Life is a matter of choice between birth & death. The only thing that is certain, after being born, is that death is inevitable one day.
The choice of living or dying is a daily choice for everyone. It is a choice of perspective, whether I see my life descending on a downward spiral towards death or ascending on an upward spiral of life. I can either live a lot each day or die a little each day.
On average more than a hundred million people are born every year and more than 90 million people die every year. Yet the choice of when we die is not a conscious choice, neither is it a sub-conscious choice; as our sub-conscious instinct is programmed to keep us alive. As long as I have the will to live, dying is not a choice. Our survival instinct is programmed to keep us alive and part of that programming is a fear of death.
Metaphysically, it is the Soul that chooses the matter of life & death. Few human beings know their personal choice of reason to be born or the length of their physical life. It requires great wisdom to intuitively know when one’s life will end. That wisdom is greatly impeded by any fear of dying.
In my disconnection from my Soul, I have no way of knowing when my life will end. With the perspective that life happens to me, so does death. In the same way that I am a victim of life, I also become a victim of whatever causes my own death.
When my perspective is that causing my own death is preferable to living, then suicide is my only conscious choice. For someone with dementia this is not an option. The irony is that when we are struggling to live, we will also struggle to die. Struggle is part of the learning process that is offered by Life. We all learn through our opportunities, our challenges or our problems.
Nobody ever sees their dementia as an opportunity for their personal learning & growth. It is seen as a challenging problem that becomes more challenging as it becomes more of a problem, leading to an inevitable death.
A primary symptom of dementia is the inability to choose. A conscious choice between life & death is not an option for someone with dementia, neither is it a conscious option for their carer.
Choosing for someone to die is judged to be a crime called murder. In law there is a clear distinction between suicide that is legal & murder, which is not. With dementia there is the added complication of whether the patient has the mental capacity to make a conscious choice between their own life & death.
With dementia, suicide is not an option and a fatal accident will always be viewed with suspicion. As a society, we want everyone to die naturally, from what we believe to be a natural cause. Unfortunately, we have no idea what naturally causes us to die, even though death is the nature of life.
Death from natural causes is certified when a medical practitioner can find no physical reason for death. We believe that old people just pass away due to old age and this can happen at any age past 65 years and be quite acceptable.
We tend to avoid the duality of life or death by only looking at life. Death is a subject that is taboo and not discussed. We don’t talk about it or even think about it until someone dies unexpectedly.
We never ask the question: Who decides when we die and who decides when we live? When we believe that life happens to us, because it is illegal for death to happen by us, then life & death both happen by accident; unless we are deemed to die of old age.
Unless I take responsibility for creating my own life, I cannot take responsibility for creating my own death. Life & death is a duality of the same energy, which means that when I take responsibility for my own life, I can take responsibility for my own death. My death becomes a conscious choice at the end of a fulfilling life.
The purpose of life is to fulfil one’s own vision for life. The purpose of death is to pass on to a new life of fulfilment following the eternal path of an expansive Soul.
What I cannot do is take responsibility for someone else’s life or someone else’s death. Yet this is what we are doing as a society, all of the time. In the absence of taking responsibility for our own life, we end up taking responsibility for everyone else’s life.
With dementia, someone else taking responsibility for your life appears to be inevitable.