One month ago today I stood in a hospital room at the end of an overnight vigil, watching as a nurse administered morphine that ultimately stopped the beating of my father’s heart. As the display showing the heart rate descended to zero and the last breath left his body my family in the room began to cry.

At that moment of profound grief, however, my feeling was one of relief.

Why not sadness? In part because my Dad had been brain-dead for hours because his blood pressure was not high enough to deliver the vital oxygen needed to sustain that organ, but also because the outcome of our personal tragedy had been obvious for months. The end was inevitable whether it was December 26th or some day a few months later after much suffering of my Dad, a preview of which I had been witness to first-hand in the three days before we called the ambulance to take him to the hospital.

For those who need it spelled out explicitly, a group far larger than even my cynical, pessimistic mind often comprehends, the relief I felt was for my Dad, not for me.

I now have the clothes and bathrobes I had bought for him on that last day before he entered the hospital; things I had chosen in a shopping spree ignited by concern, decisions made with his infirmity in mind of things that were easily donned and shed, especially after I had to help him disrobe upon his request, assistance given in full knowledge that he would never ask for help unless it was not only absolutely needed but even beyond that state, purchases made with my hope beyond reason that his condition would improve to the point where he could receive the chemotherapy that might prolong his life.

A repeat of the treatment that had brought him to the lowest point in his life, something that I learned after his death was an experience he revealed to one of his best friends that he would never have wanted to repeat.

What is the cost of suffering for a few months of life versus dying, cutting short that pain?

How do you rationalize that cost/benefit analysis, even if solely for yourself without consideration of the feelings of others who would be devastated by your death?

Yet those analyses must be made given our current state of medical technology where the body can be kept alive long after the brain has died.

The deep scrutiny of cost versus benefit leads down paths that come to conclusions that are not comfortable when compared to initial, emotional reactions but cannot and should not be denied. Conclusions that imply larger principles than currently recognized because of fears overriding thought.

Fear is the mind-killer because the same ancient organ, the medulla, that keeps our body functioning long after the part of our brain we use to think has died also responds to the primal urges of fight or flight stimulated by fear.

Humanity earned its success among all species through the use of the brain beyond the fight or flight response of the medulla.

We now choose to abandon principles because of our fear.

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Part II to be posted soon.

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