however paltry, have the potential to
live on forever, protected in perpetuity by the
astonishingly resilient thing called computing. It
is a central theme of the 20th century that books
may get remaindered, but E-mail and Web pages
could well live forever. Everyone from Timothy
Leary to Darth Vader lives on in the Internet.
DYING WELL
Our death rites will change.
There just isn’t enough real estate to bury the
American dead. There aren’t enough transplant
organs. And it isn’t sufficient for most folks
to write a simple will.
The 21st century will not see
the death of death. People will still grow old,
and they will still die. But the clues for how
death will change are already present. We will
live longer and better as we age. We will age more
gracefully. We will expect more from death than
did our ancestors, and expect more, too, from our
children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. The recent trend of late
divorce — divorce after age 70 — suggests that
people expect more from their own relationships as
they get older. When we do finally die in the 21st
century, our death rites will change. There just
isn’t enough real estate to bury the American
dead. There aren’t enough transplant organs. And
it isn’t sufficient for most folks to write a
simple will. After all, we can use the cells and
sperm and eggs of the dead these days for
reproductive purposes, and we can even go back and
figure out who Thomas Jefferson slept with. The
dead don’t rest easy anymore. So dying will
increasingly mean planning ahead.
Nobody likes to think about
dying, and death in the next century will not be
any easier to grasp. But coping with death, coming
to die, and passing over into death are all going
to be a little better as we develop policies,
rules, ethics, and technologies that make
bioethics a part of a 21st century death. Even if
we can’t cheat the reaper.
MSNBC columnist Glenn McGee
teaches at University of Pennsylvania’s Center
for Bioethics in Philadelphia. He is the author of
the recent book, “The Perfect Baby.”
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