Our regular writer, Terry Field, a retired English businessman who lives in Normandy, France has wintered in Florida for the past three years. He and his wife have made numerous friends and now some are passing. Here are some very thoughtful reflections by Terry.- GNH
Violence Done to the Conditioned
by Terry Field
My sojourn in America during the winter months has been a revelation. Of course, superficially, the immense wealth of the continent, the potent distribution of that wealth through the ruthlessly beautiful economic system offers personal pleasures available here that are all but impossible to experience elsewhere. American friends illustrate what we overseas know; a friendliness and openness on meeting that is rare in the ancient settled societies of the old worlds overseas.
SO far, so pleasant. But more and more, other, previously unseen things rise to the surface. At the group level, the amusing lunacy of the contrived bitterness of the ‘debates’ of the Democratic Party ‘contenders’ leaves one aware that brute anarchy now reigns there (as it does in England). The things bigots who loathe America from the left in Europe are easy to observe here. Yet for me, I feel no such hatred or any kind of contempt - rather a depth of sadness and commiseration. I feel that I would be as they are had I not been born in different soils and under different skies. Nothing more than that.
My sadnesses are not tinged with even the slightest sense of arrogance, and I have no feeling that the world that made me is in any sense safer of better. These are simply differences that illustrate the almost unlimited ability to fashion unique ‘social minds’’ dependent upon the laws of economic circumstance, and the fluidity of opportunity.
Firstly, the vulnerability of Americans should be addressed. These people are in general hot-house plants, fearful of the cold of dangerous life they see outside their borders, and within, they are saturated with the fear of death. The exultation of the individual removes the protection of knowing your life is simply an element in the totality. Other civilisations have lived with death as routine, in all ages of their populations, in great number until preventative medicine, but also, in other societies, lives are lived unsegregated by age.
In America, and more and more in its psychologically colonized mini-copy England, life is lived by segregated age groups. This produces odd delusions that carry over as the seven ages of man are experienced. From infanthood through to adulthood, all manner of beneficial preventative interventions guide the body on its journey to perfection as it grows to middle life. The deficient neonates simply do not make it to see the sun, so the pool of the imperfect is tiny indeed before medicine acts to polish the cut stones to their shining glory.
Then decline sets in, as it must, but in America, ‘all can be controlled’, and the same promise of beneficial intervention is offered to the rotting bodies as was offered to the young bodies. The promises are offered by the most absurdly revered, and in my view the most deeply corrupted social sub group in America, the ‘doctors’. Those always pictured smiling in long white coats and never without a sphygmomanometer round their necks. The marketers dream mini-godlet.
As the aging accelerates, the mechanical, chemical and cellular offerings proliferate. All with the promise that is so very seductive. ‘We may be able to help you’. For the old aging consumer of future joys, this sentence is all they need to hear. All their lives they have been upsold and the ‘winners’ have enjoyed the most ‘upselling’. So they are putty in the ‘doctors’ hands, and they always acquiesce and buy the hope. Remember that America is NOT a European civilisation. Here the democracy of unlimited self- help, unencumbered by class and structural constraints applies to all matters and that includes ‘healthcare’. They really should remove the word ‘care, and add the word ‘offering’.
The consequences of this life-by-hoping’ can, to a European’s eye such as the writers, bespeak not simply tragedy close to murder, but also the degradation of what it always has been to be human. Three examples of direct experience need to be offered in summery form here. They happened to our friends, we saw it done, and my wife and I are shocked and much reduced at experiencing their consequences.
The first example; an 83-year-old gentle man who ran our gardens in our ‘community of condominiums’. Like all fair skinned who live in the sun, he had skin cancers that were removed from time to time. Had the worst happened, at his age, the tumors would very probably have been slow in forming and he could have expected some years more and he certainly did NOT need what the surgeons sold to him.
IN short, they removed the top 7 inches of his scalp – in its entirety – and replaced it with a similar massive graft from his leg. The dear gentle fellow, grey and ashen on his little electric cart afterwards tried to recover and garden, but of course he was done for. In such a shocked and weakened state he contracted a fungal infection of the lungs, entered hospital very shortly afterwards, and as I sat at his bedside holding his hand as he was dying, all I could see was the dollar signs in the business managements’ eyes.
The second example. A gentle, quite lovely person in her early mid-nineties who, when we first met, and she had hobbled over leaning on her wheeled-frame to greet me said ‘Nice to know you; anything you want doing, call me and I’ll be there’ – I nearly cried on the spot. Well, on returning to the condo in November, I walked past her home, and her disabled 73 year old son came out in his wheelchair, and I asked after his mum. ‘She died a horrible death last summer, those bloody surgeons butchered her for money. It would never happen in Europe’ he said.
Shocked, I asked how. ‘Well, she had infections in her teeth and gums ( to be expected at 94 years old I would consider). They took the teeth out to stop the infection, but it didn’t work, so rather than being kind to her, they offered her jaw reconstruction. They took out her jaw bone, left it to heal for some months and offered jaw reconstruction surgery but she died before they could do it. They earned thousands out of it, Bastards’. That is what he said, and I believe every word, particularly the very last one.
The third and last example is current. It had its conclusion yesterday. My dear wife and I are not yet close to getting over it. A good friend, a sophisticated French Jewess who fled Nice after the rise of antisemitism a few years ago and came to the ‘safety’ of America contracted a blood cancer. She went to a treatment centre in Texas. They were clear, at 73, and quite frail, she would not survive the radical treatment, which involved the destruction of the bone marrow and its re-seeding with new marrow from a donor. She went home, and continued to research other possibilities. She was driven, a professional woman of education, intellect and great sophistication. An admirable French woman. And keen to live.
SO she visited another cancer treatment centre, also offering the same treatment. ‘Yes we can do it for you, there is an X% total population failure rate but we can do it. Success is a possibility'. Note the repeated word ‘possible’. That was enough for her. Her treatment began in January; we attended a New Years eve supper before she entered the clinic and friends surrounded her with good wishes. She was coquettish, happy as a girl and keen.
She entered the hospital. She had the chemical cocktail administered followed by the ‘infusion’. Her own bones where stripped clean of her DNA. We waited for a good outcome. I was not greatly hopeful. No such outcome happened.
Her kidneys were overwhelmed, her heart struggled, her bowel began to die. We were called to go to the hospital to speak some French to her, since she was barely conscious in the intensive care unit. On arriving I went ahead of my wife; I have seen much death and wished to pre-warn her if the sight would be dreadful. Which it was.
Clearly the lady was dying. But of course, the staff, being American, were dreadful in their inappropriate happiness. “She has had a new birthday with a new blood DNA" chirruped a nurse to me. Kafka could have been surprised. She declined, the doctors called her family from France, they advised the procedure had failed, she would be removed from the ITU per her ‘living will’ terms and left in a palliative ward to die.
The process was long and hard. The observation of the French family was that a humane intervention would have eased the passing had she been in France, but they assumed the doctors and lawyers are terrified of litigation ‘this being America’. Our friend died four days later. Her funeral was yesterday. Now she chose intervention; she positively sought it out. BUT the certainty, not the suspicion remains that the advise that ‘recovery is possible’ is given because morality and actions in American medicine are fatally contaminated by money.
Wealth here is a curse. Add to that unending lying about the undesirability of our beautiful decline to certain, desirable and dignified death is an invention of a novel society cut off entirely from human experience that supports stronger social structures in ancient civilisations. In Europe – as of course in most other parts of the world - we know about ‘fate’. We know that ‘Alla fleish ist grasse. ’ Knowing that would produce different offerings, choices and endings.
ON a personal note, I am seventy now. Oldish, shorter by an inch, and changing quickly. What I was I no longer am. I knew this was my fate. I am happy with it. I wish not to be saved by radical interventions from what it will bring. I ask only (as a concession to living in ‘civilised times) for an easing from pain if it is needed. I accept my fate and smile kindly at it.
I want my step grandchildren to enjoy the space I vacate, and the meager resources I pass to them via my most dear wife, and whom a fervently hope lives in close communion with her family after my soul goes to my unfathomable maker. I am humbled and grateful at being allowed to exist. I do not want, in life, my body blended with the remnants of dead others to see dawns others should enjoy for me. More could be written, but the fear-induced violence of the society I pass winter-time in is now at such a crescendo that the sound of it is deafening, and enough is enough. – Terry Field
