Every now and then another novel about immortality will appear on the charts. Dara Horn’s Eternal Life, first published in 2018, is a good one.
The story line is predictable: A woman and her lover (who is also a rabbi-in-training in Rome-controlled Jerusalem) agree to accept immortality as payment for the life of their son who is dying in an epidemic. The son lives, and so do the parents – forever! The novel then skips around in the eras, exposing our chaotic past in various parts of the globe.
The reader might think that immortality would be a great blessing in times that featured the millions of deaths by mass executions, poverty, wars, plagues. So why aren’t these characters happy? It’s hard to be happy when you have to witness the deaths of your spouses, children and friends over and over and over. Everyone dies. Everyone but one man and one woman, not even together.
It turns out that immortality is a hardship, but we long for it anyway — like buying lottery tickets every week! The odds are impossible and people who DO win the lottery find life burdensome because of greedy friends and poor money management.
We look at videos of centenarians who can barely blow out their candles on their birthday cake and say to ourselves, “Not me. Not me. I don’t want to live longer than my ability to stand on my own two feet and blow out my candles.” And then we spend tortured months and years trying to “cure” the diseases that would send us to an earlier grave. As we fight to live, we feel weak, miserable, sick. If we’re “lucky,” we live to be 100 – and we can’t blow out the candles.
So what should we be hoping for here? I think we should be hoping for enlightened times, i.e. times that would allow us to treat ourselves as humanely as our pets. We euthanize our ailing dogs and cats with deep regrets because we don’t want to see them suffer. We think it’s sinful to do the same for ourselves. Do we really believe that God is less humane than human beings?
It seems positively wretched that it’s impossible to control our own death. The arguments against euthanasia are all about generalizations like the “slippery slope.” The argument goes like this: If we allow limited euthanasia, soon there will be unlimited euthanasia. Greedy relatives and overworked doctors will kill off patients rather than opt for treatment.
I’m not impressed. Sure there will be mistakes. Greedy relatives will continue to plot against their rich uncles. However, I don’t think I should suffer because of these “mistakes.” Some people are willing to put down a dog because they don’t want it anymore. Do cases like this cause us to watch our own dear pets die in agony? No. We do the humane thing and end their misery.
The evil in human nature is no argument for not doing good. That’s all I’m sayin’.
