DEATH'S PEDAGOGY:
Ramsey, Paul
DEATH'S PEDAGOGY PAUL RAMSEY The assault on the last...
...The singularity of the reference to those non-interchangeable human beings indeed come, is worth pondering, and applying as well to the lifeCome unfalteringly...
...dread of death supersedes all else...
...And ritual and chant...
...That is all that is meant by an person has to wear reading glasses...
...P. Lippincott, $8.95), "There is a time to live, under which she would choose death...
...She then observes, Explorations in Medical Ethics...
...Neither will plains the "inexplicable" ease with which he decided I again smite any more every thing living,' God told to go to NIH from the Georgetown University Hospital: Noah, and the phrase kept coming back to me...
...It was always present, like a kind of of peace and light and-very palpably-love, is per- background music...
...The awful, terrible act of dying was, tion as desiring bodily beings...
...The more a coachman and a nurse...
...Mannes is playing truant...
...these "avenues must be kept open for those life he had lived made little difference in that engagewho cannot, or will not, bring themselves to join" the ment...
...see him did not wish `to admit what they all knew and Still largely without that normative guide to action and what he knew' was a sense of the awfulness and unique- for social approval, we now have "calisthenic sexuality," ness of dying: `Those lies-lies enacted over him on the and 12-hours of consecutive pornographic movies for the eve of his death and destined to degrade this awful, purpose to utterly "desensitize" patients in a poor peosolemn act to the level of their visitations, their curtains, ple's Masters and Johnson "therapeutic" program at certheir sturgeon for dinner-were a terrible agony to tain medical schools, thereafter to begin their reconstrucIvan Ilych...
...Quite naturally, then, Alsop thinks of ex- a weary life...
...he had the con- articulated understanding but for silence mutually shared solations of philosophy and quotations remembered in and for "the squeeze of a warm hand in time of darkuntranquility as he probed to find behind the masks of ness and fear...
...Or as a testimony to the attention...
...We had practical philosophy of the insightful or rational versus rather die in rational control of our dying, we con- the dumb, the brave versus (understandably, of course) template insuring that we do so rather than risk the the cowards...
...But a human being in bodily identity with that vidual life-span...
...Still, despite the growing euthanasia were, with "the man in the white nightgown" (W.C...
...The page would blur, and the and snicker, cacophony in my head would mount from a murmur And in short, I was afraid...
...Ivan Ilych must not have been on the in the first instance by chatting about sex all day long for reading list at Groton...
...seemingly, descriptively, "Millions have never lived to Commonweal: 497 their fullest capacities...
...Then on the next By way of contrast, Stewart Alsop, in the written page she fully endorses the moral judgment underlying record he left behind, had not yet wrestled from death those statements: "1 believe that the will to die is the more than a glimpse of its friendly face...
...So Alsop himself distanced from it as much as he could...
...deliberate death, pleasant odor)" (italics added...
...Not that six I bring thee a song, that when thou must other children might exist instead...
...But however long, and the result is the same...
...and submission to the power of a And what was so special about Ivan Ilych's death that widespread chatter that tells us again and again fables prevented his taking toward it-at least as an ideal-the about "death with dignity," good deaths...
...Christopher's Hospice I really do have cancer, and I really am going to die...
...Yet the term is really which, not written in the score, we hear behind all appropriate to none of the possible answers...
...it is customed to living with Uncle Thanatos"-the "strange easier to do what others do...
...Com- one of our pre-death morticians, in Stewart Alsop's dybat is aroused only by the blasts or the cacophony...
...It is always too untimely for that...
...stood reduction to "sturgeon for dinner...
...analogy comes in when Alsop, mixing metaphors, speaks Calvary Hospital in New York, founded over 70 years of the "little pea of fear at the back of my mind," the ago by a group of Catholic women...
...Afterward, when I felt well to cry for "the first time in about fifty years," and in again and believed I was cured, the thought became order to get away from his hospital roommate he went very terrible...
...of his life's course as a trajectory, and the un- he was that was dying...
...Such ing to be "marrowed...
...Dreadful is the mysterious power of death its true persona, or its nature manifest (showing fate" (italics added), Alsop twice comments, once when forth) in more than one personae...
...that here was dying...
...And because of this, they would will take the high road to rationalized or administered settle rather for a minimal life than no life at all...
...administered death...
...There was not the slightest tendency to supeuthanasia movement...
...Bad I judge, conveyed by remembering the words, "On pain test-results he dreaded only "second most...
...Such men, then some others, perhaps the outlook of a com- consequences come from first turning mysteries to be passionate Ideal Observer who views his death as one contemplated and deepened altogether into problems to among others...
...within his conversation with himself, I requires (death was "learning" Alsop to know his should say, he felt himself addressed...
...He refers to Sir William Osler's sugperiences of combat in war, "the first sudden shock of gestion that it might be a good idea to chloroform realizing that the people on the other side are really everybody on his sixtieth birthday...
...courages us to avoid that tutelage...
...This forming oneself in the wisdom of acknowledged limita- is qualified, of course, by the author's recognition that tions...
...Alsop never refers to that work...
...Moreover, there is a philosophy of human life en- Among us, however, the brightest and the best in tailed in that view of death...
...20 September 1974: 502...
...These things are true, of course...
...Euthanasia" is a term as appropriate for all gated together, an approaching "evil" which annuls every possible answers as it is for some or any answers to ordinary distinction between good and evil, the backquestions of the sort...
...Also he writes, "I was never `half in love with easeful Having begun a "journal" early in his illness, Alsop death,' and I suspect John Keats wasn't either...
...waiting for the disease to declare itself"-the disease We should not be surprised, therefore, to find no imlife was horn with...
...Because of who sand...
...There may be some truth increasing numbers are choosing a still higher way...
...You should do more to for Mannes, the "oratorio of euthanasia...
...the last three decades, and now propose to do the same Still I venture to say that Alsop was schooled to many about death...
...That Alsop ever much richer, then let him give all that a history thought of when he asked himself that question...
...And in Following tests, "bad counts were bad news-much the same instructive dialogue Alsop had also to be worse news than the gloomiest headlines in the news"learned" the irreplaceable uniqueness and importance papers...
...To ask got up, and fumbled in my shaving kit, and found anthat question and suchlike questions is to ask about com- other sleeping pill and at last dozed off...
...Such is Mannes writes, "on the extraordinary assumption that the outlook, I believe, of Marya Mannes' recent book, the millions of people in this world who continue to Last Rights (William Morrow, $5.95...
...Concerning an ordithought of resort to the "bare bodkin," while chatting nary housewife and mother, back in NIH after a relapse, intermittently with his wife Tish "about things that he discerned that she truly had lived a "normal" life in 20 September 1974: 500 the interim between treatments and "seemed quite un- an expansive and dubiously persuasive rhetoric...
...He was comprised of that...
...of death...
...Their dying...
...Rather sitive souls...
...For example, her report with obvious dis- 26, 1974...
...What did Caius," Ivan Ilych asks, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych is often read as an "know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya attack upon the triviality and superficiality with which had been so fond of...
...not however in the interrogative mood...
...Contemplating this nation full of half-lives in wards and nursing homes, PAUL RAMSEY is a Methodist layman and Harrington Spear Paine sustained by tenacity, Mannes takes up a very definite Professor of Religion at Princeton University...
...but then all the same...
...it might have been useful for them you grasp for life...
...Yet he writes that "when Aggie"-the latter petition because "one wants to put I was really sick-when I was in close fear of Thanatos a chip on the double zero, just in case...
...And why would he mild an expression) to know the meaning of treading particularly be degraded by any degradation of the awful, water over a thousand fathoms (or, is it twenty thou- unique, terrible, solemn act of dying...
...think what others think...
...That time came for Stewart Alsop on May dignities...
...gone instead to a party where he first met Tish: "my Then I chant it for thee...
...That was "correct and respect in the face of encounters with death because as applied to Caius but certainly not as applied to him- of the unique human beings therein made manifest, can self...
...Finally Alsop expressed another set of dependent variables-different from those of Marya Mannes, who, Combat Imagery as we have seen, seems to believe that the fuller the life, the higher the "quality" of life that is experienced, Applying the combat-imagery to his own case he then the more acceptance and the less fear of death composed in Churchillian periods the following expres- there will be...
...and awe-fullness of death itself in order to grasp Tol- In any case, the humanity of mankind is at stake in stoy's understanding of the very meaning of that de- how, after sex, we go about assaulting this last taboo: meaning superficiality painted over the face of death in death...
...A logically appropriate class name for all pos- ings from Kissinger...
...Because of this, we who know we are her illustrations are mainly drawn from those whose mortal have the opportunity to learn "so to number passion for a full life turns suddenly into an embrace our days that we may get a heart of wisdom...
...of death intolerable...
...They are among the background music, the music of death, blared high most graced and graceful institutionalizations of care again for a moment...
...Someone should pay attention death is treated by the people round about a dying man, to what here is forever to be no more when Ivan Ilych and as a complaint over the awful isolation of the dying dies...
...That, I sup- needed in the modem age, and for what Robert Morison thinks the continuation of Cornell is going to do for him...
...Two lessons he has learned: "that most that a solution must be devised for those who cannot people are nicer than they seem to be" and "that, alescape the cake of custom or church...
...If he did not know it before or sense it deeply along his bone marrow, death was saying to Stewart Alsop "I'll learn-ye" the meaning of being the transient center of a whole world of worth, his one and only world of worth...
...If true, that means that acceptance of into the bathroom and "cried my heart out" and felt a one's own death remains in the end a judgment of good deal better...
...If Alsop's world of concrete values seems to -although that term is ordinarily used in a sense re- anyone too narrow, let him expand it however much he stricted to only some possible answers, narrowing down will, let him also add realized "qualities of life" howto such things as Hamlet's "bare bodkin...
...I have just run out of my small store of courage,' I said...
...It is not simply that we hoped to improve matters civilization today...
...not his very maudlin or excessively self-pitying in such thoughts, it own dying...
...tancing" from death not only to keep it at bay but Of course, such tenacity is not a mere nuisance to to entice its friendly features...
...None do, who treat him and that ball as an goodness or acceptability of a natural death apart from incident, one among the many...
...The inference here of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences...
...Commonweal: 499 Death is nothing but dreadful to any human being...
...Alsop's roses at NIH...
...Then a sense platelets) first of all a recognition that the theme of of the reality of death crowded in on me-the end of a death throughout lived or dying life is no simple tune pleasant life, never to see Tish again or Andrew or to dance to...
...A "better themes of life whether well or poorly sung...
...it is rather a constant theme or back- with something of a comic spirit, one can try to imagine ground music: the background of all backgrounds...
...The most faithful stern teacher of that dying process...
...I emerge a bald skeleton and wait for death...
...phony-not exactly a headache but a kind of murmur- I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat ing unpleasantness...
...in London created and run by Cicely Saunders...
...Literary man that he was, he wonders it is not a fact of life negotiable or manageable like "who would fardels bare, to grunt and sweat under other facts...
...That would seem individua"life" (unique, individual human life) becomes a pro- tion enough-all elements, doubtless, not without sense word, the more death is an enemy...
...The ingly described by Marya Mannes...
...They observed "a well-tended problems are intrinsicailly solvable-even if no one little triangle of roses...
...If we have did the human problematic in facing death vary "aclived to the fullest of our capacities, dying is merely cordingly as the candidate/ preliminary was" (Emily suspension within a mystery...
...he repeats: "Thank you God, thank you Mother, thank The foregoing functional variables-felt sickness, with you Father, thank you Aggie" or "Please God, please the thought of easeful death-Dare associated with another Mother [who is thought maybe to be in the vicinity set of variables...
...Would it be better to die this way ground of every background that has foregrounds, a muror that...
...It will come nettes that were part of Mannes' accumulation of in- for us all...
...But one in particular strikes me as suggestive anti-word, the more pro we should be and will be in of the memory saturated with sense-the smell of leather respect for any of our companions in this dying life of and the feel of roundness and bodily agility in playours...
...So much for the consolations of "social imof Stewart Alsop's life-span in the vast sea of humanity...
...and in recalling words from a chila really low count of platelets (which physicians say dren's game, "Heavy, heavy [hangs over your head], is impossible for a patient to feel) because then "I do what hangs over...
...unconscious, indescribable process . . . of adjustment So in a penultimate chapter the author speaks of "al- whereby one comes to terms with death...
...it is tion of the center of all the evil as well as the good that the name for choices made only because there is worse may comprise an experienced life-cannot fail to be for still in the alternative...
...Perhaps one would not then really to face the chance of death when they were young...
...But these were not reviewing the notebook record of his recent experience, cheerful poems like the one Mannes quotes from Walt and again when remembering what might have been or Whitman: not been if in Great Britain during World War I a Dark Mother always gliding near with soft feet, comrade in the King's Royal Rifle Corps called "PlowHave none chanted for thee a chant of boy" had not been ordered to guard duty and Alsop fullest welcome...
...that is where the understanding of death as always an Enemy, that there downhill trail really starts...
...That, too, ex- -1 had no desire at all to kill anything...
...In any case, Alsop "did not realize, until I let nature, in the shape of infection, take its course...
...Even so, to her pupils...
...Alas...
...The "independent though it can be hard at first, in time one becomes acspirit" is rare...
...to a shout...
...not these not yet but he was passsible answers to suchlike questions might be "euthanasia" ing away...
...parative medical indignities or comparatively painful or The same experience is recounted on a day among insulting or embarrassing states of human affairs that many days he walked with Tish toward the NIH buildare, at least, commensurate with one another...
...There are little ritual "prayers" which comparative indignities still...
...A person's particular death had to be seems to me, but rather instruction in the truth pro "learned" (as the uneducated sometimes ungrammati- nobis...
...It is a word infinitely dread most is getting very sick and dying...
...At least he must pay under those circumstances...
...Among his might be," she writes when first insinuating the point, publications in the area of medical ethics are Fabricated Man: "that those who opt for life on any terms have never The Ethics of Genetic Control and The Patient as Person: known life in its fullest terms...
...Nicky or the four other children again, never to go to "Would it really be worthwhile to spend a month or Needwood again, or laugh with friends, or see the spring more cooped up all alone in a laminar flow room, losing again...
...and Alsop wondered why they don't have Japanese beetles against which nothing works at Needwood...
...for the views of some theologians that the whole creation To understand death to be always an alien power groans and is in travail, and must needs be included in does not mean that it is sensed to crouch and lurk the final Redemption-if there is one...
...The constant tribute to his wife Tish is not for Alsop, of course, was a lucky man...
...Alsop converses, as it Marya Mannes...
...Bernard Bosanquet) alike have meant by saying can only talk about it when it is over...
...Again while reading, there was "a sort of con20 September 1974: 498 tinual background music-or rather background caco- I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker...
...Alternatively and behind every door...
...Such people often take death in stride with ment in what John Donne called "Death's Duell...
...author's report (her rightful distaste this time made The "fact" that death comes to everyone in time obexplicit in parentheses) of a nursing home supervisor viously was no replacement for and was little assistance who "said tartly, 'Y' know, they keep on living, they in Alsop's own task of dying...
...So Alsop thinks of his children: flow room (where the air comes in one way and goes while glad that none of his boys has been in war, he out the other, and most of the patients do likewise), wonders whether they may not have missed something he writes, "I think I'd choose the pills...
...Suddenly silence, "and then I knew I wouldn't see the roses next year...
...foreseeably so without a sound understanding of the "Beneath the isolation and superficiality he felt sup- human that can be either enhanced or violated by at pressed in [Tolstoy writes] because those who came to least some opinions or actions in the realm of sexuality...
...That's a fair proof that neither true life nor Many a contemporary view of life and death en- real dying has been the instructor...
...Concerning you and that in the case of death in the end "they" the latter alternative to chemotherapy and the laminar are going to succeed...
...Alsop...
...Astonishingly, examples of the alternative devised for There was also a musical metaphor that seemed the groundlings are Youville, a Roman Catholic Hospi- appropriate to Alsop's experience-but it was not, as tal in Cambridge, Mass...
...Sometimes it receded almost to invasive...
...He came terrible" (from John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, even to believe that he could tell his own symptoms for Alsop thought...
...Hunting and fishing were joyful activities of God the Father interceding for him as she once did to Stewart Alsop, sports without which he believed his with Franklin Delano Roosevelt!], please Father, Please children are missing something...
...cally say for "taught") to be good for him...
...movement (confusedly, that means active or passive, Fields), with "Uncle Thanatos," once with "dear old and even the use of pain-relieving drugs...
...He called himself and was called "Dr...
...A musical help him be a part of life as long as he is with us...
...There was nothing itself was good or could have been timely...
...Not simply a self-centered collection of lesson-and there are others-exacts a high tuition, the specific memories: "He had been little Vanya, with toys, highest tuition exacted over all the earth...
...out / They crawl all over your face and snout / They There was nothing whatsoever about death that in make a helluva mess of you...
...If our lives have seemed Dickinson...
...Not Tish or the children or their home in the country or the roses or the generations of an old and knows the answers and there are none given in the back honored Connecticut Yankee family until now close to of the book...
...just cling on . . .' (as if this were a nuisance, like All along, of course, there is a remarkable "disincontinence...
...and While his first reaction was to pounce upon a single the Hospice to be built in New Haven under the lead- ominous phrase in his doctor's report of the results of ership of Florence Wald...
...the thought of death was more easeful, and far less Having written that in a letter to a friend, Alsop began terrible than it had been...
...The sense fear of death...
...whether the term encompasses all possible answers to The death of him who is the center of all that world of such questions, or only some, "euthanasia" is the name worth-and, not to be sentimental, let us add the cessafor judgments concerning comparative indignities...
...he could see, reduced by those about him to the level The same outlook and program addressed to "the last of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident taboo" can only lead eventually and logically to the (as if someone entered a drawing room diffusing an un- same thing: to "calisthenic dying," i.e...
...most of us "fear single action...
...Conlater observes that in many disguises "the fear leaps solation and commonality in the human condition were, out, every fourth page or so, from my notebooks...
...pulse in Alsop toward an elite of courageous free spirits Of course, from time to time in the experience of in contrast to other miserables on earth in regard to encountering the prospect of his own dying, Alsop dying, such as we saw in Mannes...
...That policy was foredoomed to failure, and of the same insights...
...him an irreparable loss, on unquenchable grief, the threat A "better death" would be better to say than a "good of all threats, a dread that is more than all fears aggredeath...
...His is a simple, and more marrow...
...Mannes can write that "the name of the oratorio they may have in some ways the better part, and we is euthanasia"-thus banishing with a phrase all engage- the worse...
...and in saying that "those who give us the most profound here we come to the crux of the book...
...nor for him direct reflection of the quality of life...
...That, indeed, stance of "a rational man," if not the stance of these spells the end of "intensive care" for the dying...
...what I of death, name not death to me...
...That Caius-man in the abstract-was mortal was withstand dissolution in this civilization any more than perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract sexual relations between human embodied persons withman, but a creature quite separate from all others...
...and observes, "In trying to kill you"-after which "an unhappy inner fact, chloroform might be appropriate as soon as a stolidity takes over...
...perhaps "the privacy so dear to the her statement that "dying is merely suspension within a civilized and economically secure has, in banishing commystery" seems calculated to induce vertigo in face of munal ritual and common experience, made acceptance a fascinating abyss in prospect...
...but there is a time to die," the book concludes...
...it not from some philosophy of life and death more To the misleading or falsifying term "euthanasia," the profound than that which unfolds the banner of "death expression "death with dignity" adds only cosmetics and with dignity," Stewart Alsop was being "learned" by Commonweal: 501 the final "indignity of death" (if anything, that is too Why, separate from all others...
...dumb or because death is no evil but because-as in From that question Alsop went deeper to ask himself war-"the bravest men were rarely intellectuals or sen- another...
...my mind-an essential art for one in fear of deathYet, if I have not entirely misread this book, they are and the background music became almost inaudible second-best...
...she believes Uncle Thanatos...
...He was aware of the need for "papering over pose, is one thing past theologians and philosophers misery," that "a man can't be afraid all the time" and (e.g...
...What so precious was at stake in ex- be solved...
...Can human beings be utterly desensitized and cepting his death from the visitation of those "lies en- then reconstructed in their attitudes toward death-at acted over him" that had first to remove the taste of it...
...live miserable lives are 'rational.' " A rather condeThe word "rights" in the title says it all...
...pose that lesser clods cling to life because they are lesser...
...I glorify thee above all: six children would not exist," he writes...
...The woman had learned to live with the did the "disease" of dying "declare" itself...
...It questioned background music, subdued or cacophonous, and that Stewart Alsop...
...ing presence, lecturing the fishes and the birds on the Most of the time, like Alsop in an acute sense, one is "naturalness" of dying...
...The abundant ternative...
...He is one of the attitude toward that tenacity (not toward the misery few non-professionals elected to membership in the Institute as such) as morally second-rate...
...got sick, how much the war had meant to me...
...Even the one "personally" involved is the impersonal pronoun "one" and not quite yet "I myself...
...Even if not quantifiable along a scale, the centers of political power or the world-historical significomparands (if, there is such a word) are on the same cance of doing columns for Newsweek or getting briefplane...
...She mani- insights into death are those who have most fully lived fests more than a little "over-againstness" in relation the life of the spirit: the creators among us...
...It remains to be seen whether trepidation, awe mortal, therefore Caius is mortal...
...that "helps to prepare you to face death when you "Perhaps I'd simply refuse to take chemotherapy and are old...
...But it will...
...He thinks of the . conare "people" on the other side who are trying to kill venience of an overdose of sleeping pills...
...The brightest, the best and truly brave again...
...If he knew dying," however, is very often a fitting expression...
...To a perception of the "odd sense of unreality: that it was my death we were discussing," he adds an additional layer of consciousness: "This is a most interesting experience," he twice observes, "although one wishes one were not so personally involved...
...They may have missed finding out more wonders whether so: ". . . When you're near death about themselves...
...There is a constant poem": "The worms crawl in and the worms crawl sense of uneasiness...
...We will universalizable, functional relation: ". . . When sick never surrender...
...Alsop gained both in solidarity with humankind Alternatives and in appreciation for the uniqueness of his own and others' individual existence...
...Pre-death morti- In the full scope of her book, veneration for the free cians" are telling us how to "manage death" so as to spirits and the creators among us turns into an elitist avoid facing that threatening, bracing Other...
...We will fight in the peripheral blood...
...But I put John's remark out of for the dying that exist in the modern Western world...
...least operationally toward the deaths of the uselessIvan Ilych had always been persuaded of the correct- according to the requirements of instrumental social raness of the logical syllogism, "Caius is a man, man is tionalism...
...In the mo- scending and contemptible attitude, I should say, toward ment and mood of insisting on rights, one is hardly the miserable among earth's persevering inhabitants...
...Rather like Stewart such "socialization...
...Stay of Execution is a remarkable personal taste of the hospital attendant who cheerily described document, a rich heritage of wisdom for his family and a patient who "said just yesterday, 'I want to die,' friends and for the rest of us who read it with some and then right away, 'Can 1 have two eggs...
...today or tomorrow?-with the medical details muring music rising to a cacophony and then receding and manner of dying filled in...
...That "A man who knows his life is in danger...
...that life is a "vale of soul making...
...That Therefore the reader should reevaluate earlier vig- time has not yet come for me...
...We continue to call suicide 'irrational,"' instruction in facing death as an alien power...
...Not simply assertedly no abstracrepeatable, non-interchangeable significance of an indi- tion...
...What matters to a dying patient is simply "how far he is away from death...
...and even in the "horrid little not feel at all well in my skin...
...or the sensitivity to death's tuition for the still living...
...instinctively formed feeling is quite enough to provide a foundation tries to better the odds...
...These alternatives are mov- a test, he found he could turn the music down...
...The Rather more to the point for Alsop were T.S...
...Eliot's grim Instructor was "learning" Stewart Alsop a thing lines: or two...
...I reached out my hand for Tish's...
...DEATH'S PEDAGOGY PAUL RAMSEY The assault on the last taboo As a teacher, death is a stern disciplinarian...
...Ecclesiastes' talk about the "times" gain.enwasted or futile, death is more reprieve than reprimand," trance as only a reference in the last lines of Alsop's the author writes just before introducing her own remarkable account of his own Stay of Execution "Living Will" with its specification of many conditions (J...
...the more death is an and touch...
...span here ending by the dreadful verdict of death...
...or better still his country home to But one has first of all to bring into view the awfulness him, and Tish and his children...
...We will fight in the bone to the approaching death...
...It should bothered by the sword of Damocles she must have be wholly jettisoned from all our talk about death and known was hanging over her," not because she was dying...
...There came upon me a terrible sense of alonemy hair and my flesh, either to die in the room or to ness, of vulnerability, of nakedness, of helplessness...
...Alsop's dependent variables have nothing sion of his personal stance toward the Enemy: "We to do with richness of life or with a "timeliness" ascribed will fight amongst the platelets...
...There was no smell of death in this place audibility, and then sometimes it would come blaring where it claimed many, so soon...
...want to be so "rational"-or in that way rational...
...She squeezed my hand and said nothing...
...Only compassion, and back, accompanied by a sense of incredibility, 'My God, recognition long withheld...
...mortality" or Jay Lifton's "surrogates for immortality" Only the grim Reaper "learns us" that...
...didn't interest us...
Vol. 100 • September 1974 • No. 21
