Saturday, July 11, 2009

New revelations

It has been a while since I blogged here.  I see some people have signed up on the blog, but I do not see any messages and don't know how to find them.  I am pasting in a note I wrote to one of the people who are on the EC blog.
I had a real  set back in my thinking and feelings yesterday.  I have been having more trouble eating and I am    not sure how fast the cancer is progressing, but the hospice nurse thinks it is more aggressive then we suspect and that I should start getting prepared for greater limits on my activity.   She really dropped a bomb on me when she started talking about when I will have to make a decision about turning off the tube feeding when my quality of life begins to ebb.  As she points out the feeding is keeping me alive and feeding the tumor too.  There will come a time when the tube feeding is counter productive; IE: the tube feeding just prolongs existence.  The frightening thing about that is that  they are saying I have to pull my own plug.  That is down the road I know, but it is something to think about.  I am still churning over the thought.  But I gather that when I am in a situation where the quality of life has deteriorated to lying in bed in pain I will not be is such a conflict as I am now.  Basically I will be starving and dehydrating myself to death.  The book Final Exit does not have a very pretty description of this way out.  I can only hope that hospice provides sufficient drugs to limit that form of agony.  I also feel that when the decision has to be made I should move into a hospice setting.  I do not think Marian should bear the brunt of not feeding me.  The discussion  with the nurse was pretty hard on her also.

Two guys and a women from the mid-west Atheist group came over last night and we had 
a great hour and a half discussion.  It was a great lift for me.

Hope to work through all of this feelings stuff.  Maybe I have not accepted the situation the way I thought I had.  Right now I am going to try to focus on one day at a time.



  1. Underneath each of your posts is a link that says "comments." If you click this link, you will see the messages people are leaving for you.

  2. Dear Bob,
    Does your family come to visit you?

  3. Oh, Bob...sorry ignore my last post.
    I see in your earlier blog your grandchildren were coming to see you. That's terrific! I've worked with people that are dying and so many don't get many visitors. I visit some of the ones I know. We have the greatest conversations. Its a blast.

  4. It's OK to not accept, or not always accept, or even not ever accept, the situation.

    And although it may be a small thing indeed, perhaps here is a genuine advantage to being without religion in facing death: it's OK. You are not being ungrateful to a deity, or losing faith in it, or in any way having thoughts which you might see -which you might have been led to see- as guilty.

    As a physician who worked for quite a while in palliative care here in Europe, I have seen some of the most difficult feelings in religious people who felt compelled to be joyful in approaching death, and guilty that they weren't.

    So much weight of the past and future, when all we ever have is the present anyway. You have it right: one day at a time.

  5. Hello Bob... I don't know if my story will help you or not, but here it is... Take from it what you will.

    About 9 years ago some friends of mine and I were involved in an accident which left my body so broken that I had to lay there and watch 2 of my friends die by drowning because I couldn't get to them, though they were only inches away from me. I was in more pain than I thought it possible to endure, and this was increased by the passing of my friends and the pain of my other friends. There were 6 of us in total and there were, in the end, 2 survivors. The other survivor suffered such severe brain trauma that he was reduced to the state of an infant... In a 36 year old mans body.

    I was told that I would not survive. Then, as it became apparent that I would, I was told that I would be paralyzed. I don't know how or why but my body fixed itself quite well. I still live in constant pain, but no one knows that but me and my immediate circle of family and friends. I walk, I make love, I play with my children and I don't take pain medication for the normal pain, and only ibuprofen or tylenol for headaches and such.

    What did I learn from this experience? While I laid there, utterly broken and helpless, I looked at death and I couldn't see anything. It's not that there was nothing to see, but it was more like I was driving down the road and there was a hill in front of me. It may have been a cliff leading to the abyss, or it may have opened out into a valley, or it may have veered off into a completely new direction. I have no clue what was there, if anything at all, but this is what I took from my experience:

    Death is neither the beginning nor the end, but an inevitable, unavoidable part of life. We hear all the time about how humans fear the unknown. Well, that is not true of us all, is it? Were that the case, cities would have been built upwards rather than outwards, and no 2 groups of people would ever have met. No ships would have been built, no new lands discovered, no friends or enemies made.

    It may be that, in death, there is nothing else for us, in which case it will be like going to sleep and having a dreamless night. It may be that there is some new road to travel, so new friends (or enemies) to make and some new lands to discover. No one knows, and that is why there is no reason to fear it. Do what you can to live as long and as well as you can, for as long as you wish. Not because you fear the next stage of the journey, but because you are not ready to end this stage just yet. And when you are ready, or when the choice is taken out of your hands, know that you meet the next challenge head on with wonder, curiosity and pride. And, if there really is anything on the other side, look for me there. I will be there soon enough!

    Good luck, Bob.

  6. Hey, Bob! I'm not sure if you're able to read this, but if you can, post a short reply and I'll write more.
    This is a confusing application; my friend has to use google's e-mail and HATES it, as it's terribly non-intuitive. Don't they have anyone on staff who can design a simple app?
    -- Kris, who is becoming less and less fond of Google

  7. Kris how do I get in touch with youl No email address

  8. Bob: I definitely feel for your situation and understand, a bit, what you are going through. I saw it from the other side, watching a loved one die. Here's a post I made on vjack's blog Atheist Revolution (

    My wife died 2 days before last Xmas after being given 4 years to live 16 years ago. 11 years ago she got a lung transplant. The last 2 years of her life were very bad as the drugs she was taking due to the transplant were destroying her liver and kidneys. She was on dialysis about 16 months.

    Never once in all that time did we seriously discuss religion, there was simply no need to. There were the occasional jokes, like the fact that she was probably the most prayed for atheist in the world, but she understood the sentiment behind the desire to pray for her. When she got the transplant she said she wanted a sign put up that said PRAYER with the red circle and slash through it. I told her that was, of course, the proper juju to neutralize their incantations.

    We certainly put the lie to the idea of no atheists in foxholes, we were in one for 16 years and never felt any urge to pray, nor were we wracked with doubts or fears about what would happen after she was gone.

    When the time finally came I was devastated and deeply angry that a person as great as she was should simply cease to exist, it seemed like a crime against nature. The idea that she had moved on in any way and that I might meet her again would have been tremendous comfort, but how does one choose to believe an absurd delusion? The answer is you can't.

    Here is my blog post on her death:

    If you scroll down on the right you will find a list of labels, click on Darcy to read more. There are many posts past this post that talk about how I'm dealing with it all.

  9. Hey bob, I just found your site and realized how close you are (geographically). I was wondering if you would accept strange visitors at this stage? My email is radfo1ce @ Gmail . com without the spaces.
    As a fellow atheist, I was hoping not only to learn from your experiences, but to help you out with some (probably needed) comic relief and intellectually stimulating conversation.
    I also have a bachelor's in psychology. I was just wondering, because it seems in another world, we would have been a good match for friendship.
    If not, that's ok and I understand completely. Let me know either way, and I hope things go as well as possible for you.

  10. Dear Bob,
    I'm so sorry for your pain. I read your blog and I'm very concerned about how you feel right. You mentioned you had a real setback in your thinking? What did you mean by that? Can I help?

  11. Hi Bob,

    NO problem with the atheist assumption/orientation you have, but is it really a dichotomy between (a) religion vs (b) atheist? Isn't there a 3rd way that endruns both of those? I wonder if you can read at all, you might look at Robert Monroe's incredible series of 3 books: 'Journeys Out of the Body', 'Far Journeys', 'Ultimate Journey'. No, it isn't airy fairy New Age stuff, Monroe was really down to earth. I think it could be quite an eye-opener, and far more interesting than most anything I've ever read in areas of religion, atheism, or New Age fantasy.
    All best wishes,

  12. Something that helps me: Most physicists think that the flow of time is an illusion, which takes the sting out of death. Einstein sure thought so. bear with me for a few paragraphs.
    Start with Einstein's theory of special relativity, which states that the speed of light is the same for all observers no matter what speed that observer is already traveling. Hundreds of experiments have shown that special relativity is accurate. The universe under this theory can be represented as a four dimensional "block" of sorts.
    A way to imagine this is to represent each instant in the universe on the surface of a very thin piece of paper. If you looked at the paper, you could see little tiny galaxies and stuff, like a photograph. Now as each instant of the universe ticks by, another page is added to the top of the previous piece of paper. Eventually the galaxies would spread apart, and stars would twinkle out. In this way the universe, through its entire history, would end up looking like a big stack of paper (a 3-d block). It is 3-d because we represented each instant of the universe as a 2-d piece of paper, and the third dimension here (the height of the stack of paper) is time.
    Since the universe is actually 3-d, when you add all of the instants of time together you get a 4-d block (this is a simplification, but good enough for our purpose). Everything in the 4-d block has always existed and will always exist. Universe + time = 4-d block.
    You can think of your life as being a movie, where each instant is shown on a separate frame. Our instinct is to imagine the projector shining on one frame at a time, always sweeping forward, and once the light passes that frame no longer exists. That is not the case at all. Rather, there is a light always illuminating every frame of the film. They are all equally real.
    But don't we experience time as sweeping forward? There isn't a zillion versions of me, after all. Well, actually, according to the above, there are. You are just one frame in that movie, thinking they are the only frame. All the other frames also think they are the only frame. Rather than thinking of time, you need to think of yourself as not a 3-d person sweeping through time, but as a 4-d person existing in all of those frames at once.
    Once you die, the past frames don't go away. The flow of time is an illusion, so those frames always existed and will always exist, each with the projector light always shining on them. Saying you fear death (one boundary of your 4d existence) is like saying you fear never getting to Jupiter (as another part of your 4d existence never leaves Earth).

  13. There are no illusions but delusions. And time is not one. However, we hav already been dead, so we know we can cheat death.

  14. Stay Strong Brother