Content warning: This post talks about death, dying, and mentions both assisted and unassisted suicide.
I take a weekly newsletter called This is True from Randy Cassingham, and one of the regular features is the Honorary Unsubscribe. He started it back when Jack Lord died and Randy noticed there was little coverage of his death. His HU this week was for his mother, who died at 99, just six weeks short of her 100th birthday. In reading his HU post about her, it seems she had a wonderful life.
Randy doesn’t usually allow comments on Honorary Unsubscribe posts, but he did on this one, and one of the comments struck me.
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
—Leonardo da Vinci

Happy Death?
I think a happy death is similar to a good death, and that’s something we don’t consider nearly as much as we should.
Modern society has such an odd view of death. We’ve created this kind of taboo around it. We don’t like to talk about it. We don’t like to consider that once we’re dead, it’s all over, and there’s nothing left. That’s the core belief of several religions. “This isn’t really the end. There’s another eternal life, but you only get there if you do these things.” But you have to be good in this life because if you’re not, you’ll go to the bad eternal life, not the good eternal life.
Some religions take a different view of the afterlife, suggesting that when our physical body dies, our immortal soul gets moved to a new body.
There are scientific fields of study working to end the biological aging process so that we can live forever.
Why are we so afraid of death, though?
Why are we scared of life ending?
We’re so disturbed by death that we don’t even like to say “died.” Instead of saying that someone died, we say they “passed on/away” or they’ve “gone to a better place,” or “gone to heaven,” or, even better, “gone to be with the Lord.”
We don’t let children go to funerals, reinforcing the idea at a young age that it’s a bad thing.
We do everything we can to keep someone’s body alive, even though their brain, their self, their personality is long gone. Someone couldn’t tell you what day it is or who you are, and their skin is paper-thin, so flimsy that just touching them opens a bloody wound. But by golly, we’re not going to let the Grim Reaper win! He’s not going to get Grandma, not on my watch, no sirree!
Who’s In Charge?
I read a piece the other day about a Tennessee legislator who’s working to loosen abortion restrictions he put in place several years ago. He wants to give parents back the right to control their pregnancy and make healthcare decisions without fear of imprisonment.
In the article though, one of his aides brings him a “right to die” bill.
“That one you can send back,” he responds without hesitation. Advocates have been bringing him assisted suicide bills for years, he says, and he’s never been persuaded.
What? Why? Why isn’t that also one of the “most basic human rights we have?”
Shouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t we be the ones in charge of how we die? Sure, we can put healthcare powers of attorney in place, and tell our families to not perform heroic lifesaving actions. But those are all passive measures. They’re designed to be put into action after we’re no longer competent to make decisions.
What about before that time?
Why can’t someone decide, “Hey, I’m done,” and go to a doctor and ask for some help? Isn’t that process better than traumatizing the person who finds you after you’ve killed yourself with a gunshot to the head? Isn’t a quiet, dignified death in a home better than stepping in front of a train or truck, devastating the train crew and truck driver and emergency services people who have to respond?
Look, everyone dies. It’s perfectly fine to want to have some control over your death. It’s completely acceptable to involve hospice care or a death doula.
Let your death be as good as your life.
DaVinci said, "As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.” Let your death be as good as your life. | Beyond the Taboo: Rethinking Society's Fear of Death Share on XShake, Rattle, and Roll
We had a little shock Friday night.
About 11:20 PM, I was sitting at my desk, head down in some genealogy research, when I heard a low thunder-like rumble.
Then my chair moved.
The house rumbled like it would with a close lightning strike, except there hadn’t been any lightning. Diana woke up from the rumble. Middle Son came out of his bedroom right after it happened.
It was a 5.1-magnitude earthquake about 80 miles away. That’s the second-largest in recent history, the largest being a 5.8-magnitude quake in 2016, in the same general area. The Did You Feel It report at the USGS shows people felt it east as far as St Louis and south down into Texas.
The local Facebook groups lit up something fierce, but there was no local damage, and as far as I know, little damage near the epicenter.
We rode out a 4.8 quake in November, 2011 in the RV, one of a series over several days. It was close to bedtime and I thought the kids were jumping around because RVs aren’t the sturdiest things in the world. No damage for us in that one, either.
Writing
The other day I was scrolling through Mastodon and came across a friend’s blog post entitled “Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Celebrity I’d Like to Meet.” Then I clicked through to learn more about the WWBC at Long and Short Reviews, and decided I’d take on a few of the topics. My first post will be Wednesday, 7 Feb, for the topic “Things I Like to Do on Stormy Days.”
I probably won’t do all of them, because some of them just don’t fit for me. But several look interesting, so watch for them on Wednesdays here. And each WWBC post will have a link back to Long and Short Reviews, which hosts the whole thing. Be sure to click through and see what other bloggers have to say on the week’s topic.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share a thought in the comments. Sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. Find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar or follow it on Mastodon. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader.
[…] I wrote earlier this year about society’s fear of death. […]