X-Message-Number: 6822
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 1996 12:07:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: Loss vs. Blame

Keith Henson writes about sense of loss. I felt a strong sense of loss
myself not so long ago, when my own father died after refusing to be
frozen. I suppose I could have blamed the nursing home for advising him
against cryonics, or his best friend who thought cryonics was a foolish
waste of money, or myself for not trying harder to change my father's mind
... but the fact is, the real culprit was my father himself. He simply DID
NOT WANT IT, just as most people in the world simply DO NOT WANT IT and
prefer permanent death, for reasons that seem painful and sad to us.

It is hard to blame people we care for when they make life/death decisions
that offend our feelings of right and wrong. Several people were reluctant
to blame the AIDS patient in Florida whom Steve Harris writes about; they
would rather blame Steve. Others find it impossible to blame Timothy
Leary; they would rather blame me and Mike Darwin. Still others seem
incapable of blaming Jack Kevorkian's patients for wanting to kill
themselves; they would rather blame Kevorkian for killing them. There is a
unifying thread here: a perception of the patient as a victim who is not 
competent to make decisions and is thus exempt from blame.

Well, we may blame care-givers if they supply substandard care; but where
*decisions* are concerned, if the patient is calm, sane, rational, and
independently minded, the patient must take the ultimate responsibility
for deciding how (s)he wishes to die. 

I note that friends of Leary in the cryonics community tried hard to
persuade him to opt for being frozen, near the end. If we are going to
start blaming people for their actions, logically we should blame those
friends for being so ineffectual. 

This of course seems unreasonable and unfair--just as it is unreasonable
and unfair to accuse me of "poisoning Leary's mind" against cryonics (a
concept that seems ludicrous at best). I suggest it is more rational to
agree that Timothy Leary was not a malleable person; he simply did not
want to be frozen, and the people around him were no more able to change
his mind on this topic than they were able to persuade him to stop killing
himself by slow starvation. 

--Charles Platt, speaking for myself not CryoCare


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