You Want a Physicist to Speak at Your Funeral

A friend of mine recently linked to this at a blog, via another blog, but here is the referenced source:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4675953

"And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith."

What do you think? Are these notions comforting to you? Or do they feel like more attempts to pretend that a loved one isn't really gone and lost to you forever?

Christopher Hitchens

Toward the very end of his life, the prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote an interesting article in Vanity Fair on the subject of his own death and the process of dying of a prolonged illness.

Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Read the rest here.

A Request

This interesting request landed in my inbox today:

I am working to increase the awareness of humanist and atheists needs and concerns among the military chaplaincy and the Chaplain staff at the VA hospital. They have asked me to present to the VA Chaplain's staff meeting on Feb 22. I have a question to ask of the group that gathers with you tomorrow....if there is time. 

If you were in the hospital, and a chaplain came to call, what would be helpful to you as an atheist or humanist? What would not be helpful? In terms of death and dying, what would be comforting and relevant? 

I'd appreciate any feedback you can give me. 

Let me know what you think in the comments and I will pass it on.

Rationing in Disasters

From an interesting article on rationing health care in disasters:

Yogini could see that the ICU was at its limit.

“All the beds there were full of patients, so it was pretty obvious there was only a small amount of machinery available,” Yogini recalled. “Seriously ill patients were coming in continuously.”

There was just one ventilator free. Ganesh was so sick his chances of survival looked poor at that moment, even with a ventilator.

Dr. Kinikar wanted to try. She put Ganesh on the last ventilator.

Some of the other doctors criticized this decision. Soon two more babies arrived who had difficulty breathing. Hospital policy forbids removing children with a poor prognosis from ventilators to make way for others.

Kinikar now found herself in the situation she had dreaded. There were no ventilators available for the two newly arrived children.

Thanks to Karen for the link, where you can read the full story.

How Doctors Die

Here is an interesting article about how doctors choose to die, which turns out to be very different than the general population.  A snippet:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Read the rest here.

For atheists, this life is enough

There are several salient points in this piece, but overall it seems to have more to do with not thinking about death... or at least not worrying about it....

"This life is enough, if you are here for it. The people worried about death are the ones not truly living. They are the ones who know in their hearts that they need more time."

"The kind of further existence that religions offer me tends to be in a place where we are no longer hungry or horny, where we have wings instead of desire. But who are we in a place where our troubles no longer trouble us, and we no longer need balm for the wounds of it all, nor medicine for the madness?"

"I like being alive. As far as I know, I always will be alive. I understand that this sounds strange but think about it: You will not know it when you are dead, just as you did not know it before you were born, so it is none of your business. As far as you are concerned, you are always alive. It is awful to lose someone and worse when the person dies young. Nothing about God or the afterlife improves that: With or without God childhood leukemia and teenage car-accident fatalities are tragic beyond words. An adult who gets a bad diagnosis has reasons to feel sad too. It is sad to leave others behind, but I don’t see anything so sad about going."

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/life/atheists+this+life+enough/5871784/story.html#ixzz1hqaKvAT8

How to Live Given the Certainty of Death

Watch it on Academic Earth

This is one lecture from a course at Princeton on the subject of death. I quite liked it. The rest can be seen here.