Death and Therapy

...The Buddha and Socrates and Jesus all saw something deeply significant in the dread we have of death...

...The Thorn B i r d s COLLEEN McCULLOUGH Harper & Row, $9.95 STEVEN KROLL By now almost everyone will have heard of The Thorn Birds...

...That "us" sounds like the papal "we...

...In addition, he deals with such issues as the pros and cons of the "living will," legal definitions of death, the responsibility of doctors, the rights of patients, and public policy considerations...

...I don't...

...Mack moves from the particular to the universal carefully, defending each step along the way, and thus never loses DEATH AND THERAPY JOHN GARVEY A few people I know say they are actually looking forward to death...

...Finally, I suppose the thanatology craze bothers me for the same reason a lot of pop psychology does...

...At least this is one danger...

...There have been the Patrick Whites, the Thomas Keneallys, the Sumner Locke to find evidence, or at least strong hints...

...It has been widely reviewed, and Becker's belief that virtually every human activity is a response to our continual need to evade the fact of dying is an important one, to say the least...

...The method of Moody's book is extremely vague, a fact which is defended on the grounds that we are still cautiously making our way into this realm...

...It is not the end of the physical body which should worry us . . . . Death is the final stage of growth in this life...

...Veatch handles a number of extremely difficult questions with extraordinary sensitivity, and his chapters on the choice not to prolong dying and the right to refuse treatment are espeI cially strong...

...All of this is enough to send any aspiring writer straight to the typewriter...

...It's particularly interesting because the author is unknown--she's published one earlier novel, Tim, that didn't sell--and because both she and her book are Australian...

...It is as if you die and find, not heaven, but Peoria...

...Mack's A Prince of Our Disorder and Mazlish's own earlier work on James and John Stuart Mill embody the prodigious labors of many years...

...A more recent book, more limited in focus than Becker but essential for anyone interested in the ethical implications of the new awareness of death and dying, is Robert M. Veatch's Death, Dying, and The Biological Revolution (Yale, $12.95...

...But in the end we are told, "There is no need to be afraid of death...

...One strength of Mack's study is its meticulous grounding in the rich particularity of a single life lived in a historic time and place, enmeshed in a dense web of social relationships...

...The dying people were there to teach people who tend to talk about death far too easily...

...Well, as presented here it is in fact unscientific, and as to clerical dissent I can only say that most of the people who have recommended Moody's book to me (as well as her own work) are priests, nuns, and ministers, who find this kind of writing reassuring...

...stopped and then started again dead, in any meaningful sense, and the fact that none of these subjects experienced brain death (which is increasingly the clinically accepted standard) is certainly important...

...at the same time, he will not make anti-euthanasia fundamentalists happy...

...Certainly more research will be done in this area, and it might be reassuring to some people to know that a. peaceful death may not be as dreadful as they thought...

...If they had, of course, they could not have come back to tell the t a l e - - b u t this is part of my point...

...I must be somewhere in between...

...There is no total death...

...To take the problem of structure first: the interviews in On Death and Dying occurred in the context of a seminar in which dying patients were invited to talk to theology students, for the benefit of the latter...

...Death: The Final Stage of Growth (Prentice-Hall, $2.95) was edited by Dr...

...My reasons are mixed...

...But is my comfort the sole thing at issue...

...A human being" doesn't die, but I, or you...

...it is in fact basic to the doctriz/e being born here, a doctrine which shows up again in Death: The Final Stage of Growth, a title which looks for the silver lining if ever a title did...

...The problem is not that Mazlish is wrong that revolutionary ascetics are individuals who have "displaced libido" onto such abstract ideals as humanity, The Revolution, or The Rights of Man, and are therefore incapable of loving "real" people, including their own families...

...we shall see him, then, as he is...

...They feel sure that it will be wonderful, presumably because their faith presents them with a belief in an afterlife which is much better than this life, or because their current existence is miserable enough to make death seem a relief, whatever it invalves...

...one of the million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever...

...Kiibler-Ross and includes several good essays on the institutional, religious, and psychological aspects of dying...

...Only the body dies...

...But attempts at reassurance are something else again, and could lead us to believe that we can somehow control our deaths...

...it /s beginning to be a school, even having its form of the old imprimaturwin this case, approval in the form of an introduction or recommendation by Dr...

...It hardly survives a good night's sleep at this point, and it seems foolhardy to suppose that death will be easier...

...The book has all the earmarks of a rushed job...

...Ktibler-Ross's On Death and Dying (Macmillan, $2.45) is one of those breakthrough books, the kind of writing which makes a major difference in the ordinary regard people have for a common but mysterious thing, which death certainly is...

...How the decision-makers at Harper & Row-the trade chief, the marketing director, the subsidiary rights director--took the manuscript home for the weekend and realized they had to go all out...

...Could dying become similarly institutionalized7 This has been seriously recommended...

...Mazlish's analysis fails to be as compelling as it might in part because he has molded his "evidence" too neatly into his three-part model of the revolutionary ascetic, a model he claims to derive from a rather mechanical "synthesis" of Max Weber and Sigmund Freud...

...It takes questions which have moved philosophers, poets~ and prophets to real depths, and reduces them all to questions of therapy...

...Jesus's weeping at Lazarus's death and his dread at Gethsemane have more to do with what death is and will remain for human beings than the less than honest counsel to "interpret this in any way that makes you comfortable...

...On the whole the trend has been healthier than the mentality which prevailed for years, and still hangs on in those doctors and relatives who refuse to tell dying patients the truth about this most important moment of their lives...

...Ernest Becker's The Denial o/ Death (Free Press/Macmillan, $2.95) is one of the good death books...

...In the theology seminar the death professionals are already potentially present, ready to tell us how to feel, and when to...

...How Colieen McCullough wrote it at the rate of fifteen thousand words a night, once did thtrty thousand in a sitting, finally produced a manuscript of a thousand pages weighing ten pounds...

...What about the truth...

...Bruce Mazlish's The Revolutionary Ascetic is a less successful book than Mack's Lawrence...

...So far, so good (but I begin to see the hand of Woody Allen when Dr...

...mbut there are problems with it, as with any orthodoxy, and as with any orthodoxy they come down to problems with structure and doctrine...

...It is a long way downhill, morally and intellectually, from Crito to this...

...This sentimentality is not accidental...

...Mazlish, however, does the opposite...

...Death still is the ultimate helplessness, the thing before which we are absolutely powerless...

...The author's statement that the dying people were teachers isn't entirely false, but like the statement that teachers learn from their students, it isn't entirely true either...

...I don't want to make light of what is in many ways an important achievement...

...Veatch's book is subtitled "Our Last Quest for Responsibility," and it is hard to imagine a more responsible treatment...

...But we know that when he comes we shall be like him...

...In Li/e A/ter Li/e (Bantam, $1.95) Raymond Moody, M.D., summarizes the experiences of approximately 150 people who either died (in the sense that their hearts stopped beating) or came very close to death...

...Would the Socrates of Crito find it reassuring to be told about the "being of light...

...He begins with a schematic, inadequately developed global "ideal type," the revolutionary ascetic, and then proceeds to "plug in" particular revolutionaries like Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin and Mao...

...perhaps oxygen deprivation or the closing down of brain cells explains some of these things: I don't know (and I don't think anyone does), but in any case no strong conclusions can be drawn from Moody's book, which comes with a blurb from Richard Bach of Jonathan Livingston Seagull fame, and a foreword by Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross...

...Illich has told the story of a panicky attendant at a birth who tried to push the head of a baby being born back into the mother--the objection being that the baby could not be born until the doctor arrived, until the professional presence validated the moment of birth...

...KiiblerRoss is pushing this notion...

...Part of me is agnostic about what happens at death, but another part hopes at least for something more interesting than this...

...Who can object to making death a permissible word...

...Almost without exception they found the experience reassuring, and time and time again they speak of such things as a "being of light" who is there as a beneficent presence, along with dead friends and relatives who welcome them...

...Kiibler-Ross's experience with dying people, who were asked to speak freely about what they were going through, and her detailing of the stages of the dying person's response to impending death has since become classic...

...I am afraid that the same thing cannot be said about the books produeed by the Elizabeth Kiibler-Ross school...

...In other words, ';vith professionals, or with people whose professional training makes them professionally sensitive...

...Mazlish's psychological evidence and account of the lives of his revolutionaries relies heavily on secondary sources and is anecdotal and nonspecific...

...Veatch has some important criticisms of the "death with dignity" movement, which, as he points out, might involve a contradiction in terms...

...Commonweat: 473...

...Not that there is anything deceptive or false about Moody, but what he has found---or at least his interpretation of his findings--makes him credulous at times, as he is, for example, in discussing the later stages of death described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, "which none of my subjects has gone so far as to experience...

...One is that these books simply do not make death less mysterious or frightening to me...

...So much of her approach is Commonweal: 471 sight of his subject...

...Mack argues convincingly that Lawrence's heroism, coupled as it was with critical self-restraint, a unique capacity to empathize with others, and an inability to justify killing with facile appeals to the "national interest" provide us with a model of the anguished (because self-aware and critical) contemporary hero, the "man with a load on his mind...

...You may interpret this in any way which makes you comfortable...

...I have that hope, and have no idea what dying will be like...

...Better than speaking of people who "pass," like kidney stones, "from this world to the next...

...One can and should prepare for death, and its constant reminder that we are contingent beings is necessary to any wisdom...

...Klibler-Ross hails Li/e Alter Li/e as a "courageous" book, and braces Moody to prepare for criticism from clergy, who will, she says, resent his explorations into a subject which they believe to be taboo, and from scientists who will call his work "unscientific...

...The conclusion to On Death and Dying, in most ways a very decent book, is dreadfully sentimental...

...Kiibler-Ross...

...Not that Dr...

...22 luly 1977:472 What about the particular person, or the unpeaceful death...

...This is reassuring only as long as all you need is reassurance...

...There are several reasons why this is so and a comparison of the two books points to weaknesses in Mazlish's approach...

...Ivan Illieh has had a lot of good things to say about the dangers of professionalism, especially the sort which attends the most basic and sacred moments of birth and death...

...I have reservations about calling someone whose heart has...

...and the doctrine extends itself dramatically in Life After Life...

...But the rather breezy casualness of Mazlish's analysis, capped by a concluding chapter that poses a series of superficial historic "ifs" in ten dizzying pages, is neither convincing nor even particularly interesting...

...There has been an avalanche of death books, some of them very good...

...How the Literary Guild snapped it up as their June selection and, in an incredible auction among paperback publishers, Avon Books paid a recordsetting $1.9 million for the paperback reprint rights...

...Up until now, selling fiction about Australia in America has been like trying to sell chocolate cake for breakfast...

...But her thought and her method have contributed to the possibility of professionalizing death...

...My other criticism is an esthetic one...

...Ktibler-Ross reassures us that "one of our patients had died during an interview...

...I have a hunch that it will not involve the survival of whatever it is I think of as myself, and that my "self-image" (to use the current happy jargon) will be among the first things to flicker away...

...The highly persOnal mode of leadership assumed by Lawrence towards those he "enabled" contains within it, Mack argues, a critique of traditional styles of military leadership and modes of heroism linked to an easy justification of killing and violence...

...In fact at the beginning of On Death and Dying she speaks of the death of a farmer in his own home, with his family and friends nearby, in a completely healthy, non-professional manner: this is a good death, she says, and rightly...

...In addition, they have "out of the body" experiences in which a kind of non-corporeal duplicate of the meatier self hovers over the deathbed scene...

...We have to accept the a priori statements of the authors that the self is eternal, and so forth, and that for this reason there i-s no need to fear...

...This may all be true...

...The accounts of death here sound, frankly, a little corny and disappointing, like the grey world described by spiritualists who speak confidently of "the other side...

...Here the Kiibler-Ross school claims unfolding of an analysis, which produces psychobiographies that genuinely enhance our understanding of human lives in history...

...The self or spirit, or whatever you may wish to label it, is eternal...

...I men~tion this because of all the books published during the past few years which have hauled death out of the closet, but in the process felt the I need to dress death up a little, put him in a leisure suit or a doctor's white coat...

...The doctrine is found in seedling form in the last chapter of On Death and Dying: "Watching the peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star...

...There were presuppositions hanging around the idea from the start, one of them being that death can be dealt with, and that the proper dealing-with depends upon a proper attitude and therefore with proper people...

...I wonder whether there isn't too much generalizing here...

...On Death and Dying grew from Dr...

...It is that kind of care alone, not unlike the organic valuable and moving that you feel almost ogre-ish saying anything bad about it, especially because it is fast becoming an orthodoxy, one which travels under absolutely humane auspices (who can possibly object to making death easier...

...He considers Lawfence a paradigmatic example of the "enabler," the person who enables ~thers to see possibilities they would not otherwise have seen and to dare deeds they would not otherwise have dared...

...My hope is confined to John the Evangelist's statement that "what we shall be hereafter has not been made known as yet...

...who therefore reject their social ties and their own pasts and thereby come to represent to others a new "ego ideal...

...I know others who fear death because they think of it (not, after all, unreasonably) as the end, obliteration...

...Even MGM could do it better...