We have all heard the epitaph from Palahniuk that says “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”. Never have truer words been spoken. We are all going to die, every single one of us. That’s the God’s honest truth and we all know it. We’ve known it in one form or another since we were children.

Unfortunately it’s not the whole story.

Death cannot be foregone, but it is also ugly and horrible and it’s stalking every one of us. Death is simply the name we give the end of our lives, but what it really is, is the destruction of our lives.

For a few of us, a very lucky few, we die in an instant when a drunk driver hits us out of nowhere on the day of our graduation or the birth of our children. Instant, painless death at a high point is the best anyone of us could ever beg for.

You see, they lie to us from the beginning. When they toilet train us, they don’t bother to tell us that in a hand full of years we will be crapping ourselves again, but at that time no one is going to think it’s cute. No one will dotter over us, or make happy little jokes about how our “little poopie stinky winkies”. When you’re 78 and you shit your diaper, the underpaid nurse just bends you over the bed, and cleans you, and wishes she had stayed in school or learned to type.

For your part you just stay there on the bed and try to think of more pleasant things than the woman sanitizing your ass and her cold, cold hands.

If you think any of this is funny, you wait for the punch line, its coming.

You see, the loss of control of one sphincter or another is really the least of the things you need to worry about at our age. Honestly the dehumanizing embarrassment of having a woman (who you would never even have over for dinner ten years ago) buff your rectum until it shines isn’t even the worst part.

The Pain is what you want to worry about.

The Pain that precedes our death is waiting for us all. It is waiting for all of us, and unlike death, it doesn’t even bother to stalk us in the night. We walk up to it and it embraces us, the only consolation being that it never discriminates. It holds everyone the same. A lucky few, a blessed few step out of line before they buy the ticket for that show.

Degenerative illness is a creation of 20th century medicine. They have figured out how to prolong our lives longer than they can make us comfortable. The drugs fail, we develop a tolerance and then all we do is wait. Sickness is ugly. Illness is degenerative. Life is degenerative. When it gets really bad, you look at death as Christmas. Only by then it never comes in time. By then it’s too late.

The reason it’s too late is that The Pain strippes us of all we have and all we ever were. It makes us see life for the truth that things will never be as good as they used to be again. Never, not ever or ever. The pain can get so bad that you beg for death and when all the begging and pleading that is left inside of you is gone, there is nothing to do but wait for death to take it’s slow ass time getting around to you.

You think that those people that commit suicide after being diagnosed with a major disease are weak?

Do you believe that euthanasia is wrong?

The very first time the medicine breaks down and you loose your voice because your body was never meant to scream that long, look me in the eyes and tell me that suicide is wrong. Tell me that doctors who intentionally overdose their patients are going to burn in a hell worse than anything we experience on earth.

I have seen doctors celebrate the “miracle” that will keep a patient alive for another two weeks, even though they know that there is no way to control The Pain.

Remember earlier when I mentioned a punch line? The Pain is waiting for you too. It’s waiting patiently for all of us. And the chances are that our death is going to be longer, and uglier and more debasing than anything that our parents or grandparents could imagine. Advances in medicine will keep us alive longer, but the odds are they will not improve the quality of our lives enough to make it worth the trouble.

There is this poem that has haunted me for years. It’s by Yeats and talks about the end of the world and the second coming of Christ. It says “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold”.

“On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” But for most of us, long before the time line runs out, we will be stripped of everything that made life worth living. We will be dehumanized, tortured by modern medicine and our own bodies until all that is left is a sack of warm meat that bears no resemblance to what we were, and can no longer beg for an ending that will never get here soon enough.

Feel free to start laughing anytime you like.

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