David Goodall ends his life at 104 with a final powerful statement on euthanasia

[Hekate]

39. I'm glad that he had the choice and the means. There is no "cure" for old age...

Last edited Mon May 14, 2018, 03:10 PM - Edit history (2)

When I was a kid I used to think living to a hundred or even 200 would be fabulous. But now I am 70, and realize that everybody gets the same number of "youth" years, and nowadays some extension of "middle age" years -- but after that, old age is what you've got.

Whether your personal old age is two decades or ten decades (as in, living to 150) what you are living with is an increasingly frail body with all its bits faling off or breaking, and a near inevitability of dementia at some point, because the brain is just another body part.

We have 7 billion people on this planet. When we have sorted out that problem, get back to me about extending life indefinitely. Then get back to me about "curing" old age.

I'm not in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet. But there is a lesson in Greek mythology:

I met the Sibyl at Cumae, quotes TS Eliot in his epigraph to The Waste Land.

"I saw myself, with my own eyes, the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys asked her: "Sibyl, what do you want?" she responded: "I want to die."
Petronius, Satyricon

The god Apollo asked his faithful prophetess what gift he could give her, and she asked for eternal life. Unfortunately, she neglected to ask for eternal youth, which Apollo could not afterwards grant her, so that she shriveled and withered over the years into an insect husk of the woman she had once been, living a wretched eternity in a glass bottle.
The poet T.S. Eliot used this passage as the epigram for his great poem "The Waste Land," and indeed his work is filled with prophets living on the edge of chaos: the Sibyl of Cumae shrinking into nothingness...
http://www.deepthought.org/~efulton/sibyl.html