While sitting at my dad’s side, watching him die, my brain goes strange places. It turns out, that as much as you’ve discussed the inevitable moment with family, and know what dad wants, the moment you tell the doctor to stop treating your father, and make him comfortable while he dies, sucks.
It sucks quite a lot. My rational mind completely understands that he’s lived a long life, and lived well - but has only lived periodic good moments for the last couple years. It’s time. Philosophically, and realistically, it time. We are all here for an eye blink, and we all get to mourn when someone's time ends anyway. I get it. That doesn’t stop the lower brain from screaming and making a hell of a fuss.
He deserves that fuss, and I am content to let it have its say - which is just as well, because it is going to have it’s say, and trying to stop it is silly. I’ll mostly stay away from dad stories, cus tears on my keyboard risk short circuits. but I’ll drop one.
The day dad became convinced anthropogenic climate change is real, he turned to me and said, “Well, we had a good run. Sorry about that.” with tears in his eyes. It was both the humour and the tears that sum up dad.
To mix this into the general conceptual stuff on this site - life is a temporary blip, both as a species and as individuals. A professor I recently met was in the news for working to identify the particular layer that will define the beginning of the Anthropocene. The geological epoch defined by man messing with stuff. (Yes, yes, it hasn't been formally adopted yet, whatevs. It will be soon.)
The ‘temporary us’ are collectively messing with the much, much longer lived planet enough, we get to rank with asteroids and ice ages in defining epochs. Note that the planet shrugged us off until there were billions of us. It took some pretty serious collective effort to get to that point.
The marker the geologists are looking at is related to nuclear testing in the fifties. That testing was the result of an incredibly focused effort by a team of Americans and catch of effort by other country’s teams. Of course, the signal it left behind in the sediment wasn’t only created by those teams.
It was made by the accumulation of knowledge, expanded upon by each generation of the species since we began, and before we began. The particular causality of that leap in knowledge was catalysed by war and fear. Let’s make the next few leaps catalysed by cooperation and love...that sounds sappy, collective good? That's too impersonal and marxist, damn philosophers wrecking perfectly good words, or politicians wrecking perfectly good philosophies, whatevs. I'll stick with sappy, cus I'm emotionally in touch with myself, at the moment.
Cooperation and love are characteristics that were drummed into me, as founding principles, by a dear man, now dying as his family watches. He was a hippy before it was cool - a well dressed young lawyer, who preferred classical music or Frank Sinatra, to the noise generated by ‘those kids’ hippy - but he had the important parts right.
Correcting the present individualised drift in the worlds organising principles to one that focuses towards cooperation and love, might be something the America-centric world thinks of as out of the sixties - but it still matters. It’s always mattered - and it’s important.
The clothes and drugs and living in communes might not be needed, but there were some good tunes, good vibes, and good ideas. They are good ideas, and they’ve done better in some of the ‘not America’ world, than they have there. Let’s make sure future ‘progress’ - for any political entity - includes sustainability as a founding principal, and make ‘progress’ with the human organism.
P.S. The human organism in my head is different than the ‘gaia’ idea of earth as an organism in an important way. The human organism can steer it’s evolution to be helpful to gaia, where the rest of life aren’t there yet...or maybe they’re ahead of us...whatevs.
We need to steer our evolution to a place that is consistent with the health of other life, and sustainable to the planet. That principal is buried in the root of most religions, and is as old as the species. The western world just seems to have forgotten it for a few generations.
We've been to thinking as individuals too much. Living individual lives, that are largely self guided, is an important efficiency feature that has encouraged the recent technological advances of the species - but it needs to be done with consideration of its sustainability. Let’s steer that evolution in a sustainable way...’Kay?
P.S.S
I submitted my first fantasy novel to a publisher. I’ll hear back in ‘up to a year’. They get a lot of manuscripts, and can only read so fast, apparently.