Do you want to be resuscitated? Do you want doctors to use extreme measures to save your life, or do you prefer a natural death? How much do you want your family to know about your situation? Who is designated to make decisions on your behalf in the event you can’t make them yourself? In the event you pass, what do you want done with your body? Do you care?
At some point in your future, perhaps at any time, and with 100% certainty, you will take the grandest, scariest, most adventurous, least predictable rocket trip of your life. If you were an astronaut with NASA, would you plan for this trip? Hell yes, you would!
While life is a spiritual journey, there are some very practical tasks that deserve your attention, and as I’ve said, if you don’t plan your life (or your death) then someone else will plan it for you. If you’re like me, then having someone else drive is NOT what you want. I want to chart my own course and sail it, thank you very much. So let’s get started.
Like many of you, I felt sucker-punched by Bourdain’s decision, and I am struggling to make sense of it…to find an emotional shelf to put it on. I do that by wrestling the issue to the ground, a messy process, sometime capturing my work-in-progress thoughts with you, as incomplete as they are.
Branding all old people “cool” is a disservice to the cool and the uncool, for it lumps old people together as a homogenous group and makes tragic assumptions catering to the efficiency of institutionalized senior care.
