For those who want to see things this way, private residences for seniors (RPA) are schools where the attendants are the owners. Registered in one of them for a few months, I quickly learned that control and choice are the two key words of the new art of living and, subsequently, of dying. This is clearly evident in the arguments often heard in favor of medical assistance in dying.
I place myself first, not because I want to present my case as exemplary, but to evoke the personal orientation on which my thinking on the subject is based. I am afraid, simply afraid, of objective data about my body, especially when it is quantified. I have the feeling that knowing about your illness makes it worse. This is why I entered the doctors horizontally; this twice.
And when, at age 75, I consulted a family doctor for the first time, for prevention, it was to receive a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, a multifaceted and largely unpredictable disease. I belong not to the “control and choice” pole, but to the “abandonment and necessity” pole, satisfied if not happy to know neither the day nor the hour… Which, paradoxically, encourages me to admire those who have the courage to taste the facts in their objective rawness.
If the big question of dying were limited to the orientation between the two poles in this particular case, the cause would quickly be understood, but it is an entire vision of the world that is at stake. “One day, you we’ll see, we’ll meet, / Somewhere anywhere, guided by chance,” says the song. It turns out that the most important and happiest events of my life were in the spirit of this song, in the atmosphere of kairosthis art, not of planning the future, but of seizing the opportune opportunity along the way.
Last night I listened to a selection of Bach cantatas offered on a good device by a friend who knows Bach and admires him to the point of campaigning for his canonization. Perfect joy, to which it could have failed to be a gift, a grace.
Alfred de Vigny, about the stagecoach and the railway in The Berge houser: “Farewell, slow journeys, distant noises that we listen to, / The laughter of the passerby, the delays of the axle, / The unforeseen detours of varied slopes, / A friend met, the forgotten hours / The hope of arrive late in a wild place. […] No more chance. Everyone will slide on their line, / Immobile in the only rank that the departure assigns, / Plunged into a silent and cold calculation. »
We certainly recognize modernity in relation to tradition, but beyond this agreed distinction, we can see on the one hand a self which displays itself and which asserts itself through control and, on the other, a being which opens to the cosmic and the divine, thus inserting itself into the great whole.
If death were the great encounter of a life, what would it gain, what would it lose by being calculated or grasped in passing, controlled or the object of letting go, this theme which pulses at the heart of postmodernity ? You will have guessed my preference.