On Human Suffering

 

Suffer Your Way Off This Earth

When one of Vas. Vas. Rozanov’s brothers died suddenly in his sleep, a female relative was horrified, not because he had not been shriven and received last rites from the church, but because he had not suffered. “How hideous that is, to die without having agonized your way into the other world, without having expiated your sins in pain, without having suffered!”

Rozanov, A Dark Visage

 

Old Irish Prayer

Dear Lord, please send me a quick and painless death.

 

Nope. Sorry, homosapien. You want to die right with the Lord, you got to agonize your way into Death, and the more lengthy and drawn-out the suffering is, the better the Lord feels about it.

 

To follow this logic to its conclusion, we can justify the existence of nursing homes. These way stations to Death, havens for the useless and superannuated, allow for the proper agonizing and suffering that is a prerequisite for entering the Other World.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie: Here We Be. Where Be We?]