LH 95 star forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud

The results are in from the thirty-seven people who voted in the poll, (hardly representative but enough for a tiny feel), and I’m both surprised and heartened.

But before I launch into that discussion, I wanted to thank everyone who voted, as well as everyone who tried to vote but couldn’t because of technical difficulties.  There were a lot of you latter, I know.  This post got about five times the number of hits as translated into votes so clearly, the glitch some of you reported was a big one.  Bummer.  I really wanted to know what you thought.  I’ve recently been assailed by doubts about the value of what I’m trying to do with this blog and the eventual book, and I was trying to establish whether there was really a need for it or not.

Note to self: Learn more, much more, about conducting a casual poll.

And now to the results.  Taking into consideration that the sampling was minuscule and the line of questioning was leading at best, I was still surprised to find that my suspicions were baseless.  In spite of all the progress medical science has made over the last century, everyone who responded still sees death as the natural conclusion to our biological destiny.  While there were those who thought our age span might be extended beyond 120 years, a few who thought we’d find a cure for aging, and some who thought disease would eventually be eradicated, nobody checked the Live Forever box.   The proponents of Immortalism will undoubtedly be bummed, but it makes the job I’ve undertaken seem more feasible.

For those who didn’t know yet, I have an agenda here.

We all have our particular stars to shoot for and I’m no different.  Mine involves trying to ease some of the unnecessary levels of fear I’ve seen around dying.  I’m not gunning for ALL the fear mind you, because some of it is appropriate and perfectly healthy.  It’s like a couple of people mentioned in their comments; the instinct to survive is in our DNA and, without the fight or flight response, we wouldn’t last long as a species.

No.  What I’d like to target is the unnecessary fear.  The excess.  The bogey man part.  The kind of terror that results from things like lack of education and unrealistic expectations, from misinterpreting symptoms to grossly underestimating our own strength.  I want to tackle the kind of creeping, obsessive fear that arises from focusing on external, technological solutions which we often can’t control, to the exclusion of internal strengths that we can.

That last one was what I was trying to gauge with the poll.  As a society, we’re dedicating our resources and faith to medical science at a rate that’s escalating geometrically, and I wanted to find out just how much faith.  Because if most people are starting to believe deep down that dying is ultimately unnecessary then, honestly, there wouldn’t be much left for me to do here.  The hope of living forever raises an entirely different set of fears about dying that I wouldn’t have a clue how to address.

If that was the case I’d be free to begin a whole new star-hunt.

However, thirty-seven out of thirty-seven people still believe that dying is biologically inevitable and, while it’s not universally representative, it’ll have to do.  I’ll just assume that trying to ease some of the fear around dying is still a relevant and worthwhile goal to pursue after all.

Note to self:  Possible things to talk about in future posts.

1)  Cultivating internal resources like courage, endurance, gratitude, trust, humility, strength, inner dignity, etc., provides the most powerful fall-back position for when technological solutions fail.  (Other options:  Despair.  Rage.  Blame.  Generally falling into the abyss.)

2)  Cultivating the above also dramatically improves the quality of life before dying.

3)  Instead of devoting all our attention to fighting over who’s going to pay for the viral growth of outside, institutional services, we can also look into designing and building closer, committed homes and communities where it’ll be easier to help care for one another.

4)  Before we pour our hearts, souls, and tax dollars into more of the bitter, divisive legislative battles raging, we could first try to weave a constructive, workable meaning for suffering to help us navigate with a little more grace.  (Of course this would require courage, trust, humility, etc., which brings us right back to the practical uses of number one.)

I know there’s a way to die that isn’t as scary as most people think it is.  I’ve seen it.  I witnessed a variety of ways to navigate the process that not only make it less devastating for the person who’s dying, but actually helps buoy and heal those who have to pick up the pieces afterwards and carry on.  I just need to figure out if there’s a practical way to communicate what I learned to anybody else.

That’s my star.

copyright 2011 Dia Osborn