[Deep Thoughts] Superman Does Good
Posted: Fri Sep 22, 2017 10:11 am
What does it mean to die well?
So, the Mom of a friend of mine just passed in her sleep yesterday. She was ninety, or so, and in a facility that she and he apparently were happy with. Maybe six months ago, she had planned to enter said facility with her husband, but he died a day or so before they were scheduled to enter.
They left three kids, two doing ok, a batch of grandkids, a long and illustrious firefighting career, about what one can expect. As far as things go in 2017, that might be it.
Nobody was put out or traumatized by their deaths. No real regrets.
Didn't win a Nobel Prize, but did what a person might reasonably be expected to do.
Would it have been 'better' to die at a fire scene? I don't think so. Maybe that's a function of 2017, USA, with relatively small uncertainty about whether we'll wake up tomorrow.
Complications? Pathological selfishness. Deep regrets. Unremitting agony or illness. The torture of isolation.
These make this a decidedly different question than wolves, smallpox, routinely long sea voyages and nighttime raids on your village.
So this is an experiment with no controls. It's got 7.3 billion answers, adjusted dramatically for culture and location.