[MD] On Death and Dying

[Arlo Bensinger]

Joe,

My deepest condolences. My mother also has a serious medical 
condition with which I've been occupied.

Pirsig's words on Chris' death in the afterward to ZMM is one of the 
more meaningful short considerations of "death" I have come across. 
Worth repeating. The "pattterns" Pirisig talks about, I believe, are 
the dialogic inter-social, and intellectual, patterns we build over 
our biological lives. They are larger than "us", and are not limited 
nor confined to the biological patterns from which they emerge. Your 
wife lives not only in the voices and echoes and dreams of those who 
knew her, but in the myriad of ways her participation with them 
effected their being, their patterns, their activity. In this sense, 
I believe, we are all at once both echoes and sound.

"I tend to become taken with philosophic questions, going over them 
and over them and over them again in loops that go round and round 
and round until they either produce an answer or become so 
repetitively locked on they become psychiatrically dangerous, and now 
the question became obsessive: "Where did he go?"

Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He 
had a bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of 
books. He was a real, live person, occupying time and space on this 
planet, and now suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack 
at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed 
back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of 
these answers made any sense.

It had to be asked: What was it I was so attached to? Is it just 
something in the imagination? When you have done time in a mental 
hospital, that is never a trivial question. If he wasn't just 
imaginary, then where did he go? Do real things just disappear like 
that? If they do, then the conservation laws of physics are in 
trouble. But if we stay with the laws of physics, then the Chris that 
disappeared was unreal. Round and round and round. He used to run off 
like that just to make me mad. Sooner or later he would always 
appear, but where would he appear now? After all, really, where did he go?

The loops eventually stopped at the realization that before it could 
be asked "Where did he go?" it must be asked "What is the 'he' that 
is gone?" There is an old cultural habit of thinking of people as 
primarily something material, as flesh and blood. As long as this 
idea held, there was no solution. The oxides of Chris's flesh and 
blood did, of course, go up the stack at the crematorium. But they 
weren't Chris.

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an 
object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the 
flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The 
pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that 
neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete 
control of.

Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. 
But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the 
center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern 
was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. 
That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery 
headstones and any material property or representation of the 
deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by 
finding some new material thing to center itself upon." (Pirsig, ZMM Afterward)

Arlo