Skip to main content
Read page text
page 168
– ANAKANA SCHOFIELD – be created to avert people dying alone. People would be paid to be with you, but I fail to imagine how it could be implemented for those who die without warning. Those who die in the middle of the night or those who live alone and there’s no one there to be woken up by their passing. It would require a professional observation service of all humans by another human and we’d run out of humans for the task. We could narrow it down to the most likely candidates to die based on illness or genes or not looking the best for staying alive. I try to imagine the 24-hour shadowing of individuals so that no person would be alone at the point of death and what man/woman-force this would require and grow dizzy. But is it what people want? Do people even wish to have company or their deaths witnessed or do they prefer to be left in peace to get on with it? Henry James’ father felt this way about James’s sister Alice. He wrote to her giving her permission to end her life. (She didn’t). ‘I told her that so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life when-ever she pleased; only I hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances, she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends.’16 Since I fear death I automatically assume others do 16. Henry James Sr. In letter to his youngest son, Robertson James (September 14 [1878?]). Introduction, The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence, edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell. 150
page 169
– The Difficult Question – and perhaps this is very much not the case. Perhaps I imagine there’s a terror to dying alone that those who do die alone cannot consciously experience. We won’t know because we can’t know because there are many variables and it’s not verifiable. Strange that. Strange that our experience of our very final moment is not verifiable by us. You can spend your whole life analysing and thinking and recovering from your birth. Your death is only for those left behind to analyse. All you get to do is die it. Intuitively if our final moment will forever remain – to the person who lives it or dies it – a figment of our imagination, then why would our imaginary moments warrant verification? The imagination is devalued when we seek justification for content in fiction. She is redundant, under-employed, within this framework since it’s only the imagination that can work up or ponder or create our final moment. We don’t demand, nor can we, that someone has lived their final moment before they can imaginatively convey their fears of it to a sympathetic listener. We don’t deny them this opportunity by suggesting nonsense you’re only speculating and you haven’t lived it yet. Come back to me when you have lived it because only then will it have indisputable value. In contrast our present day, self-submission and verifying of every minute of our existence via social media is interesting for the accurate banality it 151

Page Text

View plaintext

– ANAKANA SCHOFIELD –

be created to avert people dying alone. People would be paid to be with you, but I fail to imagine how it could be implemented for those who die without warning. Those who die in the middle of the night or those who live alone and there’s no one there to be woken up by their passing. It would require a professional observation service of all humans by another human and we’d run out of humans for the task. We could narrow it down to the most likely candidates to die based on illness or genes or not looking the best for staying alive.

I try to imagine the 24-hour shadowing of individuals so that no person would be alone at the point of death and what man/woman-force this would require and grow dizzy. But is it what people want? Do people even wish to have company or their deaths witnessed or do they prefer to be left in peace to get on with it?

Henry James’ father felt this way about James’s sister Alice. He wrote to her giving her permission to end her life. (She didn’t).

‘I told her that so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life when-ever she pleased; only I hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances, she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends.’16

Since I fear death I automatically assume others do

16. Henry James Sr. In letter to his youngest son, Robertson James (September 14 [1878?]). Introduction, The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence, edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell.

150

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content