I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence.
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Today is the 21st Mother’s Day since Mum died.
She would have been 95 years old on her birthday in August this year.
As I’ve written elsewhere, she was a mother’s mother. Karen and I were talking today about that and something I wrote in that post about Nicholas, 2 years old at the time in 2002, playing in the front yard, running around a bit too close to the footpath and road:
Mum, having only just recovered from a major lower leg fracture, did her best to run after him, even before anyone else reacted. No thought for herself.
It’s also Dad’s birthday today. He was 89 when he died in 2020 and would have been 92 today.
I try to remember to light a candle each year on my mother’s and father’s birthday. Today (May 14), it was for Dad, and he would have been 91.
On August 17th this year, it will be 20 years since Mum died (four days before her 74th birthday). On January 7th this year, it was 2 years since Dad died.
So, you can imagine my mild surprise when Facebook notified me that it was Dad’s birthday and invited me to post on his timeline. Apparently Facebook time stretches beyond this life…
I’ve noticed this phenomenon a number of times now. Of course, given concerns about “what social media knows about us” and “how it controls what we think” (to which I’m not entirely unsympathetic, but about which I have not yet succumbed to total paranoia), I suppose it’s comforting to know that Facebook hasn’t yet figured out whether or not an account owner is still alive. Seems like a not-too-crazy-hard application of traditional symbol systems AI to search death records etc and put two and two together though.
At some point in time, the living Facebook population may outnumber the non-living. Perhaps just in time for Facebook Metaverse v2.0: reanimation? That may be taking AI too far though. 😉
Still, I thought I’d take Facebook up on the invitation to post on Dad’s apparently eternal timeline. Given his particular sense of humour, and that he was a Uniting Church minister, I’m pretty sure he would have found it funny.
Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) legislation is being discussed starting from March 17 in the South Australian parliament.
A little more than a year ago, my dad expressed a wish to die every day I was with him for the last week of his life. He was living in Tasmania. While there are amendments to be accepted, VAD legislation is now on the way to being passed there.
I recently took part in a discussion of VAD in South Australia at the Blackwood Uniting Church, a special meeting of the monthly philosophy group, supported by a well thought out presentation by a palliative care doctor. The consensus seemed to be support for VAD.
A cursory glance through my blog will show that I don’t believe in gods of any sort. One problem with religion in general is that it encourages people to pretend to know things they can’t possibly know, and potentially (and this is the crucial bit) base important life decisions on such belief. I’ve written elsewhere about what counts as good belief.
With respect to Christianity at least, the more liberal the denomination, the less salvation by faith thinking there is, and the more emphasis on living a good and caring life due to some notion of (a God of) love there usually is. Of course, you don’t need religion for that.
Especially given that there was a “Non-Christian but I wish to support the Group” option, I was encouraged to sign up on the Christians In Support of VAD website after the philosophy group discussion.
The more names on petitions and lists in favour of choosing a “good death”, the better.
Try to enjoy life now. There’s a very good chance that this is the only one you’ll get. And if your end of life scenario sucks, remember: it’s your life, not some imaginary sky fairy’s. You should get to choose, in consultation with those you care about.
Whatever you believe, the fact is that each of us was born into a life that none of us asked for.
You can choose to consider life as a gift, or to simply accept the fact of existence and embrace it. Or both, if you like.
We were not alive for 14 billion years (give or take), and we won’t be alive for even longer while the heat death of the universe plays out over trillions of years.
But we should, where possible, have some say in the manner, time, and place of our exit from life.
Anyway, let’s hope that VAD legislation is passed in SA.
After upgrading my MacBook to macOS Catalina, WINE stopped working, because 32-bit applications were no longer permitted to run. I had been using WINE to run the Windows IRIS program for image processing and DSLR photometry as part of my minimalist approach.
After my father died in January this year, his older MacBook was passed on to me. It still has Yosemite as the OS, so WINE & IRIS work fine on it!
Given all the times we spent talking about astronomy, the special time we shared watching the 2001 Leonids under a dark country sky, and the “help desk” support I tried to give him over the phone, I know that dad would approve of my use of his old computer in this way.
I’ve had some conversations in recent times that have ended in disagreement over the question of whether members of homo sapiens are more important or special than members of other animal species.
But what do we mean by special?
Relationships with other beings, human or non-human, make the participants special to one another.
Particular things about us make us special, e.g. tool use, intelligence, culture.
The holy books of some religions and other ideological traditions often claim that humans are special, perhaps even chosen in some way.
It’s important to distinguish between these different types of special-ness.
The first type is subjective and derives from a shared history, an emotional bond. For some people, the death of an animal can be as devastating as the loss of a relative or human friend to someone else. There’s no right or wrong in that. It just is.
The second type can be tested; other species use tools, have high intelligence and some may even have their own kind of culture (e.g. humpback whales).
Although a person of faith is unlikely to agree with this, the third type must be supported by evidence, and since, as Carl Sagan reminds us, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, this is a difficult requirement to meet.
Humans are meaning creators. Relationships are central to being human and meaning is often created in relationship with others; not always, but very often; some do choose to find meaning in solitude.
My father’s health was in decline late last year and more rapidly before my eyes in the first week of 2020. However, his death on January 7 2020 has not changed my view of the special-ness of homo sapiens relative to other species.
Dad was special to me because he was, well, my father. We had an emotional connection, a shared biological and social history, a relationship spanning more than 5 decades. I am in the process of mourning his loss. This does not necessarily imply that we or members of homo sapiens in general are special in any other sense.
We are free to choose who to become. If we are special in any sense, it is due to the responsibility we have to accept the human condition and to leave the world better than we found it, irrespective of the fact that we will not be around to see our legacy.
…but what is not possible is not to choose…if I do not choose, that is still a choice. (Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism)
I gave a eulogy at my Dad’s funeral six days ago. Before the transcript of the eulogy below, I want to make some preliminary background remarks.
My father, Kelvin Benn, was born on May 14 1931 and died on January 7 2020 after recurrent bouts of pneumonia. He had emphysema and a rare blood cancer that a small fraction of patients with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma present with.
After the usual indignities of being a hospital patient, falls in and out of hospital, being on oxygen, and having intra-venous antibiotics a couple of times, Dad began eating less and became increasingly unwilling to take medications. The intention was still to try to get him well enough to be able to leave hospital and go into a nursing home. The reality is that he had lost the will to live by late 2019 and certainly by early 2020.
I spent time with Dad in hospital from January 1 to January 6. We said our goodbyes. I felt there was a good chance I would never see him again. I returned home, uncertain of his future, intending to return again soon. My wife, kids and I had a few days planned in Melbourne from January 8. I thought that if Dad’s condition deteriorated I would at least be able to get back to him (in Tasmania) at short notice. He died late in the afternoon of January 7…
My mother died in 2002 after failed heart valve replacement surgery. Dad married again in 2006. Dawn (dad’s wife) gave a eulogy followed in turn by my sister Julie and I. In the last part of the eulogy, Julie and I took turns reading short extracts from a few of my father’s short funeral sermons that resonated with both of us.
What comes through from these extracts is a focus on relationships, a requirement for personal responsibility, freedom and the necessity of choice, a consideration of the consequences of our actions, and a mandate to do good whenever possible. This resonated with my sister and I and aligns with my own philosophical position, derived from existentialism and consequentialist ethics.
It also gives me some hope for the future of our species that an atheist and a Christian can agree on so much.
What follows is the eulogy I gave at Dad’s funeral on January 13 at Pilgrim Uniting Church in Launceston. My theme was commonality, something we desperately need to focus more on if we are collectively to survive the decades to come.
It’s easy to focus on the differences between people. Dad and I were different in many ways. But we also had a lot in common.
We were both in The St John Ambulance Brigade from an early age, attending sporting and other community events as first aiders, and both becoming cadet sergeants.
Along with the anchor tattoo, Dad also had the S-J-A-B tattoo to prove it!
We both studied at theological college, and enjoyed having philosophical discussions.
We both took our work seriously.
Further to Julie’s comments, Dad often used to say that rights come with responsibilities. As a teenager, mostly I would just internally groan at that…
However, I’ve found myself increasingly saying this sort of thing in recent years to my kids and others, along with: “That music is too loud!”
Then one day, I realised that I had become my father. 🙂
Something I also remember as a young teenager was that if I was ever rude to my mother, out would come the belt!
Of course, those occurrences were few and far between! 😉
Dad’s work as a Uniting Church minister kept him well occupied and, as Julie noted, when he wasn’t out preaching or providing pastoral care, he was often up working late in his office, especially on Saturdays, preparing the sermon for the following day.
Even after retirement, Dawn can probably relate to Dad not straying far from the office for long periods!
Some of my favourite memories of Dad are from beach holidays in the seventies, the two of us body surfing or snorkelling.
As Julie also noted, holidays like those at Port Hughes were good times too, even if my first jetty catch was a puffer fish!
Another fond memory is from 1998, when Dad and I stayed up until the wee hours in Mallala watching a meteor shower as the Earth ploughed through the debris left by a comet.
Dad had a good sense of humour.
In an email to me in 2016 he said:
“I have a few things I want to share with my GP … Will let you know if he thinks I may not live to be 100 after all!!”
When he was in hospital recently, a measure of his wellness was the frequency of his witty remarks.
Dad gave a Probus club talk in 2015 titled “Strange Things that Happen at Funerals”. In one anecdote from that talk he says:
One day the undertaker picked me up to conduct a funeral for a man he knew, so I asked him to tell me something about him. “What was he like,” I asked. His answer stunned me: “This is the first decent thing he has done in his life,” I was told. “What about his family,” I asked. “They are all the same”, he replied. So, I thought I had better used the old, sterner burial service. Afterwards the family came up to me and said, “Lovely service, Father.” It just goes to show that you can never tell how people are going to react.
Like many fathers and sons, Dad and I had our disagreements and at times we hurt each other with words.
However, in a 2015 email exchange, in which we had disagreed on matters of belief, he said:
“Unless we are willing to be open to change, our thinking can only become stagnant. The older we get the more we realise how little we really know…or we have wasted a life. It has been a great blessing that we have always been able to be open and honest with one another.”
I’m sure there are times we could have been even more honest and open, but the point is to intend to do better.
I don’t think it would be a misrepresentation to say that Dad emphasised the social justice and pastoral care aspects of his faith.
He genuinely cared about people. The idea that “God is Love” became more important to Dad as time passed.
Julie’s daughter, Kate, recently found some of the funeral sermons Dad wrote. It seems appropriate to finish by reading some excerpts that resonated with both of us. At a time when so much of the world is divided, Dad’s words seem especially relevant.
“In our troubled world today we are witnessing what happens when over zealous people force their misguided views on others… We need to be aware of each other’s differences so that we will not make the fatal mistake of believing that we are right and God is on our side.
We come into this world and pass through it, leaving it either a happier & better place or a sadder & sorrier place. The choice is ours and so are the consequences of our choice.
Nobody else can live our life for us and nobody else can be held responsible for the way we live it. Freedom to choose & responsibility for actions are the two sides of the same coin.
Life is all about relationships and building relationships makes demands on us. Good relationships are costly. We are all far from perfect but we should always be striving to be better than we are.
As we think about somebody else’s death we cannot help thinking about our own life, and our accountability…to help people to become more loving, more forgiving, more compassionate, more honest, more understanding and more tolerant, more in tune with… one another.”
I was looking through a bunch of old photos and slides today and came across these star-trailed pictures (film-based) I took of the 2001 Leonid meteor shower from Malalla, South Australia:
Star trailed images taken with a tripod-mounted Pentax K100D
Meteors radiate outward from a point in the sky in the constellation Leo (called the radiant) since the Earth is ploughing into left over sublimated material from comet Temple-Tuttle in that direction.
My father and I stayed up until the wee hours watching the meteors come thick and fast. I have good memories of that evening spent with dad. After he’d had enough, I stayed up to watch them until the sun came up.
