Category: death

Atheist dies, asking people not to tell her child that Mom’s in heaven

December 19, 2015 • 11:30 am

I thought for sure that the McFarland Thistle was a Scottish newspaper, but it actually comes from McFarland, Wisconsin (population 7808), and don’t ask me why. Perhaps there are many of Scottish ancestry there. At any rate, reader Gregory James called my attention to a heartbreaking but also wonderful article in the paper, “McFarland’s Heather McManamy dies; leaves extraordinary letter to all.” McManamy died this week of metastatic breast cancer at only 35, leaving a four-year-old daughter, Brianna.

But before she died, she wrote 40 letters to her daughter to be read at various milestones in the future; these letters will apparently be published. And she left as well a final note to her friends and family, which was posted by her husband on Facebook. I reproduce it in full below. McManamy was an atheist, and her nonbelief is evident in this last message (especially in the second paragraph), as it is in the video at the end. She faced her death bravely, even with humor, and didn’t clutch at false superstitions.

So … I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, apparently, I’m dead. Good news, if you’re reading this, is that you are most definitely not (unless they have Wi-Fi in the afterlife). Yes, this sucks. It sucks beyond words, but I’m just so damn glad I lived a life so full of love, joy and amazing friends. I am lucky to honestly say that I have zero regrets and I spent every ounce of energy I had living life to the fullest. I love you all and thank you for this awesome life.

Whatever religion brings you comfort, I am happy that you have that. However, respect that we are not religious. Please, please, please do not tell Brianna that I am in heaven. In her mind, that means that I chose to be somewhere else and left her. In reality, I did everything I could to be here with her, as there is nowhere, NOWHERE, I would rather be than with her and Jeff. Please don’t confuse her and let her think for one second that is not true. Because I am not in heaven. I’m here. But no longer in the crappy body that turned against me. My energy, my love, my laughter, those incredible memories, it’s all here with you.

Please don’t think of me with pity or sadness. Smile, knowing that we had a blast together and that time was AMAZING. I (expletive) hate making people sad. More than anything, I love making people laugh and smile, so please, rather than dwelling on the tragic “Terms of Endearment” end of my story, laugh at the memories we made and the fun we had. Please tell Brianna stories, so she knows how much I love her and how proud of her I will always be (and make me sound way cooler than I am). Because I love nothing more than being her mommy. Nothing. Every moment with her was a happiness I couldn’t even imagine until she came crashing into our world.

And don’t say I lost to cancer. Because cancer may have taken almost everything from me, but it never took my love or my hope or my joy. It wasn’t a “battle” it was just life, which is often brutally random and unfair, and that’s simply how it goes sometimes. I didn’t lose, dammit. The way I lived for years with cancer is something I consider a pretty big victory. Please remember that.

Most importantly, I was unbelievably lucky to spend over a decade with the love of my life and my best friend, Jeff. True love and soulmates do exist. Every day was full of hilarity and love with Jeff by my side. He is genuinely the best husband in the universe. Through all my cancer crap, he never wavered when so many people would want to run. Even on the worst days you could imagine, we found a way to laugh together. I love him more than life itself and I truly believe that a love like that is so special it will live forever. Time is the most precious thing in this world and to have shared my life for so long with Jeff is something I am incredibly grateful for. I love you, Jeff. I believe that the awesomeness that is Brianna is our love brought to life, which is pretty beautiful.

It absolutely breaks my heart to have to say goodbye. If it’s half as sad for you as it is for me, it breaks my heart over again because the last thing I ever want to do is make you sad. I hope that with time, you can think of me and smile and laugh, because, holy (expletive), did we have a breathtaking life. Go google “Physicist’s Eulogy” and know that it is a scientific fact I will always be with you both in some way. I know that if you just stop and look hard enough, I’ll be with there (in as non-creepy a way as possible). You’re my world and I loved every second we had together more than words.

Friends, I love you all and thank you for the most wonderfully awe-inspiring life. And thank you to all of my amazing doctors and nurses who have taken such incredible care of me. I don’t doubt that my team gave me every possible good day that they could. From the bottom of my heart, I wish all my friends long, healthy lives and I hope you can experience the same appreciation for the gift of each day that I did.

If you go to my funeral, please run up a bar tab that would make me proud. Heck, blast “Keg on My Coffin” and dance on the bar for me (because there had better be a dance party at some point). Celebrate the beauty of life with a kick-ass party because you know that’s what I want and I believe that in a weird way I will find a way to be there too. (You know how much I hate missing out on fun.)

I look forward to haunting each one of you, so this isn’t so much a goodbye as it is see you later. Please do me a favor and take a few minutes each day to acknowledge the fragile adventure that is this crazy life. Don’t ever forget: every day matters.

Here’s a news report on Heather’s struggle and death ; it gives me a bad case of the sniffles, as it did the reporter at the end. I defy you to read the above, or watch the below, without some tears:

A few photos from the Daily Mail:

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Every day matters.

How do you want to die?

July 28, 2015 • 2:01 pm

I’m surprised nobody has thought of this before: collecting doctors’ wishes about how they would like to die. That collection was done by Tom Chivers, announced on Twi**er, as below, and published on BuzzFeed. Click on the screenshot below to go to the article, which is a lot better than usual pieces on that aggregator site:

Screen shot 2015-07-28 at 1.46.01 PMPerhaps unsurprisingly, the doctors’ opinions are fairly well in line with each other, and probably differ on average from those of “regular people”. Physicians wouldn’t usually opt for CPR or extension-of-life procedures in the case of terminal illnesses. The doctors have simply seen too many people have sad, painful deaths, or have their lives prolonged for no clear reason.

I know how I want to go: I want to die in my sleep at a ripe old age or, barring that, have a sudden heart attack that drops me instantly—the F. Scott Fitzgerald death.  I don’t want to know it’s coming, although others may disagree.

Readers are invited to describe their preferred method of demise below.

Addendum: the first reader below suggests his/her preferred death celebration or memorial. I’ve added mine as a comment, and you can add yours, too.

Oliver Sacks: Still working but saying goodbye

April 29, 2015 • 12:15 pm

Oliver Sacks is going to die, and that makes us (and him, of course) the unlucky ones. In February I wrote with sadness about Sacks’ announcment that he had terminal cancer, an announcment that was poignant and as full of humanity as we’ve come to expect from the man. The guy was sui generis—plagued by his own mental and physical problems, which he wrote about with candor, but filled with empathy for the badly afflicted people he encountered as a neurologist. He was, too, a superb writer and storyteller: maybe not so much a scientist as a messenger of science. But whatever you call him, you can’t dislike him, and I think we’ll all miss him when, as he predicts, he’ll be gone in a few months.

The good news is that we have the man for a while longer, and he’s still working.  For instance, yesterday his autobiography came out: On the Move: A Life.  It’s already #22 on Amazon’s bestseller list, and the New York Times‘s captious critic Michiko Kakutani gave it a good review. Excerpts:

That love of the world and Dr. Sacks’s wisdom about human beings — and the mysterious connections between the brain, the mind and the imagination — have animated his writing over the years, from “Migraine,” published four and a half decades ago, through “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” and more recent works like “Uncle Tungsten,” “Hallucinations” and “On the Move,” his deeply moving new memoir.

. . . In “On the Move,” Dr. Sacks trains his descriptive and analytic powers on his own life, providing a revealing look at his childhood and coming of age, his discovery and embrace of his vocation, and his development as a writer. He gives us touching portraits, brimming with life and affection, of friends and family members (relatives that include, remarkably enough, the Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp and the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban). He recounts conversations about writing with the poet Thom Gunn — “the rushes and stoppages, the illuminations and darknesses.” And he describes W. H. Auden leaving America after 33 years to return home to England, looking “terribly old and frail, but nobly formal as a Gothic cathedral.”

And, in the latest issue of the New Yorker, Sacks has penned a fascinating description of his work with Spalding Gray, an actor famous for his searing and autobiographical monologues (you might remember “Swimming to Cambodia”.) In Sacks’ piece “The Catastrophe,” he recounts how Gray, after a car accident that injured his frontal lobe, became increasingly depressive and, despite treatment by Sacks, ultimately killed himself by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry. It’s a case study, but an empathic one, and perhaps the last example of this kind of writing we’ll get from Sacks. (I hope not.)

Finally, Sacks has written an autobiographical essay/literature survey in the New York Review of Books: “A general feeling of disorder.” It’s largely about his own battles with migraines, and he winds up discussing the dreadful medical treatment he accepted to buy himself a few more months of respite from the metastatic cancer that had filled his liver. It’s a grim but fascinating procedure in which beads are injected into the hepatic artery to block blood vessels, cutting of circulation to the liver tumors and thus killing them. The unfortunate byproduct is that all the dead cells and their exudates flooded his system, causing him a long period of “general disorder” as the debris was mopped up by his immune system. Fortunately, it seems to have worked, and he’s going to have it done again.  Here’s his ending:

Epilogue

The hepatic artery embolization destroyed 80 percent of the tumors in my liver. Now, three weeks later, I am having the remainder of the metastases embolized. With this, I hope I may feel really well for three or four months, in a way that, perhaps, with so many metastases growing inside me and draining my energy for a year or more, would scarcely have been possible before.

Oliver Sacks says farewell to life

February 19, 2015 • 7:13 pm

Oh dear—this is so sad. Oliver Sacks, who was treated for a melanoma of the eye nine years ago, has just discovered that the cancer has metastasized to his liver, and there is no cure. He’s written a short piece in the New York Times op-ed section,  “My own life,” which is incredibly poignant and moving.

We all must face this some day, and my own hope is that I die quickly, preferably in my sleep. Sacks is now saying The Long Goodbye, and I’ll miss him. Do have a look at his piece.