Euthanasia – the good death

     Occasionally a confluence of influences come together to create what I like to call an “aha moment” a consolidation of previous bits and pieces of thoughts and ideas into a coherent and meaningful whole.

        Life and death issues are with us from the moment of birth. The pull of life is so insistent for the young that they think of themselves as immortal by default. And that's just as it should be. The imminence of death for the aged is just as insistent and gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, we begin to entertain the nagging and intrusive thoughts of our own demise. And that's also just as it should be. It is said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I would add that an unexamined death (if only in the abstract) can lead to an unnecessarily trepid approach to aging.

        What we fear is not so much the unknown that death is, but the absence or loss of life and the potential pain of a prolonged dying process. There is a wonderful Snoopy cartoon where Snoopy and Charlie Brown are contemplating the grim reaper. Charlie says: “Someday we will all die, Snoopy.” Snoopy responds: “True, but on all the other days we will not.” Now, that's a bit of useful philosophy.

        So, we arrive at one of those confluences, in this case the inevitability of death and the inevitability of living until then. Those inevitabilities are givens. What is not given is the quality of those inevitabilities. We can live life poorly or well, and we can also die poorly or well. One is likely to lead to the other. To die well, one must live well—and have choices. To live and die poorly is often a result of no choices whatsoever, or bad choices. To die well, implies a choice of when and how to depart this life as well.

Foxglove and vine Ikebana

digitalis lanata (Foxglove)

        Unwittingly I gambled with death just the other day by using a plant called Digitalis lanata (Foxglove) for an Ikebana arrangement not knowing its name. By chance a blogger recognized my photo of the arrangement an told me of its name and that it was a highly poisonous plant. Sure enough, a Google search informed me that all parts of the plant are highly toxic if ingested and can lead to severe symptoms and even death. It is also used to treat heart patients in controlled dosages.

        The author Umberto Eco in his novel The Island of the Day Before puts it rather well. “We die because we cannot do otherwise. Only the philosopher can think of death as a duty, to be performed willingly and without fear. As long as we are here, death is not here, and when death comes, we have gone.”

        A news item today informs me that the Canadian Parliament will soon consider draft legislation to codify Canada's assisted suicide laws. Euthanasia is already legal in Canada, the draft is designed to establish guidelines for who can (and, equally important, should not) be considered eligible for assisted suicide.

                    Draft legislation in Canadian Parliament

        Assisted suicide is, of course, a controversial topic and one that should not be considered lightly, but should be approached with a view to choice for those who, in certain circumstances, would choose knowingly and in sound mind not to prolong a painful terminal illness and die with dignity—a good death.

        Euthanasia is a derivative of the Greek words for death [thanatos] and good [eu]. He never lived his life so well as in the leaving of it. I think I read something like that somewhere once upon a time. At any rate, I would like to have that choice, should I want it, when my time comes to bid farewell to this beautiful blue-green marble.

China - Winter 2016 (move to Shaxi)

     If Dali was about getting acclimated to a large town popular with tourists in Yunnan, away from the hustle and bustle of the commercial center of Shanghai, five days in Shaxi was about exploring the countryside of rural Yunnan.

rape blossoms blurring by the national highway

       The staff of the Yin Fang Inn arranged the same car and driver who took us to Butterfly Spring to make the 3-hour drive to Shaxi. The route varied from a 6-lane national highway zipping by fields of rape blossoms, a new toll road and a winding country road through verdant fields and large and small villages.

verdant fields and villages along winding country roads

    

waiting for the tuk-tuk - our very capable driver

cobblestone and clear running water -
mountain runoff that you can drink

    Shaxi is a charming and quiet small town, a big contrast to Dali with a completely different feel. The car couldn't enter the older part of town and we had to park and walk a short distance into the town. The driver called the hotel (Cato Inn) for us and arranged a meeting place. The hotel owner soon arrived in a tuk-tuk and loaded our bags on, but we had to walk the short distance through the old town's sun dappled cobblestone streets with a cool clear stream babbling right down the side and through the square with its old outdoor theater to the hotel situated in a narrow alleyway.

Cato Inn - our hotel on the left

Shaxi town square and the old theater

our room left and
veranda

plum wine, peanuts and dried fruit from the market

        The hotel is traditional in structure and modernized a bit for comfort. We booked a room with a beautiful view of the valley and mountains to the east. After settling in we explored around the little town a bit and bought some peanuts and dried fruit to go with our plum wine which we enjoyed on our veranda while admiring the view. Afterwards we went out to a restaurant just around the corner from the town square called Orange Restaurant and had a delicious Chinese dinner of: shredded beef with shiitake mushrooms; sweet and sour sautéed cabbage; and a slightly (we specified) spicy hot potato soup with marinated vegetables. Too delicious to bother with pictures. Yum!

view of  inn courtyard, valley and mountains beyond

along the river front just east of town

the old East Gate

red hot peppers used A LOT
in Bai ethnic cuisine

Orange Restaurant - ate here every day

it's not easy being green

    Thanks to global warming? 

      It isn't even summer yet and we're already living with a green invasion as the jungle seems to overtake the neighborhood. 

lush green of deciduous trees - used to be a lot of pine trees on the slopes and distant mountains

tree knocked down (green on green circle)
recently in a high wind had
to be chopped up with a chain saw 

      There used to be a lot of pine trees in the surrounding mountains but for the past 20 some odd years we have watched as the pine trees turned brown, withered and died year after year, a brown blight on the landscape, until now there are nothing but broad-leaf trees of endless varieties and new species of creeping vines and weeds in wild profusion. 

green bamboo does well in a semi-tropical climate

our house almost lost in the green jungle jumble

      A recent half hour walk yielded in intense profusion of green punctuated with here and there splashes of color. 

purple pre-leaf flowers seem to mimic the surrounding greenery

with a tinge of green - roses crawling along a wooden fence

lavender green
if I were a king
you'd be my queen

three pink roses on a green bed 

Wayang Puppet in the green rain

old teachers never die . . .

 ... they just enter second childhood!

     One of my favorite Agatha Christie characters is the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot who is always rattling on about the "little gray cells". The implication, of course, being that as you age if you don't use them you lose them. The obverse being, quite naturally, that as you grow if you don't develop them they wither on the vine. How can you kill two birds with one stone? Why not facilitate the development of the little gray cells as a way of slowing down the loss of same? Makes sense to me!

       My new English class--expanding the little gray cells is a two-way street. 

little gray cells ready to grow

BREAK TIME

SNACK TIME

GAME TIME

PEEK-A-BOO

       LESSON TIME isn't particularly photograph-able--it isn't all fun and games, but put it all together and you can hear the little gray cells percolating.  

China - Winter 20216 (Geothermal Paradise)

on the Old Town in the rain

rainy night in Dali

     The weather that had been beautiful for a week or so turned uncooperative and it rained for three days. We mostly hung around the hotel and went out occasionally to eat or to take the air and do some walking. We had seen a photograph exhibit at one the local temples. The subject of many of the beautiful photographs were landscapes of pear orchards in full bloom. We learned that the photographs had been taken in orchards in the area, one of which was in a town called Eryuan a couple hours from Dali by bus that we wanted to see. On the fourth day of the rains, the sky looking brighter and the clouds more broken, we decided to take a chance on the weather and do our local bus trip to Eryuan. The day started out with a higher cloud ceiling with patches of blue sky visible in places. It didn't seem to have rained much overnight and the hazy sun was making a silver lining edging the remaining rain clouds.

commerce rain or shine

bus to Eryuan

       After breakfast we proceeded to the West Gate bus stop for local buses and found the bus to Eryuan. It cost 15¥ ($2.30) per passenger. We ran into a little language confusion but there was a young guy on the bus who spoke English and helped us out. After an hour and a half the bus stopped and everybody had to get off the bus, but we didn't know why. This young man again took charge and helped us out and told us we had to transfer buses and that he was going to the same place as we were to attend his friend's wedding. 

lush green vegetable fields on the road to Eryuan

Shanwei at Eryuan
Bus Terminal

         He sat behind us and we started to get acquainted. His name is Shanwei [means something like Noble Mountain] and he is a surgeon from Kunming. He was very friendly and we engaged in a lively and interesting conversation. When we arrived at the bus terminal in Eryuan we were a bit overwhelmed by the size of the place and hadn't a clue about what to do next. We told Shanwei that we were looking for a temple with a pear orchard, but he didn't know where it was and, anyway, he thought it was too soon for the pear blossoms. He called his friend on his cell then told us he was going to the hot spring resort in town (it's well known and we had debated going there as well) before going to his friend's wedding and suggested we all go together. 

another trusty tuk-tuk

        We agreed and got in a tuk-tuk and went to the hot spring called “Geothermal Paradise”. It is a huge complex of hotels and hot spring pools galore—quite different from hot springs in Japan. Also, nude bathing is not permitted in Chinese hot springs so we had to buy swim wear. We spent a very pleasant couple hours in the pools and chatted amiably getting to know each other across race and cultures. I believe that, on a person to person level, with goodwill and openness, we have much more in common with people from different races and cultures than differences. The differences are superficial, the similarities universal and profound.

 the fish cleanse the dead skin -
if you can stand the sensation

on the road to Dali

        We all got into another tuk-tuk to go back to the bus terminal. Shanwei invited to attend his friend's wedding, but, tempting though it was, we thanked him for the honor and declined. He got off on a street corner and we continued on to the bus terminal. I got his email address and promised to send him some of the photos we had taken in the pools. We bought our tickets back to Dali, found the boarding gate and settled in for the couple hour drive back to town. 

The Blue Gecko

        After arriving at West Gate we walked over to a very good restaurant we had discovered called The Blue Gecko for dinner and returned to Yin Feng around 6pm. Road Buddy's computer crashed and we had to work on recovering it by booting in safe mode to reset the OS to the previous day when it worked properly (one of Microsoft's better ideas) and it was successfully recovered.