The Hard Conversation

beautiful marsh clouds above and below

Just finished an excellent book, At Peace Choosing a Good Death After a Long Life, by Samuel Harrington MD.  One of the central themes is accepting when death is imminent and shifting the focus from treatment to care and quality of life, which sounds so natural, and yet it is often difficult to accomplish. This author is excellent and practical in informing about such circumstances and helping people and families to arrive at this point and make their way forward from there.

Then subsequently I've fallen into the Deep Adaptation work of Jem Bendell who began a scientist who published a paper under this title a year ago saying that we are beyond mitigation and have lost control of climate change and that societal collapse is imminent or even beginning. The work now he suggests calls for care, compassion, love as we negotiate this unknown and new territory. The entire paper is well worth the read.

In both terminal cases there is no way to know the timing of the end, nor what the final playing out will look like, only that ultimately both human and humanity will succumb, and possibly sooner than either wishes.

Speaking about this often leads to a response like, "well on a more hopeful note ... blah blah." The point is not to abandon hope but to reframe it in a more realistic context. It is mature, informed hope, not fantasy. It's not a dichotomy - hope or hopeless, but a helpful hopefulness of non-denial, an eyes wide open hope that is possibly available to seeing new ways in the new information, rather than a shutting down sort of hope that won't allow new "bad" information that could help inform action.