X-Message-Number: 27315
From: 
Subject: Re: suicide, time travel and mortality
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 09:16:05 US/Eastern

    Veronica Sullivan wrote:        


> This is just   a sad sorry rambling, It is one year since my very dear oldest
> son suicided. His autopsy   revealed his thyroid gland had shrunken down to 
> nothing.  He suffered from severe hypothyroidism which was undetected on his 
> visits to his medical   practitioner. Hypothyroidism produces a variety of 
> symptoms, including weight loss, myalgia, arthralgia and severe depression.

    http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=27284

  Hi Veronica,

   I am sorry about the death of your son and I am sorry about the 
effect that it has had on you. I am sorry about many things along 
this line. I am sorry that the current state of affairs is that we either
die suddenly and prematurely, like your son, or we die by the 
slow torture of "aging" -- watching our ability to function physically,
sexually and intellectually decay while we suffer an increasing number
of afflictions that cause us grief, time and money. "Life is hard and
then you die." 

   But tragedies are worsened if we spend our time alive grieving them. 
"Few lives can be worse than a lifetime of remorse."  

    The time is near when we may actually be able to DO 
something about this mess. I get a great deal of satisfaction and 
pleasure in life in from what I can accomplish in the struggle 
against aging and death. Most recently I virtually entirely
re-wrote the entry on "Life Extension" in Wikipedia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension

   Pardon me for being presumptuous, but I think that you might find
some pleasure in going through the Wikipedia sections on astronomy
and revising them. 

   You may even feel guilty for not grieving the loss of your son in 
some moments of life, but this does not help him and it does not 
help you. Not surrendering to aging and death partly means savoring
life while we can.  As I have experienced, the very struggle against
aging and death can be rewarding and exciting. I hope that you
can join me in this struggle and that we can enjoy each other as
comrades in battle.  If we must die, let us at least take this pleasure
in the face of the enemy. 

                                      -- Ben

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