[Oe List ...] Jaime's 8/29 column/choice in dying

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

Thank you, Jaime, for sharing your columns.
 
Anyone interested in the right to make their own end-of-life decisions  
might want to check out _www.compassionandchoices.org_ 
(http://www.compassionandchoices.org) , a  Denver-based group supporting, educating and advocating 
for "compassionate  end-of-life care in legislatures, courtrooms and at 
bedsides."
 
Jann McGuire
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 8/25/2013 4:43:51 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
svesjaime at aol.com writes:



j'aime la vie  


Yesterday,  appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all,  
Celebrate!



-----Original  Message-----
From: Jaime Vergara <pinoypanda2031 at aol.com>
To:  editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Sat, Aug 24, 2013 5:38  pm
Subject: August 29


The End
 
>From the Internet:
As I was lying around, pondering the  problems of the world,
I realized that at my age I don't really  give a rat's ass anymore.
… If walking is good for your health, the  postman would be immortal.
… A whale swims all day, only eats fish,  drinks water, but is still fat.
… A rabbit runs and hops and only lives  15 years, while
… A tortoise doesn't run and does mostly  nothing, yet it lives for 150 
years.
And you tell me to exercise? I don't  think so.
Just grant me the senility to forget the  people I never liked,
the good fortune to remember the ones I  do, 
and the eyesight to tell the  difference.
I love the author’s paraphrase of Francis  of Assisi at the end.
 
We are coming to the end of our  writing.  As one of my soul mates who went 
through chemo and now lives  the struggle of a cancer survivor says, 
talking of end things do not come  easy.  Everyone avoids the subject of death.
 
My theological awakening, when the  discipline was still considered the 
queen of sciences, occurred in the 60s  when a strapping 18-yr old Pinoy lawyer 
wannabe chanced on an ecumenical Youth  Assembly at Silliman University in 
Dumaguete City (an institution started by  Presbyterians in 1901).  I bump 
into characters like the Nazi-executed  martyr Bonheoffer (Freedom), biblical 
scholar Bultmann (Question of God),  theologian Tillich (You are accepted), 
and the ethical visionaries Niebuhr  brothers (Church as social pioneer), 
et al.  We consequently teetered to  the left.
 
Add the opening of closed doors and shuttered  windows of the musty 
Basilica by John XXIII, and I found my mind quickly in  the expansive quadrangle of 
the monastic cloister contemplating moves not even  common to Jesuits.  A 
sail later, from Manila to SF’s golden gate, by  Greyhound to the woods of 
Kentucky across the prairie of the Midwest, I  quickly entangled myself in the 
on-going theological upheaval at the time,  buttressed by a youth 
revolution  and a civil rights movement with truncheons and live dogs.  Those were  
heady days to be playing  attention to one’s life.
 
A decade later, an elderly couple, a  renowned Princeton University 
educator and head of Union Theological Seminary  in New York when the fierce winds 
of Vatican II were blowing wildly to the  Hudson, and his wife, decided to 
take on “the freedom of the Holy Spirit” with  an intentional overdose of 
sleeping pills at 75 and 80.   

Euthanasia was the dreaded term for the act,  espoused as far back as 
Socrates downing the hemlock, restored at the cutting  edge of a Christology that 
saw Jesus not as a victim of Roman connivance to  Jewish defensive paroxysm 
but as a willful act of taking the cross unto one’s  entire being.  The Van 
 Dusens decided that the springlike burst of joy at birth and its muted 
wintry  chill of death can no longer be just left to passive resignation in  
nature.  As increasingly a feature of birth, death had become an item of  
choice.
 
I was liberal but not that  progressive.  Michigan was our vacation State, 
with friends living in  Flint when graffiti was still unseen in 
neighborhoods, and Muskegon still  elicited mirth and mystery from foreign lads like me. 
 There was Jack  Kavorkian in Pontiac, bringing sanity to dark corners but 
later vilified in  U.S. media as Dr. Death, sentenced later to 10 years in 
prison (served 8) for  practicing physician-assisted suicide.
 
My Dad at 57 rode a motorbike to supervise  his assigned territory in 
Cagayan, a province in northern Luzon.  One  late afternoon, in his desire to get 
home before sundown, he taxed stamina too  far and ran head-on to a bus.  
Medivac to Manila and subjected to the wonders of  reconstructive surgery, he 
could not go through an airport security without  triggering off the alarm 
bell and flashing red lights.  Steel had been  conjoined to his bones.  
 
Retiring early, he joined my brother in  Hawaii.  Later, in his late 80s, 
he would pray, “God take me,” for the  pains that ailed his body.  My last 
visit with him was when he was 92 at  a nursing home, still smiling but lost 
on figuring out who-the-hell I  was.  He died at 94 after attempting many 
times to escape from the home,  often found wandering in the middle of the 
night on the busy highway, perhaps,  hoping never to be found alive again.  
 
Unhappily for him, one of his sons is a  chaplain with the Honolulu police 
department, so he would invariably be  escorted in a flashing limo of Aloha’
s finest back to the  ward.
 
My mother lies in a nursing facility in  Honolulu where she is assisted to 
eat at appointed times; she sits and snoozes  on her wheel chair awaiting 
her turn to be guided back to her bed as  caregivers are assigned their 
numerous patients.  She turns 94 in  September.
 
Ending is not something we decide.   We would rather have someone else 
decide it for us.  Most of us would  rather be on automatic ride in the great 
roller coaster of life.  To  those who still reside in a two-story universe, 
as my father did, we allot a  lot of decisions on an external power we call 
God.
 
Though the terms hara-kiri and  seppuku entered our vocabulary recently, we 
are not close to  contemplating their actual execution.  What we do know is 
that setting  endings is a glorious liberating thing.  We are bidding adieu 
to  this page and the island of Saipan. 
 
Our 10-4 is not casual.  It ends with a dot. Period.

Jaime  Vergara
_pinoypanda2031 at aol.com_ (mailto:pinoypanda2031 at aol.com) 
yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In  all,  
celebrate!





_______________________________________________
OE  mailing  list
OE at lists.wedgeblade.net
http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20130826/086fdbaa/attachment-0001.htm>