I have a friend at work named Alec. Today was the first time I've had a chance to talk to him since the New Year. And he told me his mother died December 20.
It was quite a story. Apparently it took almost a week to get her buried (although they are Jewish, and he explained that Jewish tradition says you have to bury the dead right away). First, ... December 20 was a Friday, but by the time she died it was after sundown so the mortuary was closed for the Sabbath. When he got a hold of them on Sunday they explained that burying someone, even in ground that is already zoned for a mortuary, requires a permit from the City (and of course the City wouldn't open till Monday). Then they told him they might get the permit in time for a service on Tuesday, but they might not ... and Wednesday was out because December 25 is a LEGAL holiday even for people who don't celebrate Christmas for religious or cultural reasons. So they held the funeral on Thursday. (sigh) On the other hand apparently she left her paperwork in very clean, simple order so that it was easy to transfer the bank accounts and other funds the way they were supposed to be transferred.
But one comment struck me. He said that her health had been failing for over a year, so that it was no surprise to anybody. Also her memory had gone, and she was suffering from dementia. But still ... what he said was, "When I visited her, I still had my mother there." She didn't have her MEMORIES. Sometimes she mistook Alec for his brother, or for her late husband, or for some other earlier husband that she NEVER HAD. But he talked about memories as if they were possessions, like furniture that you might abandon when you sell your house. (The comparison uses my words, not his ... but that was the spirit of it.) In other words, he said that even losing her memories didn't make her into SOMEBODY ELSE. She still had the voice, the character, the personality, the gestures, the particular phrasings, ... and he said that it was all of THOSE things that made her HER.
And of course the reason this struck me so strongly is that there is a long tradition of intellectual opinion that says your reason and your memories are exactly what make you You. In antiquity the Platonist school (for example) taught that suicide is morally wrong because our lives belong to the gods and not to ourselves, but they made an exception in the case where you can detect the onset of irreversible madness ... because in that case You no longer exist. And certainly I've heard plenty of people say, over the years, some variation on "When I don't know who I am any more, just pull the plug because I don't want to hang around after that" ... or else "because by then I'll already be gone and all that will be left is an uninhabited body" ... or something else that identifies US with our consciousness. Maybe this is what I get for spending so much time in schools, or around academically-inclined friends. Anyway, it's almost a commonplace in my book, and you've probably heard it plenty of times too.
And this is exactly the opinion that Alec denied. He said that her mind, her reason, and her memories were NOT what constituted his mother ... they were more like things that she owned, that of course she valued, but that she could give up at need without relinquishing what was fundamental about her. What he saw in her every time he visited this last year was something deeper and more fundamental than any reason or memories, something which told him that, in spite of everything, his mother was still there lying in bed talking to him.
That wasn't the center of what he said -- in 45 minutes that we talked he spent no more than a couple of minutes on this point. It's just me who has blown it all out of proportion because I think the implications are huge, and profound.
