© 2007, UrbisMedia
I already knew that there are people who die on cruise ships. But when the lady sitting next to me a today’s bible study meeting leaned over and told me there ad already been two deaths on this cruise, it seemed a little too close for comfort. The bible class gave it another level of poignancy. Although there were some participants that drifted in an out of the class it di8d not appear that it was one of “our own” who had gone off the get some real answers.
When boarding a ship several years earlier I remember wise-cracking that it looked like our first port of call should be Lourdes. I was younger and in better shape myself at that time, but I could still remark when I had a look at my current fellow passengers, that they should paint a big red cross on the side of this ship. One elderly man from Australia struggled along behind the nurse pushing his wife, a woman frozen in incapacitation from a stroke or neurological disorder, in a wheel chair. Following them was a ship’s steward pushing a special toilet chair and other medical equipment. I wondered how the hell they were going to have a good time; but with the money they must have shelled out for a disabled cabin and the medical assistance, they had to be as financially able as they were physically disabled. One had to admire their determination. On deck each day another couple took the sun by the pool, he wheelchair bound and totally dependent upon his wife. She read to him and fed him and always had a ready smile. They were both brown as nuts the sunbathing, and either oblivious or disdainful of skin cancer. There were many canes, some walkers, loads of hearing aids and who knows how many pacemakers and other less evident medical aids.
One has to admire such intrepidity. The average age aboard must have been over sixty. Most of my fellow passengers were of an age where it is not so much “good to be alive” as it is simplypreferable to be alive. These were not people who were there just for the food, and this was not a ship with rock climbing walls, miniature golf courses, and wet T-shirt contests. These people were aboard to add or re-visit our destinations in spite of their infirmities, some of them out to squeeze just one more new experience out of their lives, to see a lion or giraffe up close, or buy some handicraft from a native artisan. For some it would be their last chance to change the scenery for the last time before the final curtain comes down. For two the show was over; they had failed to cheat the Reaper one last time, or sought his cold comfort.
The Reaper is always a shadowy presence in religious discussions. I think people see no point in believing if there is not an afterlife (see DCJ, No. 39.5), and if there is one, they must employ some imagination to it, or accept a packaged version, to what lies beyond. Heaven or Hell; it’s so simplistically binary. There are voluntary inputs of personal stories of how faith was used or tested by illness, or the efficacy of prayer (see DCJ No. 40.2). But our departed shipmates are only invoked in whisper. Our spiritual leader, of he knows (he must) does not bring up the matter. I, too, think it would be unseemly.
So I am left to ponder religion’s ineluctable reality while the group is led into some vague and safe Old Testament passage about whether widows of rabbis should be allowed to wear thong panties or some such irrelevance. What interesting, and vexing, questions might have been brought up. I wondered, for example, whether there were some among our number who would have raised an objectio or an opinion of eschatological destination had it becomes known that one of our departed had decided to slip over the back rail into “that good night.” This happens more often than is accounted and is definitely not a “call for attention” in its grim certainty.
I would have raised the matter of the objections that most religions have to suicide and euthanasia. Would any of them have objection to someone in unpalliable pain, to a “quality of life” reduced to zero, to the negative effects of useless medical care, deciding to go “over the side.” There would be some, I would guess, who would summon the old bromide that it is God’s choice to give us life and His when to end it. This can be heard from pulpits and rostrums in state houses and it hardly worthy of rebut in its arrogance and stupidity, if not its outright cruelty. Who is anyone to say what “God’s purposes” are as they insinuate themselves into the lives of others. Maybe God intends that you should make that decision, if you like, or he will make it soon enough for you, I might counter. But this issues is one of our rights over our own bodies and destinies. This must ultimately trump and all so-called “theological interpretations,” and therefore, includes that other contentious subject, abortion.
Religions are nothing if not hypocritical about the rights of death. Martyrs are revered in the Roman Catholic Church, often sainted for throwing themselves on the swords of infidels, and sent to certain death in crusades and peril in wars, always in the name of the Lord. [1] In America at least the strongest supporters of capital punishment come from the same evangelical groups that support the politicians who give it the state’s “blessing.” [2] They have non problem is hastening the departure of another person, justified, of course, in their terms.
I would love to put it to the Bible class what gives any other person the right to say I have no inalienable rights as to the use and disposition of my being (excepting mitigating or avoiding any public or social externalities in so doing) and then supporting laws or prohibitions that essentially arrogate those rights to their religion? Who are these American Taliban to prolong say, someone’s suffering because they desire a social world that fits their faith. Nothing is more fundamental to a person’s being, and damn anyone, I say, who gets in the way of another by playing God. [3]
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.16.2007)
[1] See Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits , Harper Perennial, 2005, who writes that many young men sought to enter the Jesuits because of their dangerous assignments and the prospect of a martyr’s death.
[2] At this writing almost all of the Republican contenders to succeed George Bush profess as well their approval of methods of torture (which sometimes results in death) of prisoners—and just plain detainees—in the so-called War on Terror. They all, of course, seek the blessing of the religious Right.
[3] By the way, I think it is in Leviticus that Hebrew law says the widow of a rabbi who wears a thong on the Sabbath shall be stoned to death.