After the extraordinary reception to the Beloved Professor Delivering His Last Lecture Jeffrey Zaslow teamed up with Randy Pausch to co-write the new book,
"The Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow)
Zaslow reports that Pausch is finding more difficult to say goodbye to his family than he did to his colleagues at work.
Zaslow asks "When death is near, how do we show our love?" in A Final Farwell
For many of us, his lecture has become a reminder that our own futures are similarly -- if not as drastically -- brief. His fate is ours, sped up.
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People wrote about how his lecture had inspired them to spend more time with loved ones, to quit pitying themselves, or even to shake off suicidal urges. Terminally ill people said the lecture had persuaded them to embrace their own goodbyes, and as Randy said, "to keep having fun every day I have left, because there's no other way to play it."
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Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him--
"Well, you also need emotional insurance," the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy's time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.
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Randy also made a point of talking to people who lost parents when they were very young. They told him they found it consoling to learn about how much their mothers and fathers loved them. The more they knew, the more they could still feel that love. To that end, Randy built separate lists of his memories of each child. He also has written down his advice for them, things like: "If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, 'Tell the truth.' If I got three more words, I'd add, 'All the time.' "
The advice he's leaving for Chloe includes this: "When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do." Chloe, not yet 2 years old, may end up having no memory of her father. "But I want her to grow up knowing," Randy said, "that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her."
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As he later explained it: "I am maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying. But at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living."
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And so despite all his goodbyes, he has found solace in the idea that he'll remain a presence. "Kids, more than anything else, need to know their parents love them," he said. "Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen."
The Last Lecture website.
Cross-posted at Legacy Matters.
For many years, the renowned European oncologist Sylvie Menard was a supporter of euthanasia. Now that she's contracted bone cancer, she's changed her mind.
Menard told the magazine that she always believed that each person should decide his own fate, but ‘when I became ill, I changed my position radically.”
“When you get sick, death ceases to be something virtual and becomes something that is with you every day,” she said. “So you say to yourself: ‘I am going to do everything possible to live as long as possible.”
Menard, who is married and has one son, acknowledged, “Today anything that means a new chance at life is valuable to me.”
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She said that those who promote euthanasia do so for two reasons: they don’t want to suffer and they don’t want to lose self-sufficiency, thus becoming a burden for others.
She agreed that people who are ill “do not want to experience pain” and that “they have a right to alleviate it”. She also emphasized that “pain therapy has advanced considerably in recent years.”
“Even if you do not have complete use of your faculties and you cannot get up because you are confined to bed, but you still have the affection of your family members, in my opinion, even in those conditions, it’s worth it to keep living,” she said.
One third of all federal spending on health care is spent caring for elderly people in the final two years of life.
One reason, I believe, we spend so much is a societal denial of the inevitability of death. When most people now die in hospitals, it's natural to think that death is a medical failure.
"When you're looking at end-of-life care, too often the care that is delivered is simply a shotgun approach: This person is really sick, so let's try this, this, this, and this," said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Massachusetts' health secretary. "People don't understand the limits of technology and providers don't, in a way that is understandable to people, discuss the risks and benefits of certain interventions.
"We are operating in an era where for the most part, the public thinks that consuming more healthcare is better for your health, and that's simply not true."
End-of-life care costlier in Boston
I do not think that government regulations can solve this problem unless there is a rationing of care for the elderly. An elderly person should be able to get whatever medical treatment he needs or she wants.
As death approaches, it's usually the family that insists on whatever it takes to help grandma. What grandma wants is the presence of loving family and friends.
Rocco Palmo loves his 93 year-old grandmother who is constantly surrounded by the presence and love of her daughters and other family members; but, when she was hospitalized last Christmas Eve with pneumonia, he saw what was happening in the other hospital rooms.
Walking to Gram's room, I couldn't help but look in the other doors along the way and notice so many patients all alone in their beds, almost writhing with a loneliness and heartbreak you could feel a full ten feet away and almost cut with a knife. In the eeriest of ways, the usually-frenetic hallways felt like a ghost-town, filling the place with a sense of despair, of sadness and pain that was, in a word, brutal, especially given all the lights and celebrations going on in the streets outside and streaming over the TVs.
Thinking about it later, I couldn't help but try to figure out what it was that they were looking for.... And, well, the answer was right there: it might've been 24 December, but in the purest sense of it, they were still waiting for Christmas -- not wrapped gifts, lavish rituals, beautiful music or decorations on trees, but simply the loving, comforting presence of God in a human touch.
Do family members realize that leaving grandpa in the hospital for "whatever it takes" subjects him to tubes and drops and continuous pokes and prods for yet another test, depriving him of what he wants most, the assurance that only a loving human presence can give him? Who wants to die in a hospital if it can be avoided in any way.
Death is a profound mystery. People who have developed a solid Christian faith and who believe in the risen Christ can face death with serenity. Those lacking faith still want loyal companions to accompany them to the gates of death. I wish families would consider hospice soon for their elderly relatives who are terminally ill.
As I learned when my mother was dying and all my brothers and sisters came home to be with her, our time together in her last month was wonderful, full of love and laughter, stories and visitors. Her death was beautiful , at home in her own bed, without tubes, with all the pain medication she needed, surrounded by the children and grandchildren who loved her.
Saved by air trapped in his plastic safety helmet, that plus Buddhist meditation techniques saved the life of Chinese construction worker who was buried alive.
Chinese Man Buried Alive Saved by Air Trapped in His Hat
“I had my back to the wall and didn’t know it was falling until it was on top of me. It was suddenly dark and I realised what had happened and found that there was a small air pocket in front of me,” Mr Wang said. That was when the Buddhist turned to meditation to control his intake of oxygen. “I knew it would not last, so I made myself relax and concentrated on slowing down my breathing by meditation.”
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Doctors were astounded, saying that a person could normally not live longer than five minutes in a similar sealed space. One local doctor said: “It’s a miracle that he’s alive after being buried for two hours.”
After being told that her newborn son had died during a traumatic birth, the mother suffering from blood poisoning, fell into a coma. Yvonne Sullivan was only 28 when she was taken to intensive care where her husband kept vigil for two weeks.
Two weeks in a coma is just about how long you've got with the U.K.'s national health insurance.
The doctors told the husband they might have to switch off the life support machines.
That's when Dominic started berating his wife,
When the doctors told me to think about turning off the life support I got angry," he added. "I grabbed her hand and began shouting at her. I gave her a bloody good rollicking.
You start fighting, don't you dare give up on me now. I've had enough, stop mucking around and start breathing. Come back to me."
"I'd already had to explain to Ryan that his brother Clinton had died, and that his mummy might not survive.
"He said he'd be cross with the doctors if they let mummy go to heaven. I kept telling her to pull through. Then I left the room to get some air."
Two hours later she started breathing on her own, five days later she recovered consciousness.
"I can't remember exactly what he said but I never liked getting told off by Dom," she recalled.
"Something inside me just clicked and I began to fight again.
"I had been on 100 per cent life support and I was deteriorating, but within two hours of him ordering me to get better I'd regained 5 per cent of my breathing.
"When I first came round I'd thought he'd been gone a few minutes, then he told me I'd been out for two weeks. It's a miracle really. I owe him so much."
Coma woman woken by husband's 'rollicking' as doctors were about to switch off life-support machine.
If you are hiking in the woods and come back to your car only to find that your keys are locked inside, pick up a stone and break the window so you can drive away alive.
Sandra Order didn't. She locked her keys in her SUV and died next to it in the cold and the rain of hypothermia.
When two Penn State students dressed themselves as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party, one explained later
"We are notorious and infamous as the state college, and very popular, so we have to do things that push the envelope just for shock value"
Aaron Hanscom thinks its another example of young people treating murder as a victimless crime.
Christina Hoff Sommers, who has taught ethics courses, has written about colleges’ responsibility to provide students with what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called “moral common sense.” Sure, young people hear their professors’ opinions on capital punishment, abortion, stem cell research and, yes, suicide bombings, but “they learn almost nothing about private decency, honesty, personal responsibility, or honor.”
Until they do, we shouldn’t be surprised to see college students dressed up as suicide bombers or shooting victims. After all, one person’s monster is another’s hero who just wanted to go out with a bang.
Well, this is a surprise, the death penalty saves lives. If so, the question than becomes only a moral one.
Rethinking the Death Penalty in The New York Times
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
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“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”
Amy Pickard spent 6 years in a coma until a sleeping pill woke her up.
"When she takes the pill, I see her face relax and the old sparkle return to her eyes. It truly is remarkable," said Mrs Pickard.
She is one of 360 people taking part in a worldwide trial of Zolpidem as a treatment for people in comas. Sixty per cent of patients taking part in the study have started showing signs of life.
More Awakenings
On October 19, only months after being nearly dehydrated to death when his feeding tube was removed, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix on his own two legs. Ramirez is lucky to be alive. Early last June, a mere one week after a serious auto accident left him unconscious, his wife Rebecca and doctors decided he would never recover and pulled his feeding tube. He went without food and water for five long days. But then his mother, Theresa, represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, successfully took Rebecca to court demanding a change of guardianship on the grounds that Rebecca and Jesse's allegedly rocky marriage disqualified her for the role.
The judge ordered that Jesse be temporarily rehydrated and nourished. Then Jesse regained consciousness. Now, instead of dying by dehydration, he will receive rehabilitation and get on with his life--all because his mother rejected the reigning cultural paradigm that a life with profound cognitive dysfunction is not worth living.
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In this climate, Jesse Ramirez-type stories can become more numerous, yet still barely penetrate the public consciousness. Increasingly, we hear about sustenance being withdrawn within days of a serious brain injury. And now that these helpless people are deemed dehydratable, there is a growing clamor in the professional journals to transform them into natural resources to be exploited like a corn crop--as sources of vital organs and subjects for experimentation. To show how far this line of thinking has already gone, bioethicists writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics recently advocated transplanting pig organs into people diagnosed with PVS to determine the safety and efficacy of xenotransplantation (the transplantation of animal organs into human patients).
Be careful who you give your health care proxy to, especially if you are in a rocky marriage.
Channing Moss was impaled through the abdomen with a rocket-propelled grenade and left on the verge of death in Afghanistan.
His fellow soldiers, a helicopter crew and a medical team would risk their lives to save his.
An extraordinary story Do or Die via Technicalities
“It was an extremely unusual set of events. He should have died three times that day,” said Maj. John Oh, 759th Forward Surgical Team general surgeon.
Three months after the attack, Moss attended the birth of his second daughter, Ariana.
He expects to be discharged from the Army on medical disability by October.
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“I don’t think there has been a day in the last year and a half that I haven’t thought about them, that I haven’t prayed for them. They saved my life,”
I predict this won't be the first. A doctor with the power of life and death, prescribe the latter
Surgeon charged with trying to hasten patient's death
A San Francisco transplant surgeon was criminally charged Monday with excessively prescribing drugs to a 25-year-old disabled man last year to hasten his death and harvest his organs more quickly.
The felony charges are believed to be the first against a physician for his role in a transplant.
Is there life after death? Eternity for Atheists?
Reports The New York Times, some very good scientists are saying yes, arguing that the signal continues even after the radio is broken.
Each of us, Leslie submits, is immortal because our life patterns are but an aspect of an “existentially unified” cosmos that will persist after our death.
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The mind or “soul,” as they see it, consists of information, not matter. And one of the deepest principles of quantum theory, called “unitarity,” forbids the disappearance of information.
If you try to prevent a friend from driving home drunk and the friend ignores you, don't hang on to the car window, or like this poor fellow Louis Wiederner, you could end up being dragged along until you lose you grip and fall under the wheels to your death.
New York Man Trying to Stop Girlfriend from Driving Drunk Run Over, Killed
Jay Steiner, 60, a retired nurse, who lives near the scene, rushed to the man's aid.
"Oh, my God," Steiner recalled Vega telling him. "Don't tell me I just killed my fiance."
Says Maggie Chapman, now a widow, about her husband Nick, 51, who refused to see a doctor despite terrible stomach pains. He died of pancreatic cancer, which if discovered earlier may have been treatable.
Man who was killed keeping a stiff lip.
I say again, if you don't take care of your body where will you live?
Teen-agers feel invulnerable and often go too far to look good. I mean, who in the right mind, would use a tanning bed twice a day. That is apart from George Hamilton.
Zita started doing just that when she was 14, giving them up when she was 21. But already that was too late.
Last August she found a mole on her leg and was diagnosed with melanoma. Doctors who treated her said they believed the excessive use of sunbeds caused her cancer.
Nine months later she was dead, just three days before her daughter's first birthday.
Her partner Phil said that the sunbeds had destroyed the family's life.
Tanorexic young mother dies of skin cancer after seven years of sunbeds.
I would have posted more frequently during my mother's last days if only the server which hosts my blogs had not migrated and upgraded to a new server and address causing all sorts of problems getting the blogging software to work and appear. I did write several posts that never appeared because I hadn't realized that I had such a problem for several days.
I didn't have the wherewithal to take the time to get help and figure out how to fix it. After all, my mother was dying.
We hear so much of horrific and painful deaths that it's hard to imagine death can be beautiful. Yet, such was my experience of my mother's death. She was in her own house, in her own bed, surrounded by love. Every one of us believe that it was a great privilege to be with her and with each other, our bond as a family greatly strengthened.
My mother was very independent, used to doing things the way she wanted. She didn't want chemotherapy, she didn't want to be in a hospital. Too often, elderly people fall, break a hip and end up in a hospital where they are poked, prodded and fitted with all sorts of tubes and IVs and other devices to preserve life for a few more days. But if you have cancer and know that you will die if you do not treat it, hospice is an extraordinary resource because they are skilled in palliative care, meaning they know what drugs should be given to a dying person to relieve pain, yet keep the mind alert and focused on the life still to live.
Even as she grew more frail and weak, my mother's last days were happy ones, spent receiving visitors, sitting at the dinner table with all of us, taking very short walks outside with someone on each side making sure she didn't fall, watching the leaves, paying her bills, doing her crosswords, and playing with her newest grandchild, 5 month old Adia Moxie. Even as she began sleeping most of the day, too tired to go downstairs even in the elevator, we gathered more in her bedroom and from time to time, she would sit bolt upright and beam at all of us, radiant.
The last five days she was unresponsive, eating nothing, drinking nothing. The hospice nurse put her on a morphine drip and told us she thought she would die Friday. My sister Colleen, a nurse, gave her anti-anxiety medication periodically whenever she saw the slightest indication of a furrow on my mother's brow. She grew tinier in her big bed, her strong heart using every last bit of her substance so she could be with us and us all together in one room just a little bit longer.
Because all of seven children came home to be with her, someone was always with her, reading, saying prayers, playing music or lying down beside her. Downstairs, meals were made, dishes cleared and washed, laundry done, bike trips taken, gardens weeded, flowers planted and beer drunk.
Monday, the last day, my brother Robby brought up my mother's favorite wine, Santa Margarita Pinot Grigio and we all - me, Kevin, Billy, Colleen, Robby, Julie and Melinda toasted our mother and put a tiny drop of wine on her lips, the last thing she tasted.
A few hours later she died. A half hour after that, her mouth relaxed into a smile and we knew she was in heaven.
Over at Legacy Matters, I've posted the eulogy for my motherThis is a hard post to write because the words themselves have a certain finality that's not here yet. My 85-year-old mother last fall had abdominal pains that, after a visit to the emergency room and a CAT scan, turned out to be colon cancer. Surgery followed a couple of days later and we were encouraged to think that the tumor blocking her colon had been completely excised and her colon stitched back together.
Recovery was slow but seemed complete and while she had lost lots of weight despite my cooking, she was back bopping around in her sports car. About a month ago, she began having abdominal pains again. It was the cancer back. She doesn't want chemotherapy at her age which seems to me to be quite sensible, so the focus has been on reducing her pain.
My sister Colleen is a nurse and immediately took medical leave from her job to come out for the duration which she counts as a privilege and a blessing to be able to do since her two daughters, my nieces Jessica and Chrissy are away from home, in college. My brother Kevin, his wife Melinda and two daughters, Taylor and Lucy, live in the same town as my mother as do I just two blocks away. For Mother's Day, Colly's husband Robin came, brother Billy came from Switzerland and brother Robby and his wife Jennifer with their two baby girls, 21/2 and 4 months, Zoe and Adia from California.
We all had a lovely time, my mother included, playing with the babies and looking at old family and childhood photos, about 1200 of them that I had digitized so every one could have a copy and telling stories. Now numbering about 16, we had a delicious Mother's Day lunch at a local restaurant.
In many ways we are very blessed. Mom - we call her Ruth - is completely herself, if much more frail and more tired. She laughs, makes jokes, gives orders, goes through her mail, makes calls, gets her hair done, and is forever putting Vinny her beloved Jack Russell terrier out when he's in and bringing him in when he's out and making sure he gets all three of his dinners. She carried long term care insurance for in-home care because she hates being in the hospital even though she too is a nurse and never wanted to go into a nursing home. Now the benefits are apparent because she's home where she wants to be and Colly is even being paid, making up for some of her lost income. Colly got a new MacBook, put in wireless, got a new bike and is testing some of Ruth's best, baking recipes and I'm going to make a book out if it.
We have an elevator in the house which my parents put in about 15 years ago when my sister Debby, wheel-chair bound with multiple sclerosis, was living at home. So Mom still uses her bedroom and bath but can come down easily to the kitchen, the living room, office and yard during the day. Heat gives her the most tactile relief for her abdominal pains so she sits with a heating pad at her back, holding a hot water bottle against her stomach, a heat sandwich.
Two weeks later it's a different story. Hospice has started and they have been wonderful, delivering my mother's exponentially increasing pain medications, an assigned nurse, Peggy, who visits several times a week to check on her status and making sure we have everything we need. Since Ruth was only eating about 300-500 calories a day, she was becoming even thinner although her pain does seem to be under control.
"Two to four weeks" we were told in one of Colleen's daily emails to all concerned. In just a few days, Robby was back from the West Coast, Billy from Geneva, and Julie, my youngest sister, due in Tuesday.
Her affairs and finances are all in order so there's nothing to be done there. My mother is enjoying lots of visitors, family and friends alike, basking in all the love and banter, sometimes glowing. The weather is beautiful. My brothers have found projects to do around the house and yard. Patty, Colleen's dear friend from Florida is visiting for week and cleaning up gardens, planting the window boxes, and impatiens in every corner. We all eat dinner together that one of us makes or takeout and we have cases of beer in the garage so we'll never run out. These are wonderful times for the family. The loss will come soon enough.
This is the way to go, a vigorous old age and a fast decline, at home surrounded by family and people who love you.
This is a hard post to write because the words themselves have a certain finality that's not here yet. My 85-year-old mother last fall had abdominal pains that, after a visit to the emergency room and a CAT scan, turned out to be colon cancer. Surgery followed a couple of days later and we were encouraged to think that the tumor blocking her colon had been completely excised and her colon stitched back together.
Recovery was slow but seemed complete and while she had lost lots of weight despite my cooking, she was back bopping around in her sports car. About a month ago, she began having abdominal pains again. It was the cancer back. She doesn't want chemotherapy at her age which seems to me to be quite sensible, so the focus has been on reducing her pain.
My sister Colleen is a nurse and immediately took medical leave from her job to come out for the duration which she counts as a privilege and a blessing to be able to do since her two daughters, my nieces Jessica and Chrissy are away from home, in college. My brother Kevin, his wife Melinda and two daughters, Taylor and Lucy, live in the same town as my mother as do I just two blocks away. For Mother's Day, Colly's husband Robin came, brother Billy came from Switzerland and brother Robby and his wife Jennifer with their two baby girls, 21/2 and 4 months, Zoe and Adia from California.
We all had a lovely time, my mother included, playing with the babies and looking at old family and childhood photos, about 1200 of them that I had digitized so every one could have a copy and telling stories. Now numbering about 16, we had a delicious Mother's Day lunch at a local restaurant.
In many ways we are very blessed. Mom -we call her Ruth - is completely herself, if much frailer and more tired. She laughs, makes jokes, gives orders, goes through her mail, makes calls, gets her hair done, and is forever putting Vinny her beloved Jack Russell terrier out when he's in and bringing him in when he's out and making sure he gets all three of his dinners. She carried long term care insurance for in-home care because she hates being in the hospital even though she too is a nurse and never wanted to go into a nursing home. Now the benefits are apparent because she's home where she wants to be and Colly is even being paid, making up for some of her lost income. Colly got a new MacBook, put in wireless, got a new bike and is testing some of Ruth's best, baking recipes and I'm going to make a book out if it.
We have an elevator in the house which my parents put in about 15 years ago when my sister Debby, wheel-chair bound with multiple sclerosis, was living at home. So Mom still uses her bedroom and bath but can come down easily to the kitchen, the living room, office and yard during the day. Heat gives her the most tactile relief for her abdominal pains so she sits with a heating pad at her back, holding a hot water bottle against her stomach, a heat sandwich.
Two weeks later it's a different story. Hospice has started and they have been wonderful, delivering my mother's exponentially increasing pain medications, an assigned nurse, Peggy, who visits several times a week to check on her status and making sure we have everything we need. Since Ruth was only eating about 300-500 calories a day, she was becoming even thinner although her pain does seem to be under control.
"Two to four weeks" we were told in one of Colleen's daily emails to all concerned. In just a few days, Robby was back from the West Coast, Billy from Geneva, and Julie, my youngest sister, due in Tuesday.
Her affairs and finances are all in order so there's nothing to be done there. My mother is enjoying lots of visitors, family and friends alike, basking in all the love and banter, sometimes glowing. The weather is beautiful. My brothers have found projects to do around the house and yard. Patty, Colleen's dear friend from Florida is visiting for week and cleaning up gardens, planting the window boxes, and impatiens in every corner. We all eat dinner together that one of us makes or takeout and we have cases of beer in the garage so we'll never run out. These are wonderful times for the family. The loss will come soon enough.
This is the way to go, a vigorous old age and a fast decline, at home surrounded by family and people who love you.
Last year for a poetry jam I memorized The Mower by Philip Larkin. Today, Eamonn Fitzgerald writes that the horror and tragedy of the Virginia Tech killings drives home the urgency of its command.
The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Bravery is a virtue; helplessness is not.
Long ago, way before 9/11, when airline hijackings were the craze, I thought then and still do that every citizen is a foot soldier in the fight against terror. Most days, I drive through Lexington Center and see the statue of the Minuteman, an ordinary man, ready in a minute to defend home and others.
Still none of us know what we would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun.
Kathy Shadie says
Remember: when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position. At least show a smidgen of bravery and say "I", rather than "we."
I don't know what I would do if faced with a mad killer with a gun.
I like to think that I would be brave, push past my fear, not run away, save lives. You see as a young girl, I grew up on the stories of martyrs, often young girls just like me. When I wasn't playing cowboys and Indians with my best friend Kathy, we played martyr, practicing how to fight back and die well if the Russian Communists ever took over the country. How many children play like that any more?
From Meditation on Death of the Young
The quarterback of the football team was just outside the hall when the shooting began. He said, in an article in the Washington Post, that he
"I couldn't tell whether people were hurt or not, "I was kind of on the move. The whole time, I wasn't really trying to figure what was happening or where the shots were coming from. I was just kind of on the move,
No one made a move to attack the killer or throw something at him. No one.
Did it all happen too fast?
What if they had been warned that a double murder had occurred and a killer was loose on the campus?
Jack Dunphy who's been present at over 1000 shooting scenes in his police career writes
This would have given them the chance to make an informed decision on how best to proceed with the day. After all, the difference between what happened on Flight 93 and on the other doomed flights of 9/11 was that the passengers on Flight 93 had been warned of what awaited them. Had students and faculty at Virginia Tech been told that a murderer may be stalking the campus, some of them might have been alert to the danger and steeled themselves to fend off the killer.
Nathanael Blake asks Where Were the Men?
College classrooms have scads of young men who are at their physical peak, and none of them seems to have done anything beyond ducking, running, and holding doors shut. Meanwhile, an old man hurled his body at the shooter to save others.
Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that.
Dr. Sanity says Feminishness is a Word Whose Time Has Come for a society with too much yin and not enough yang and quotes John Derbyshire, "PC is fem and its consequences are femmer..."
Mark Steyn writes A Culture of Passivity is an existential threat to our society
They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet....it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.
Have we become too passive, too afraid, too nice? Is even the talk of self defense politically incorrect? Where is it decreed we always have to wait for the police or the firemen when lives are in danger?
Michelle Malkin says
You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.
The Anchoress discusses with her son the various ways a random shooter could be taken down in "Throw a desk, a heavy book, make him flinch."
While Varifrank has the best guidelines of all in More Sparta, Less Athens.
Back from being way all day and far from the Internet, I just learned about the horrific killings at Virginia Tech. How terrified the students must have been. How awful for the victims' families. I can't imagine the shock their parents must feel after thinking their children were safe at college. I can't imagine the shock and pain their friends and fellow students are going through.
I join everyone in sorrow at this tragedy and in prayers for those touched by the shootings.
32 killed! I don't understand the 2 hour lag between the first murder and the classroom murders.
How a heavily armed man could walk around campus without people noticing and calling security is beyond me.
Why after bomb scares last week and a double murder at about 7:15, did it take 2 hours for school officials to warn students to "be cautious".
Two people killed and the gunman at large seems to me to warrant more than a "be cautious." What was campus security doing?
We've seen Columbine. We've been horrified at the Bestlan massacre. Now we're seeing Virginia Tech.
How many more?
In an emergency being connected is more important than ever. Why wasn't there an emergency communications plan for all the students? The elements are all in place. All students have phones and computers. Why weren't all the students on a email, phone text message alert?
Any plan could have saved lives.
'Two to three months," the doctor said, almost reluctantly, when I finally posed the question. That's eight to twelve weeks. Sixty to 90 days. Or 2,160 hours, if you want to get right down to it.
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Eventually - what a luxurious word.
A 39-year -old columnist, living with cancer, says Focusing on present matters most.
Little reported in the coverage of the Iraq war is the internal war by Arab and Muslim islamists on the Assyrian Christian community. They are Assyrians, speaking Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, sometimes called Syriacs or Chaldeans.
This is what the Islamists or Muslim militants, righteous and violent murdering gangs of men, have done to the Iraqi Christians since the Iraq war began.
They have bombed 28 churches.
They have murdered hundreds of Christians.
They have beheaded a priest in Mosul.
They have crucified a 14-year-old Christian boy in Basra.
They have kidnapped a woman's baby in Baghad and, when she couldn't pay the ransom, they returned her child, beheaded, roasted and served on a mound of rice.
Read Ed West's We must not let this ancient Church slide into oblivion
just to be aware of what's happening.
From Palestine, to Iraq, to Iran and Pakistan, Christians who have lived in the middle East are leaving for fear of their lives in ever increasing numbers.
American Catholic bishops have called for asylum for Iraqi Christians
Last night I watched the Sopranos, the episode when Christopher, in hospital after being shot and considered clinically dead for about a minute, reports that he had a visited his father in hell where he was told he was going.
Many people were discomfited by the Pope's speech the other day in which he said God's love is great, but hell 'exists and is eternal.'
Have there been near-death experiences of hell? Time to check out near-death.com which I found less reliable than the Wikipedia entry on near-death experiences.
Not all near-death experiences are those of a brilliant white light and indescribable love; some experience what they could only call hell.
Two of the most famous are Dr. George Rodonaia and Howard Storm.
If you think that hell has gotten a bad name, you might want to read Fr. James Schall on The Brighter Side of Hell who concludes that Hell exists so that we might be free.
"The road to Hell," it is said, "is paved with good intentions." It is also paved with many insights into the very nature of our being that guide us to the truth of things and the importance of our existence.
I wrote this post last year for Third Age, and thought why not repost it this year because so few people know about the Great Hunger. The Irish who fled the famine emigrated around the world and were such successful immigrants, so completely integrating into the mainstream culture wherever they landed, they lost touch with their own history.
Some say the potato first arrived in Ireland when they washed up on shore following the shipwreck of the 130 ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588 in a violent storm. It didn’t take long for the potato to become popular as a healthy and reliable source of food and soon the mainstay of the Irish peasantry. Grown underground, it was plentiful even during times of war, surviving when other crops and livestock were destroyed. The population of Ireland soared with more than two thirds living on the land, dependent on a potato harvest that, unlike grain, could not be stored.
When the potato blight appeared in 1845 and spread in 1846, people were left with nothing to eat, with no way to make money to support themselves. By the end of the worst years of the potato famine, 1847-1849, more than one million Irishmen women and children died of starvation in "The Great Hunger." Another 1.5 million emigrated.
About a half million were evicted by their landlords, many sent away in overcrowded "coffin ships" to Canada with little food, almost no water and no doctors. Already weak and sick, often more than half died. It was said that sharks could be seen following the ships because so many bodies were thrown overboard.
Remember now, Ireland was part of Great Britain and in this time of greatest need, the English government washed their hands of the "Irish problem" by dumping the entire cost and responsibility of famine relief upon the Irish property owners. They closed down the public works programs and soup kitchens which were a "temporary solution" for the first crop failure.
With the passage of the Poor Law, anyone seeking relief who owned more than a quarter acre in land had to forfeit their land.
Men could only get relief if they went as destitute paupers to workhouses already overfull with widows, children and the elderly. People were turned away in droves. They wandered the countryside, living in holes and under bridges, eating grass and dying in ditches.
In Donegal Union, ten thousand persons were found living "in a state of degradation and filth which it is difficult to believe the most barbarous nations ever exceeded," according to the Quaker, William Forster. His organization, the Society of Friends, had refused to work in cooperation with the new Poor Law.
Still, it was not enough as the British Government called for maximum pressure to collect taxes and tax collectors seized livestock, furniture, clothes and tools from homeless paupers. As a matter of policy they would not supply food to the starving people who were considered feckless and reckless for depending on the potato. In 1861 in The Last Conquest of Ireland, John Mitchel wrote: "The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight but the English created the famine."
Little wonder that intense hatred grew against the British. Unrest by a group of Irish nationalists known as ‘Young Ireland’ caused the British government to send in troops to quell any sort of popular uprising. Habeas corpus was suspended and the Treason Felony Act was passed that made speaking against the Crown or the Parliament punishable by deportation to Australia for life.
Ireland was forced to pay for its own relief. Landlords tore down houses so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, evicting tenants in the winter with nowhere to go. Men and women who had never committed any crimes deliberately committed crimes so they could be deported. The horrors of the Great Hunger are unimaginable to us today and deeply shameful to those who survived it.
Michael Shaughnessy, a barrister in Ireland, described children he encountered while traveling on his circuit as "almost naked, hair standing on end, eyes sunken, lips pallid, protruding bones of little joints visible." In another district, there was a report of a woman who had gone insane from hunger and eaten the flesh of her own dead children. In other places, people killed and ate dogs which themselves had been feeding off dead bodies.
So shameful is the memory of the famine that those who survived rarely spoke of it. Those of Irish descent now living in the U.S or Canada or Australia are only beginning to learn about the Great Hunger, through contemporary Irish bands like Black 47, recent books like the National Book Award winner, Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett and the PBS series on the Irish in America.
What’s most often told is the glory of a new life in a new land. The most famous of which is the story of "Nine Famous Irishmen’ reprinted on countless restaurant placemats.
In the Young Irish disorders, in Ireland in 1848 the following nine men were captured, tried, and convicted of treason against Her Majesty, the Queen, and were sentenced to death: John Mitchell, Morris Lyene, Pat Donahue, Thomas McGee, Charles Duffy, Thomas Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Terrence McManus, Michael Ireland.
Before passing sentence, the judge asked if there was anything that anyone wished to say. Meagher, speaking for all, said, "My lord, this is our first offense but not our last. If you will be easy with us this once, we promise, on our word as gentlemen, to try to do better next time. And next time - sure we won’t be fools to get caught."
Thereupon the indignant judge sentenced them all to be hanged by the neck until dead and drawn and quartered. Passionate protest from all the world forced Queen Victoria to commute the sentence to transportation for life to far wild Australia.
In 1874, word reached the astounded Queen Victoria that the Sir Charles Duffy who had been elected Prime Minister of Australia was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported 25 years before. On the Queen’s demand, the records of the rest of the transported men were revealed and this is what was uncovered:
THOMAS FRANCIS MEAGHER, Governor of Montana
TERRENCE MCMANUS, Brigadier General, United States Army
PATRICK DONAHUE, Brigadier General, United States Army
RICHARD O’GORMAN, Governor General of Newfoundland
MORRIS LYENE, Attorney General of Australia, in which office
MICHAEL IRELAND succeeded him
THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE, Member of Parliament, Montreal, Minister of
Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada
JOHN MITCHELL, prominent New York politician. This man was the father of John
Purroy Mitchell, Mayor of New York, at the outbreak of World War I.
He was brought in to take over one of the worst state medical examiner's offices in the country, but the increase in autopsies has brought its own problems now that there is only one fully staffed office in the state.
Too few body bags, an overwhelmed plumbing system, long delays in picking up bodies at scenes of crimes and too little space with some bodies being stored in refrigerated trucks parked behind the building is causing a "review of the situation" in Boston.
Autopsies overwhelm medical examiner staff says the Boston Globe.
The Boston Herald has by far the more vivid report. Morgue backlog 'nightmare'.
One morgue technician walked off the job and flung his badge at his supervisor. Now on administrative leave while the office processes his complaint, he emails the Herald that:
• Bodies stacked three high on shelves and gurneys in the main cooler, many decomposing and dripping fluids onto others through leaky body bags.
• At least five infants have remained in the cooler for upwards of two years because the office has not been able to arrange burials.
• Poor ventilation leading to a constant stench of decomposition and the routine presence of flies in the autopsy areas.
• Several cases in which improper drainage and a heavy caseload have caused blood and bodily fluids to back up and pool onto the floor of the autopsy suite.
“These bodies all have names. They are just lying there decomposing with mold forming on them,” said Kelley, a father of four. “It shows a total disregard for human remains.
One shudders to think what would happen in a disaster.
Teen's survival in Gulf 'pretty amazing'.
A 13-year-old boy survived 28 hours in the chilly Gulf of Mexico because the three adults with him kept him propped above the water line on a part of the sunken pleasure boat that protruded above the water, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Tuesday.
Melquisedec Acevedo of Houston was found Monday clinging to a line from the partially submerged boat that sank Sunday about 10 miles south of Galveston Island. Two bodies were recovered and the search continues for a fourth man.
"For that little boy to survive is a strong indication that his family members did everything possible to ensure that he at least had a fighting chance at survival," Petty Officer Adam Eggers said.
What heartens me is the realization that these three men, even as they knew they were dying, did all they could to save the life of the youngest among them whose birthday it was. Extraordinary bravery and love.
Dolphin ‘dying of a broken heart’ after trainer is killed.
When the young dolphin was rescued from the Adriatic Sea, distressed and bruised, she was nurtured back to health by a dedicated trainer who took responsibility for her care.
Now the trainer is dead, the victim of a frenzied attack by her neighbour — and the dolphin, apparently, is dying of a broken heart.
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The dolphin is refusing her daily diet of milk and squid and has lost 50kg (110lb) since Ms Monti’s murder. Her weight has fallen to just 160kg (350lb) and she has failed to respond to medication for a gastric infection.
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The extraordinary story of love emerged yesterday as keepers at the Oltremare water park in Riccione appealed for international help to save the life of their dolphin.
It seems there's an awful lot of people who go missing on cruises. The cruise industry reported to a U.S. subcommittee that 24 passengers had disappeared between 2003 and March 2006. Since then there's been ten more.
These are not known suicides and something suspicious seems to be going on. Going on a cruise is the perfect way to commit a perfect crime said Congressman Christopher Shays who warned of a
"growing manifest of unexplained disappearances, unsolved crimes and brazen acts of lawlessness on the high seas". Like small cities, he said, cruise ships experienced crimes. "But city dwellers know the risks of urban life - and no one falls off a city never to be heard of again.
Death on the High Seas, a special report from the Guardian.
Out at sea, there are no police.
It is extremely difficult for any detective to piece together a murder case without a body, and chances of finding a passenger dumped into the ocean are slim indeed. And while all cruise ships employ security officers, they do not always seal off crime scenes, detain suspects and interview witnesses in the manner that might be expected of them.
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"The cruise companies just want it to go away," says Randy Jaques, an American security officer. He claims personally to have dealt with more than 50 complaints, and says hundreds of women have signed "Jane Doe agreements" - meaning they have reached an out-of-court settlement with the cruise lines and signed a confidentiality clause.
Passengers can find themselves in a complex legal situation, potentially under numerous jurisdictions when sailing abroad. With many cruise ships registered under flags of convenience with relatively slack tax and labour regimes, the relevant laws might be those of Panama, the Bahamas or Bermuda. Prosecuting, say, a sacked crew member who has returned to his own country brings a whole new dimension of complexity. Charles Lipcon, a Miami lawyer who has built a 30-year career on suing cruise lines, says his firm does not normally take on cases without a clear jurisdiction. "What I've seen over the years is that it's a hot potato for everyone, and nothing much gets done," he says.
Feeling relief when someone dies is rarely admitted, but more common than you think.
Jennifer Elison does in My Turn - The Stage of Grief No One Admits To: Relief.
HONG KONG (Reuters) - A Hong Kong schoolboy who died in a traffic accident has brought festive hope to at least seven other patients through the rare mass donation of a large number of his vital organs.
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The mother said
"Even though I'm devastated, I want to do something for society,"
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"(My son) is very great. Even though he's left us ... we can still hear him breathe, and his heart beat. He's already become an angel."
Doctors hailed Miu's case as an example to others in Hong Kong where organ donorship is traditionally frowned upon given the Chinese belief in keeping bodies whole to allow the deceased to rest in heavenly peace.
"This is a very encouraging event... we're desperately in need of organs," said Dr. Choi Kin, president of the Hong Kong Medical Association.
Last year, only 4.2 of every million people in Hong Kong donated organs to science upon dying, a fraction of the rate in the U.S., according to the Apple Daily.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Patricia Bolsom is writing a diary of her final days.
It's a horrifying look at Britain's National Health Service where nothing is co-ordinated, no one is in charge and care is rationed.
Brian Hathaway, 20, was accused of having sex with a dead deer, but he found a public lawyer willing to defend him by arguing that because the deer was dead, it was not considered an animal and the charge should be dismissed.
Lawyer argues sex with dead deer not crime.
The statute does not prohibit one from having sex with a carcass,”
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the Webster’s dictionary defines “animal” as “any of a kingdom of living beings,” Anderson said.
If you include carcasses in that definition, he said, “you really go down a slippery slope with absurd results.”
Anderson argued: When does a turkey cease to be an animal? When it is dead?
When it is wrapped in plastic packaging in the freezer? When it is served, fully cooked?
A judge should decide what the Legislature intended “animal” to mean in the statute, he said. “And the only clear point to draw the line in that definition, I believe, is the point of death.”
I wonder if he had any idea that he made himself and his client a laughing stock across the nation. Sometimes, it's better to take your lumps and not make a public fool of yourself.
I have no doubt that a number of people at Microsoft thought it was a terrific idea to hold a preview at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, for their newest video game, Gears which is apparently so violent that even its maker calls it 'horrific'. I think both the preview and the game sounds appalling.
"Gears," which puts you in the role of a grizzled soldier fighting off alien invaders, has tantalized gamers with graphically realistic faces, explosions and blood.
The game carries an "M" rating, meaning it is for "mature" gamers aged 17 years and older.
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Attendees at a "Gears" preview party held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery last week were eager to try the game.
"It's gorgeous, isn't it?" one gamer remarked as another pumped bullets into a dead body dangling from a chain.
"Gears" doesn't so much incorporate violence as revel in it.
A chainsaw mounted on your rifle quickly fillets enemies amid fountains of gore, and when an enemy goes down in a hail of hot lead, you can finish him off with a gruesome move the designers gleefully call the "curb stomp."
"It's pretty graphic because it's not just visually that you understand a head is being stepped on and squashed like a watermelon, you also hear it as well," said Dan Hsu, editor-in-chief of "Electronic Gaming Monthly."
I've been thinking a lot about good and evil since I heard of the horrific deaths of five innocent schoolgirls, shot to death execution style, in a simple one room Amish school in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
The killer, 32 year old Charles Carl Roberts IV, came into the schoolhouse, armed to the teeth, ordered the boys and adults out, barricaded the doors, tied the young girls feet, lined them up in front of the blackboard and shot them in the head, before shooting and killing himself.
Roberts, a milk tank driver, who wrote suicide notes to each of his three children, before arming himself with an automatic handgun and shotgun, and driving to the school which he apparently chose just because it was close by and had young girls.
The suicide notes suggested that he was acting out of revenge for an incident that happened 20 years earlier when he was 12. Nothing can explain such a horrific death. To say that he was obviously "sick" seems to minimize the tragedy. This premeditated crime was evil and there is no better word for it. Sometimes, I think the personification of evil as the devil as more subtlety than is generally given credit. And I don't mean "the devil made me do it." That there are dark forces around us and in us with which we do battle is something we all know. We continually choose between good and bad, every one of us.
Today, four girls will be buried, Naomi Rose Ebersole, 7; Marian Fisher, 13; Mary Liz Miller, 8; and her sister Lena Miller, 7. The funeral for the fifth girl, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, 12, is scheduled for tomorrow. Each girl laid to rest in a white dress, a cape, and a white prayer covering on her head.
That there are good forces as well we can see from the Amish themselves. Their actions humble all of us. In the aftermath, they reached out to the family of the gunman, comforting them and extending forgiveness. Said Gertrude Huntington, a Michigan researcher who wrote a book about Amish children, they are quietly accepting of God's will.
"They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death. The hurt is very great, but they don't balance the hurt with hate."
One pastor who stood next to the body of a 13-year-old girl heard her grandfather tell his young boys, "We must not think evil of this man." Such forgiveness said pastor Rev. Robert Schenck, "Was one of the most touching things I've seen in 25 years of Christian ministry."
Descendants of Swiss and German immigrants, the Amish are Anabaptists and no strangers to tragedy which they accept as the will of God, an approach to life they call yieldedness. They derive their strength from their faith and the mutual aid of their community.
The Amish surmount hardship through mutual aid. When a barn burns, they do not call the insurance company. They have a barn raising, said Kimberly D. Schmidt, associate professor of history at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va., who has studied Amish women.
“For the families who lost children, there will be a tremendous community outpouring of love and support,” Ms. Schmidt said. “They will not suffer alone in their grief at all. People will bring in meals for weeks. As devastating as this is, there’s so much strength they can draw from their community.”
The Amish are self-insured and pay for all their own medical bills. There are young girls, severely injured still in the hospital who will require long term care. They may not be able to shoulder all the costs themselves. They generally do not accept help from outside their community. Said one Amish bishop, " "We are not asking for funds. In fact, it's wrong for us to ask. But we will accept them with humility."
The local newspaper reports that funds have been set up to cover the expenses of the victims and their families, including the family of the gunman.
Donations may be sent to Nickel Mines School Victims Fund, HomeTowne Heritage Bank, 100 Historic Drive, P.O. Box 337, Strasburg, PA 17579, or at any division of National Penn Bank.
•••
Another fund is being set up through Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Disaster Services. According to MCC’s Web site, contributions may be sent to the MCC U.S., 21 S. 12th St., P.O. Box 500, Akron, PA 17501-0500.
Donations may also be made by phone by calling 859-1151 or (888) 563-4676 or online at www.mds.mennonite.net.
If you wish to send a card or letter of condolence, address them to Bart Township Fire Company, P.O. Box 72, 11 Furnace Road, Bart, PA 17503.
Herman Bontrager, the secretary/treasurer of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, said the Amish are “very appreciative” of the outpouring of help.
“They feel so humbled by it,” he said.
The Amish sometimes refer to themselves as "plain people". What we've seen in the past week is plain goodness.
It's hard to imagine but a husband and wife arrested in the British terror raids planned to take their six month old baby with them on their suicide mission to bomb planes in mid air. Their baby's bottle would have hidden the liquid bomb.
Just in case you wondered how far the anti-life ideology of the islamo terrorists would go.
With his parents in jail, I hope that the poor baby will be placed in a good foster home with a chance at a normal life
UPDATE: Dr. Sanity says we have moved into a time beyond wisdom and points to a discussion she calls heart-breaking and she's right at Blackfive, On the virtues of killing children.
Learning to Die is quite a remarkable essay by Brother David Steindl-Rast.
on awareness of death
In the rule of St. Benedict, the momento mori has always been important, because one of what St. Benedict calls “the tools of good works” – meaning the basic approaches to the daily life of the monastery – is to have death at all times before one’s eyes....it is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death, and a challenge to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive.
on purpose and meaning
With purposes, we must be active and in control. We must, as we say, “take the reins,” “take things in hand,” “keep matters under control,” and utilize circumstances like tools that serve our aims....But matters are different when we deal with meaning. Here it is not a matter of using, but of savoring the world around us. In the idioms we use that relate to meaning, we depict ourselves as more passive than active: “It did something to me”; “it touched me deeply”; “it moved me.”
on life.
Life, if it isn’t a give and take, is not life at all. The taking corresponds to the active phase, to our “purpose” when we do something; while the giving of ourselves to whatever it is that we experience is the gesture by which meaning flows into our lives. It must be stressed that this is not an either/or; life is not a give or take, but a give and take; if we only take or only give, we are not alive. If we only take breath in we suffocate, and if we only breathe out we also suffocate. The heart pumps the blood in and pumps it out; and it is in the rhythm of give and take that we live.
The lifeguard on duty at Houghton's Pond in Milton didn't have his mouthpiece to protect himself so he refused to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a three-year-old boy.
Fortunately, there were bystanders who were CPR certified and they didn't have any qualms about germs. They saved the young boy's life.
How Faith Saved the Atheist or how to handle the pressure of 'death with dignity'.
On Father's Day, we packed my father's hospital room: his wife, daughters, grandchildren, each of us regaling him with our successes large and small.
"Life's not so bad, after all," the atheist said. I wanted to go back to ICU, find Dr. Death, drag her to my father's room and say: "This is the life you wanted to end." But if I'm really to be a person of faith, I'll have to tackle forgiveness.
China is now employing death vans used for lethal injection executions, mobile execution chambers, that travel from village to village. The designer says lethal injections are a sign that China promotes human rights.
Amnesty international says from 2000-8000 are put to death each year.
China makes ultimate punishment mobile
China's critics contend that the transition from firing squads to injections in death vans facilitates an illegal trade in prisoners' organs.
Injections leave the whole body intact and require participation of doctors. Organs can "be extracted in a speedier and more effective way than if the prisoner is shot," says Mark Allison, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong. "We have gathered strong evidence suggesting the involvement of (Chinese) police, courts and hospitals in the organ trade."
Why did Karen McCarron, a respected physician and advocate for autistic children, smother her three-year-old daughter with a plastic bag?
The toll of autism has a lot of people in heated discussion.
Her husband has filed for divorce. Grandfather Michael McCarron said
Karen McCarron had a lot of resources and help with Katie, whom he described as a happy, endearing child who loved to swing and play in the grass and would line up her Teletubbie dolls so they could "kiss" each other.
"This was not a question of there's no place to turn, there's no support," Michael McCarron said. "This was not a murder about autism."
When faced with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, ordinary moments become holy.
So Harry Lehotsky writes in the Winnepeg Sun
Being told you only have a short time to live has a way of sharpening your senses and adjusting your priorities and perspectives on life.
Many of the most ordinary events and encounters in life are infused with fresh meaning and significance.
A sunny day. The smell of lilacs. A good day at work. Greetings, hugs, goodbyes. We take too many people and things for granted.
Time simultaneously speeds up and slows down. It's hard to explain. It's like you're aware of how quickly hours and days speed by. But you're more determined than ever to juice the most out of every minute.
More than 40 climbers ascending Mt Everest passed a British mountaineer who lay dying and didn't stop to help.
Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit said
"I think the whole attitude toward climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top," he told the newspaper.
Hillary told New Zealand Press Association he would have abandoned his own pioneering climb to save another's life.
"It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by," he said.
He said that his expedition, "would never for a moment have left one of the members or a group of members just lie there and die while they plugged on towards the summit."
Too focused, too goal-oriented, too selfish to be authentically human.
A nurse writes I have seen people die.
The most sobering thing about doing what I do for a living is this: it means that I have done something that, as far as I know, the rest of my immediate family has not. I've done it enough that it's become, at least in the outlines, fairly routine.
.... I've answered the call bell or the person who comes out into the hall with *that tone of voice* or *that look* that means that the person in the bed has quit breathing. I've caught up another nurse on the way to the room to verify the lack of a heartbeat. I've called more residents than I care to think about to verify our verification and chart time of death. I've walked them through the paperwork and told them where to sign.
And, more than that, I've been alone with a number of dead people. The dead are peaceful; they don't ask for cups of coffee when they're NPO or talk politics. I've bathed bodies, removed tubes and wires and IVs, wiped off things I couldn't identify and would rather not think about. I've talked to those people as I've done it, hoping that maybe my persistence in treating them as a living person would speed their souls on to wherever souls go.
I always leave the window open when I do this, no matter the weather. If I have a soul, and if it leaves my body after I die, I do not want to have to work to get outside and fly away. No elevators for me; give me an open window. Supersitious, yes, but part of the private ritual I have.
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Those of us who midwife the dying are a weird group; we're not generally skeeved out or frightened by the thing that is most taboo in our culture. Most of us have dissected at least portions of bodies; all of us have talked to those still living about the process of dying. It's hard work, as hard as having a baby, and