Four years after he died, dad’s grave was exhumed yesterday. His remains were placed in a niche and I wrote him an epitaph: “A gentle man who lived well and loved much rests here.”
A little over five years ago, the doctors asked my brother and me to decide if we wanted to continue with the life-support systems they had placed dad on. If unplugged, we were told, he might succumb away to the stroke that had felled him. If plugged in, he’d survive. But for how long and in what shape, they couldn’t tell. We desperately wanted him to live.
And so, in the toughest decision that either of us have taken yet in our lives, we asked that he be unplugged. Surprisingly, dad survived. Unfortunately, as a vegetable. Until, he died four years ago. If he were kept on life support, he might still have been around today. Who knows how else he may have surprised us?
Which is why, every once a while, some questions play themselves out in the back of my mind.
Why did you pull the plug on him then?
Morally, what that the right thing to do?
Would you have pulled the plug on yourself?
The first question could be answered on the basis of the data points we were staring at then. Compounded by the family’s genetic history, which indicated a predisposition to strokes, his chances looked bleak to begin with. That he remained bedridden for over a year before dying was his misfortune — a random event.
On the morality of pulling the plug on him, the only way I can answer that one is by imagining my future narrative. Personally, I am deeply influenced by Ezekiel Emanuel, an American oncologist, bioethicist and writer. “…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss,” he argued in an article titled ‘Why I hope to die at 75’, published in The Atlantic magazine in 2014. It’s a line that has stayed with me.
Perspective is needed here. Medicine has advanced significantly to increase our longevity. But what about our productivity, creativity, or ability to deal with disease past a certain age?
Data compiled by the Technical University of Denmark has it that scientists do all the “ground-breaking” work that earns them a Nobel Prize in their mid-40s. But they must wait 20 years or so for the Nobel. Emanuel goes on to submit that this phenomenon is true across other domains such as literature and music too. This is not to suggest older people do not do well. They do. But the fact is, our cognitive abilities decline as we age. And while stories exist of people who defy these narratives, they are the outliers. I am most likely not.
This is why I remind my wife often (and my older daughter too, now) that once I turn 65, if a major illness should strike me, I am not to be put on life support. Instead, my organs must be harvested so they can be transplanted into someone younger who needs a shot at life. Whatever else remains of the cadaver must be given to research because the only altar I worship at is that of science.
Why 65? Because all data points I now have suggest I will be past my peak then. And that any exercise I engage in to extend longevity will drain their resources and cramp my life. I don’t like the sound of that.
Dad would have hated it if he couldn’t step out with friends to have chai, sing songs to serenade mum every once a while, pay his own bills. That settles the question on the morality of pulling the plug on dad.