One crucial difference: for my grandmother, wanting success, prosperity, and so forth, were all laudable desires; ambition and drive were necessary ingredients to success. For me, these desires are the root of suffering - they become so personalized that their non-fulfillment leads me to see my life as not worth living, even as I sit by my grandmother's sickbed. She never despaired, I don't think; her will to live was always too strong. Come to think of it, maybe it is still. Maybe she did choose to start eating again; maybe she knows a bond to life that I, indulgently, do not. Although I claim that my aversion to desire is part of a spiritual practice, I wonder if I envy my grandmother's perseverance. Even lying in bed, terribly weakened by age, she seems to possess a strength I lack.
The medical community is still very generous when defining quality of life - probably as Buddhist as America ever gets. If you can experience life - think it, perceive it, feel it - that is quality of life. Whether what you are experiencing is pleasure or pain - that is not part of the bargain, so to speak. The current debates about physician-assisted suicide seem to be about a divergence from this norm: whether there is a time at which the experience of pain is so great, certain, and unremitting that it is merciful to help someone avoid it. The distinction between assisted suicide at the end of life and indulgent suicide in its middle is muddier; it is now one of degree, rather than kind. With the choice in some cases now between quality and life, simple distinctions are lost. 'Choose life' becomes ambiguous.
It looked for a while as though my grandmother had chosen quality instead of life, and we assented. Now, she has changed her mind and silently opted not to rush God - or perhaps she lacks the capacity to make the choice at all. We will not know which is the case. If she has chosen this path, her volition is locked inside a broken mind. If the path chose her, her will is lost. I hope, for so many reasons, that it is the latter. And yet, do I also secretly hope that, even now, she intentionally clings to life -- and that I might have inherited her will to live?
Jay Michaelson is on silent retreat at Elat Chayyim in Accord, NY.
More of Jay's Head:
Go as Far as Possible
Jay Michaelson
December, 2002
When life seems irresolvably absurd
November, 2002
Tips and advice from my first gay year
October, 2002
Summer days, summer nights are gone...
September, 2002
Why is it easier to see God in nature than in the city?
August, 2002
Being at one with Being
July, 2002
New York, full of life, a cure for loneliness.
June, 2002
If the desert feeds the spirit, and Paris delights the senses, what does
McDonald's do?
May, 2002
Am I an environmentalist for the same reasons I don't like to spend money?
April, 2002
With stories today about space aliens and the power of prayer, what are
the limits of your enlightened skepticism?
March, 2002
Remembering a car accident one year later. Does anything matter?
February, 2002
A guy at a concert shouts "Whoo hoo!" at the wrong time. What can he tell
us about life well lived?
November, 2001
If crass capitalism stops us from killing each other, is it such a bad thing after all?
October, 2001
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