A wonderful book
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL WIMPS John Garvey A WONDERFUL BOOK DAN CALLAHAN ON DEATH ¦ know Daniel Callahan but until I read The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality (Simon & Schuster, 1993)1 had...
...It still remains only half the story of our lives, however...
...We cannot have our dreams live on forever, even if we can achieve them for a time...
...This book became my Lenten reading—not on purpose, but the accident was a fortunate one...
...Could we bear death better if life were perfect...
...Cal lahan chal lenges a lot of modern assumptions, both medical and philosophical, and his discussion toward the end of the book of the ways in which treatment may be limited will provoke controversy...
...We no less hate death because it is the final, the crowning, reminder once and for all that we are finite, bounded creatures...
...OF SEVERAL WIMPS John Garvey A WONDERFUL BOOK DAN CALLAHAN ON DEATH ¦ know Daniel Callahan but until I read The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality (Simon & Schuster, 1993)1 had not read any of his books...
...Probably not...
...What we make of inevitability is essential here...
...Only by confronting the ancient questions honestly will we be able to deal wisely with the medical and political questions which are currently the subject of debate...
...It does not...
...3. The richest self is not one that seeks an optimal stage ot life but that is protean enough to cope with every stage, whatever it brings...
...There are a couple of areas with which believers will find it necessary to disagree—for example the idea that "meaning can be created and it is of our nature to do just that"—but Callahan notes the disagreement of Paul Ramsey with this approach to death...
...There is grief over death which no human agency can alleviate...
...At another point he writes "Whatever meaning we find in our dying and death must come from within ourselves, though we may and probably will, of course, draw upon religious and other traditions for help...
...We cannot stop things from going wrong, however much we dedicate ourselves to control...
...The Troubled Dream o\' Lije explores these ideas and their implications, and moves from the philosophical to the practical with remarkable ease but not glibness at all...
...Nothing I have read recently is so honest about our lives as limited and mortal, or as helpful about what the consequences of that understanding should be...
...We see death at the end of the road in our lives, but it is forever foreshadowed in living our daily lives...
...There is a valuable and necessary grace in the capacity to be dependent upon others, to be open to their solicitude, to be willing to lean upon their strength and compassion...
...Ramsey wrote...
...Where Callahan is divided or ambivalent, where thinking could legitimately take us along two divergent paths, he is honest about the ambivalence...
...The latter may just feel better, and surely flatters us more...
...We hate death, I believe, because it means the end of the life that has given us what we have, and what we can become...
...In both these cases, the assumption is that human beings create meaning and meaning sometimes finds itself enshrined communally in religion but is, even there, a human creation...
...The pain of separation from life would be all the greater...
...director of the Hastings Center and a former editor of Commonweal, has written a profoundly important book, which looks not only at the social politics we bring to the question of death and the rights of the dying, but at the most ancient and central question of all: What does the fact of death say about lite...
...This latter is his own view...
...It is a profound error to think that we are somehow lessened as persons because dependency will happen to us, as if that condition itself necessarily robbed us of some crucial part of the self...
...We cannot have everything we want in life...
...To be a self is to live with the perpetual tension of dependence and interdependence...
...The former is as much a part of us as the latter...
...to be endured...
...and about the kinds of people we should be...
...1993) he explores five ideas, all of which, he says, he believes are true: 1. Self-respect and integrity need not, and ideally ought not, to be grounded in a capacity to control our lives and mortality...
...But what is within us will have been profoundly formed 9 by those traditions, or they will not be of much help at all...
...It is our human condition that is the problem, of which death is the great token...
...5. There is no inherent relationship between a control of one's death and the dignity of that death...
...His opposition to euthanasia is entirely persuasive and rigorously thought through: the chapter on euthanasia is the best single piece of writing I've seen on the subject...
...In a fine chapter...
...10...
...Callahan's questions challenge our society's myth of autonomy and independence as the greatest goods: "Why can we not bear a self-understanding that would seem to make us less than our own creations, our own possessions...
...4. Human beings will and must be a burden on one another: the flight from dependency is a flight from humanity...
...But only the token...
...Callahan asks questions about death that go to the heart of what it means to be alive: "How should I want to live in order that I may die well...
...Callahan notes the force of the argument that death is more than "a part of life, to be accepted, and the grief that goes with it...
...Living with the Mortal Self," (see Commonweal July 16...
...These assumptions, however, are far from the center of the book...
...2. Pain and suffering can make life a misery, but an obsession to manage and be relieved of them can corrupt us...
Vol. 121 • April 1994 • No. 8
