Being Mortal, But Moral?
This post is about death. If you feel
its too morbid a topic to talk about and would rather not read anymore please
feel free to stop right now. If not lets continue talking.
The average human life is replete
with failures, setbacks and rejections. We put on a brave face, tell each
other that its all passing clouds and we have to stay positive and get on with
living our lives as best as we can. But there is one facet of our life which we
cannot change despite all the best intentions, positive thoughts and Facebook memes shared between strangers and acquaintances and that's the great leveler, death.
Now you may wonder why i am talking so
freely about something we all avoid talking about, most of us even hesitate to
think about and you are right- its only because people like me, who work in the
healthcare field are on an ever present acquaintance with death, so much so that
it makes a lot of us doctors talk matter of fact way about death to everyone we
meet as if we are somehow immune to its effects. And we need that shield of
immortality (mentally) to walk into sick rooms all day long, everyday of the
year to stand beside people who are sick enough to die soon and treat them
without giving thought about catching something from those patients and dying
ourselves. If we think that way for even one minute, we wont be good doctors at
all, we would just have to retire.
But death comes to doctors too-
despite their denials in their own fallibility. And death comes to patients-
despite their doctors and their best efforts too. I have seen so many doctors who give that
perfunctory – he/she will be alright soon in the hope that they will be alright
and not because they know for a certainty that the patient will be alright.
Its a humbling fact to agree to but its the truth. For all the advances we have
in diagnostics we can still predict only the amount of damage and disease we
discover at that point in a patients body and we cannot with any fair degree of certainty extrapolate the results from the test to predict the date of death.
A man who get a 64-slice or 128-slice sonogram and pronounced to be as healthy
as a mule heart-wise can still drop dead the next day because the heart muscle
may refuse to cooperate with the doctors prediction or the liver refuses to produce
clotting factors or the kidney has been abused too much and simply shuts down. And even the postmortem might not be conclusive
for it can only tell about how it happened- a thrombotic event or a coronary
occlusion but not about why it happened when it did.
That “why death comes when it comes”
is still a whole lot of mystery to everyone. Oh, we have theories to explain
it. Modern medicine has all these researches about aging, cellular
damage,apoptosis- programmed cell death which is the he simplest and most
widely believed reason. It goes something like this - every cell in the body
contains DNA, which acquires gene mutations over time. These mutations can
sometimes occur in an instant or they can build up slowly over decades and when
these mutation reach a certain tip over point- cell death occurs. If enough
cells die- the organ dies. If some vital organ dies- the whole organism- the
human body in this case dies. Thats just
the scientific explanation of how we die. But the why, still remains
unanswered. Death is final, death happens to everyone, we are all on the road
to death and we might drop dead tomorrow- you, me and everyone of us. Accept that and it makes the rest of our life
easier to live with.
And now i come to the moral part of
this post. Knowing that we are all going to die soon, despite all our best laid
plans and maneuverings and a thousand little things we do to ease our lives in
the long run- what if we do not have that long run? What if we were to die
tomorrow? Would we still lie, cheat, back-stab, betray and character assassinate
if we know that we would no longer be around to reap the benefits later on? Would we still make long term plans
that involve short term evil actions justifying it to our conscience as
necessary evil on our way to future success, if we realize we don't have a
future at all? Or would try to live a
more moral life remembering that what we do today is not going to change
anything to our benefit? Will morality rise if we knew that our days were
numbered or would we go the other way? I am curious to know what you think. So do share your thoughts with me on this
question.
P.S. This question about the morality
of our actions applies only to the average normal person among us who wont mind
cutting a few corners to get ahead in life, regretting the necessity of doing
so all the time under their pricking conscience. For the other kind- the born
evil kind of people, this question does not apply, for they would go to their
graves doing evil to the last minute even if they never benefit from it. Lately i have been meeting a lot of such evil
people who gave me the germ to write this post. And i am curious to know others
experiences about such ones.
