After my sister died in March of 2018, I was desperate to make sense of what happened. A close friend of mine recommended I read the book Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson. I also watched the documentary about him called Griefwalker.
Jenkinson is a Canadian who worked in the “death industry” as a director of palliative care in Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. He has come to understand the perverse incentives that keep dying people alive, which stem from our inability to accept that death really happens. Die Wise helped me understand why my sister received barbaric medical treatment after her cancer diagnosis.
High-tech health care has become an undeclared war on dying itself.
[…]
Gone, if it was ever there, is the option of doing little, of under functioning, of opting for nothing when wrestling with illness and death in the presence of a remarkable range of options that doesn’t include doing nothing. Gone is any real questioning of treatment at all. The treatment options are debatable, but treatment is not.
When someone is diagnosed with a chronic illness that could lead to death, modern medicine insists on an immediate intervention that is often aggressive. Doctors may even use military terms against the illness like “hit it hard,” “attack,” and “go on the offense,” which insinuate that your body is a war zone, but even if you win the war, what damage will you body sustain? As I saw with cancer treatment, the destruction is tremendous. Surviving the war leaves you with far less than you had than when you first started, on top of the psychological trauma of wondering when the disease will return.
Because most people want to live, and have never deeply considered the fact that they will one day die, they quickly fall under the spell of the medical industry. Yes, the disease must be “attacked” and my body must be ravaged so I don’t die, because being alive is better. No monetary cost or bodily side effect should serve as an obstacle to “living,” but that living will not be the same as before.
More and more, medical technology has become–maybe by default, because so many of us have no other–the story of our dying.
[…]
Palliative medicine is a creation of rapid med-tech innovation unaccompanied by any similarly rapid innovative practice wisdom guiding its use, governed by the unimpeachable human-centered conviction that dying is a manageable metabolic event that should be managed, animated by the root conviction that If you can, you should.
If you get diagnosed with cancer, you must do something, because this is your one life and you need to live it; you need to fight! But now the doctors—the new priests—have you, and you are essentially donating your body to the medical industry. The machines and the tubes and the infusions and the side effects are now a daily feature of your existence. In essence, it’s a completely new life, but the aggressive something that is being done is often Potemkin intervention that merely enriches the doctors while extending your suffering.
What if the doctors, who are financially invested in you receiving treatment to pay their expensive mortgages, student loan bills, and BMW car payments, massage the truth about your true odds, and give you false hope that prevents you from accepting that death is on the near horizon? What if doctors know for a fact that you are dying, and you have practically no chance to survive beyond a few painful years, but refuse to tell you, and instead use mealy-mouthed code words that a family member has to painstakingly decipher as if they were uttered in a foreign language?
Once you give your body over to the doctors, they will mutilate it. They will slice and dice, pump you full of drugs, and then pat you on the hand to say you are doing great when you don’t even recognize the new life you have.
Within the health care regime the language often changes when a patient is tacitly acknowledged to be a dying person. Professionals will start talking with patients and families about “quality, not quantity.” They will talk of “palliative radiation,” of “comfort-giving measures.”
When someone is dying in the movies, a doctor often says, “I’m sorry but nothing else can be done. I recommend you get your affairs in order.” This doesn’t happen in real life. Instead, doctors repeat the word “comfort,” which really means that they want you to be comfortable with dying—but without telling you that you’re dying! They will be more than happy to fill you up with morphine and anti-depressants so you never have to be consciously aware of that fact.
Here is what I have seen, over and over: dying people in the early and middle stages of their dying, still fairly healthy considering everything, their dying no longer unknown, no longer questioned, their symptoms fairly well managed, their pain fairly well controlled, utterly terrified, unspeakably riven by dread, numb when they are not panting with the horror of it, up many hours of the night with a raw, unspeakable, pain-free or pain-managed terror. This makes them prime candidates for sedation or antidepressants. Here’s why: Their terror should have been quelled by having their worst fear managed. Yes. Of course. It should have done.
A doctor may not tell you that you’re dying, but your body knows. It can’t continue with “life” as it were, to enjoy the same things and go to work like everything is okay, which is what dying people are encouraged to do. This conflict leads to intense anxiety and terror that a doctor immediately wants to hammer away with psychoactive drugs.
In a culture that hides death, not only with humans but also with the animals we kill to produce our food, there is no secular superstructure or process to understand how we die. We’re at a loss of what to do when it comes to death (we don’t even know what to say to someone who is being affected by it), when death should be in our awareness not long after we’re born.
More Time means more time to live their dying. It means more symptoms, more drugs for the symptoms, more drugs for the side effects of the first drugs, more weakness and diminishment and dependence to go along with more time with the kids or the grandkids, or walks in the park with the dog. That’s not all it means, not necessarily, but More Time almost always means more dying.
[…]
More Time almost never looks or feels or goes the way people imagine it will when they are bargaining for it. More Time bears no resemblance to anything most people have lived. More Time is a fantasy of the resumption of a life interrupted. But More Time, when it finally kicks in, is the rest of a dying person’s life, and the rest of that life will be lived in the never-before-known shadow of the inevitability of their dying. For the first time in their lives they will live knowing that they will die from what afflicts them.
[…]
By being given More Time, they have been given more death.
Modern medicine gives the illusion that death—and the pain from death—can be escaped, but instead, doctors merely distribute the pain and suffering over a longer period of time, if not outright increasing it. Medical treatment is a devil’s bargain where you receive more time to live, but at an immense financial, physical, and emotional cost. While I would never tell a friend or relative to just let cancer or heart disease ravage them, they need to be aware that they will still be ravaged, just at a slower pace, while receiving a false sense of hope that life can return to what it was before the disease.
[The patient’s] problem was that he was still alive. Because of the treatment he’d received his life had been extended far beyond what the disease dictated, but he gained that additional life knowing that he would die in the foreseeable future of the disease he was being treated for anyway. He had bargained for months of illness and an hour of death, but instead got an eternity of wakeful agitated, motionless, unremarkable, endless, symptom-riddled, ordinary dying.
[…]
Instead of the old nightmare of uncontrolled pain and unexpected death, we have a new nightmare of controlled pain and an unexpected wish to die, a wish that can’t be accounted for by worsening symptoms and can’t be soothed by reassurances that no one will be allowed to suffer. They are suffering. Dying people are suffering a torment we once thought would only come to those in the hour of their death. Now the hour of death is months long, sometimes longer.
The deciding moment is when you become ill. Your body, existing in corrupted flesh due to Adam’s fall, has decided to die. It will always happen before you expect, and you will refuse to believe in your body’s judgment. You will blame all sorts of environmental causes and bad luck, but the body, your flawed biological shell, will win. Treatment is just rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and you will suffer mightily before it’s done. By saying this, I’m not advocating for you to abstain from medical treatment, but the costs of treatment must be understood before the disease comes, because when you’re ill, and doctors are dangling the possibility of a successful treatment or “cure” above your head, you will not be able to make a sound decision on what to do.
Dying is a natural thing, and left to its natural self each living thing knows how to die. The body has the genius of a natural thing, and it knows how to obey the accumulation of time, wear and tear, disease and symptoms. It knows how to stop. But med-tech, not in any sense a natural thing, knows how to subvert the way disease and symptoms have of keeping and marking time, and in doing so it subverts the body’s knowledge of how to stop.
You will refuse to listen to your body, to nature, to God’s plan. Besides, how will you really know it’s your time? Is refusing antibiotics for a skin infection that then becomes deadly sepsis what God has in store for you? How do I know God’s will? At what point are we being silly in refusing treatment and at what point are we extending our dying time? These questions and boundaries have to be decided before the disease comes, which means you have to think of your death and pray to God for wisdom while you’re perfectly healthy.
Personally, I don’t believe I would treat cancer that I’m diagnosed with if it’s beyond Stage 2, when it has spread from the original tumor, though to know for sure, I would essentially have to become a doctor myself by being able to decipher medical scans and understand treatment plans and their costs, and the only reason I know of the intricacies of cancer treatment is because of what happened to my sister. With death shoved behind closed doors, most people will not know the truth of how the medical industry handles death until they experience it firsthand, yet the cost of learning that experience is high. Most of you will choose the “cope, hope, and dope” option that the medical industry offers you, and I don’t blame you for that.
…extraordinary energy and vitality given in this culture to the project of not knowing that we are dying, and because of the unhesitating willingness of caregivers of all stripes to collude with this refusal to know through the usually clumsily crafted projects of positive outlook, hopefulness, and live-instead-of-die advocacy, and because the etymology of the verb “to palliate” comes closer to “to conceal, to cloak” than it does to “to help.”
[…]
The woman was referred to an outpatient palliative care service without being told what it meant to be in palliative care.
Palliative care is given to patients who are not expected to live. They are given treatments that are meant to reduce pain and increase comfort, but not always: my sister was given both radiation and chemotherapy in her last days at tremendous pain even though, in hindsight, I believe the doctors knew there was little hope in her recovery. Regrettably, it was me who helped persuade my mother and father that we should go ahead with these futile treatments. My sister wanted to live, and I didn’t want her to die, and the doctors didn’t seem wholly pessimistic, but those treatments only made her dying time that much more difficult. The doctors withheld her true odds, and allowed all of us to make the wrong decisions when it came to her final days.
Everyone knows that everyone else is going to die. Each person does not know that he or she are going to die. They do not know they are dying when they are, which is why they need to be told. There are many working in the death trade today who will vehemently defend this not knowing as a fundamental right of all people. This is compassion to them.
You don’t possess the belief that you will one day die. You’re an educated person who knows that all living beings must die, but your own death is so abstract, so off in the distance, that you don’t truly believe it will happen to the extent that it’s worth thinking about now, but by not doing so, you delegate responsibility for your life to a medical industry that has its own interests which only slightly overlap with yours. You will panic when you are diagnosed with an illness, make sure all medical options are explored, and pursue an aggressive treatment plan that takes an immense physical toll on you, and yet you will remain ever so hopeful to extend your living time that you still refuse to accept your death, as proximal as it may seem to the doctors who are treating you.
When Finding Meaning is your hammer, it turns dying into a desperate kind of scavenger hunt, a last-gasp lunge at holding back the tide of Meaninglessness that our cultural poverty on this issue prescribes to us in our dying time.
[…]
If you haven’t been deliberately making meaning in your life by the ways you’ve lived it, then your time of dying is going to be a hard, hard proving ground, a tough, under-the-gun place to do so.
If you do accept death, what meaning can you find in a culture that conceals it and pretends it doesn’t happen, where the only institution of our culture that attempts to put death into context—religion—is all but gone? Even when you’re alive and healthy, you flounder at finding meaning that transcends the material. That is only amplified during your dying time. The context and meaning must already be in place for death to make sense, but since I know very few people who understand their existence while healthy, dying will be an exceedingly painful affair.
[Medicine] has turned the epic life drama of dying into the treatment of symptoms, the treatment of side effects of the treatment, the treatment of side effects of the drugs, the treatment of secondary, escalating symptoms, the treatment of secondary side effects, and so on.
The medical industry distracts you from death, postponing your acceptance and understanding of it. You will be so busy with doctor appointments, treatments, management of side effects, and listening to encouraging words of hope from loved ones and support groups that death never stops being an abstraction.
In a death-phobic culture like our own, knowing you are dying is not as healthy as hoping you aren’t dying while you are. When hopeful people are dying, and when dying people are hopeful, they buy a house on a street called Not Now, in a town called Not Yet, according to a Freedom 55 investment plan called Anywhere but Here. They become fighters, and the obligation they hold their families, friends, and caregivers to is that there be nothing but positive, upbeat, hopeful talk around them, no matter the diagnosis, prognosis, symptom buildup or failing strength, phantom capacity or fugitive alertness, until they themselves give the unequivocal signal that they have given up hope.
[…]
It is not dying that is traumatic; it is dying in a death-phobic culture that is traumatic.
In addition to the medical industry, there is also the health charity industry that acts as a cult to recruit you and your family to the “cause” of fighting, finding cures, and having hope, all while they lop off 50% of your money in “administrative” costs, and all you’re left with is colored ribbons made in China that you eventually toss into the trash when you realize how hollow their compassion really was.
Physicians, counselors, and families are all unhinged when a dying person wants to die before they are able to.
[…]
“I’m dying.” Don’t be negative. “I want to die.” You’re depressed.
If I get a terminal disease, and choose not to get treatment, please don’t ask me to fight, and please don’t send me your apple cider vinegar cure. Let me die! When the doctor lists my treatment options, and advises me to take a drug which will napalm my body, and that it’s my best option, I will tell him to let me die! When a family member says that I need to fight for them, so they don’t suffer the grief from my absence, I will thank them for their love and say let me die! No one, including myself, allowed my sister to die. She had to fight when she was beyond the strength to do so, when it was not fair to her. Trusting the doctors when it came to my sister’s care was perhaps the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life.
Our fear of dying is an inherited trauma. It comes from not knowing how to be at home in the world. It comes from having no root in the world and no indebtedness to what has gone before us.
As we become more rootless, more disconnected from our families, ancestors, and homelands, dying becomes that much harder. We don’t know why we lived, so how can we know why we’re dying?
Dying is enormously hard. The labor of it–and it is labor, of the same kind as that which brings life into the world–is relentless, demanding. The shock of having to see your days as numbered in the dozens, of seeing your body heading out of town, of seeing yourself as mostly passed, these are in some ways ruinous and costly encounters with the way it is.
But it’s going to happen. No amount of medicine or miracle cures will stop it, and attempting to delay your death simply extends your dying time so that you die longer, so that your body rattles for longer. Today is the time to face death, while you’re healthy to face it, not when you get sick.
If you are not born with the instinct for dying well, you have to learn it. I wish you every success in finding someone who is good at it and is willing to teach you. You have to learn how to die, or you probably will not die wisely or well.
[…]
People die the way they live, mostly. That could be grim, or it could be, in a quiet and unexpected way, great news. It means that you can begin to learn how to die well long before your turn comes. It means that you can practice it in all the mundane corners of daily life. It means there’s nothing to wait for. There’s no one to give you the news. Getting up again the next morning, until you can’t: That’s pretty much all the news you’re going to get to keep you in the know. Being able to eat again, until you can’t: That’s the news. Everyone else’s dying and death before yours is the news washing up on your shore.
One downside of this book is that it’s written in a poetic style that is quite wordy. It’s not a typical nonfiction book that lays out a recipe for action; instead, it is more of a gentle ballet that connects you with Jenkinson’s heart and his experiences. While the book will help you understand death in relation to medical care, it does not help much with death itself. Instead, it talks about how death is done in the modern era, and why it is so difficult. Nonetheless, I believe this book is important to read, especially if you or a loved one have just been diagnosed with a terminal disease.
If there’s one thing I learned from Die Wise, it’s that I shouldn’t count on anyone to tell me I’m dying, especially a doctor. They won’t tell me. My family won’t tell me, and will give me hope where none exists because they don’t want me to die. I will have to expose myself to death in a way that has been shielded from me and listen to my bones when my time is near, and be ready to experience death as purely and consciously I can, just like I have experienced everything else in life, because while I may not want death to come, it will come on its own timeline, not my own.
I wish I read Die Wise before my sister died. I would have understood that all her treatments simply prolong her dying time and that cancer “remission” is still a form of dying, albeit at a much slower pace, because the cancer is still there, waiting until it can start a new offensive. I would have been able to decode the “comfort” that doctors promised her, and how when they said it’s “helpful to try” a drug, what they were really saying is that we’ve arrived at the end of the road, and that it’s time to die. I lament that my sister had to die so painfully and confusingly for me to learn how I could die wisely when my time comes.
Read Next: Eulogy
Yukio Mishima criticized death for similar reasons as you do. He lamented that dying on hospital beds is no good way of dying, and instead you should die in an honorable way, in a fight, war or a higher cause. I disagree on his notion that you should commit suicide when you think the time is right, so that you leave the world with a “heroic” death. But I was not surprised that he was praising suicide since he was Japanese and a sodomite. Interview in which he explains his views on death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLGMm6c_BCA
Your writing style changed with your change of heart. It feels firmer and more grounded; if it is because of the melancholy topics you haven chosen for your latest articles I do not know.
Conceiling death and violence from Western culture is one factor why men are effeminate – they have nothing to live and nothing to die for. They do not create lives that are worth dying for. Cowardice and indifference towards the cultural diseases may make them able to live longer lives, but no lives worth telling their (grand-)children about. I’d rather die speaking my mind and not conceiling the truth at a place like Speaker’s Corner debating Muslims than in a building sponsored by the Pharmajew.
You are on a good path, Roosh. But remember not to dwell on the evil the world offers. A mistake I keep doing less and less since God brought me back to the faith of Jesus Christ.
Powerful article.. sortof…
-Anyone notice though how EVERYTHING is going to GIVE you cancer?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsQyru5ACmA
Know this instead-
1- Cancer is the 4th largest industry in the US economy
2- De-population is A UN/Tribal priority.. There are literally HUNDREDS of INTENTIONAL chemical exposures to carcinogens put directly in your path every day.. (ex– air, food, medicine, medicine, material items, etc )
3- Cancer tests are at least 48% FALSE and the ‘survival’ rate is actually less than 4%.. which means the MAJORITY of ‘cancer victims’ will be killed by the ‘treatment’, NOT the cancer itself.
4 – The Death Industry is a Hollywood promoted -lifestyle meme- All it takes is some ribbons, headbands, and fakers like Lance Armstrong (who never had cancer btw) and everyone immediately becomes a Shakespearean actor.
Example
Hungover 35yr Dupont Factory Worker-pothead-Game artist nervously enters Doctor Cancerberg’s office;
DFW “Doc… give it to me straight.. am I okay?”
DrCB ” I am sorry.. your tests show -vague irregularities-..
DFW “Does that mean I am …not… gonna… make it?”
DrCB “If you commit to giving us 3x your earnings we estimate that you
can endure 6 months of chemo until your body is destroyed by the fact the chemo is poison to begin with.”
Cue Hamlet
DFW “Oh cruel fate!
I am cut down in the prime of life.. (weeps)
Why Me? I had just be promoted to Sub -Assistant at the Asbestos Division! -,,,And my venereal warts had just begun to subside!
(suddenly religious)
Why O Why did you forsake me, God? …. I dreamed of going to rehab so I could one day visit Paris with my Ex-girlfriend’s PETA tour group! ….
Now that will never,ever happen!..
(Sobs and wails)
It’s so not fair!
(Runs into the street screaming and tearing at his clothes like the homeless)
As for the American DENIAL of death…
Its more like Death is BORING..- not- scary.
Ever get stuck in line at the Registry of Vehicles and some fat SJW starts unloading their “chemo experience testimony” on you?
Next to other people’s baby pictures and dead pet stories the excruciating dramatics of ‘radiation this and Upjohn that’ and you might find YOURSELF wishing for the sweet release of death right there in the Registration Sticker Tax queue!!!
Like fake shooting events and other faux-tragedy everyone ‘chosen’ to be the ‘victim’ is suddenly an “ever-smiling angel”… a “sweet soul vanquished by the brutality of the Christian Heaven”.. what will Happy Hour at the Coyote Bar be without their Karaoke renditions of Bon Jovi???!
And It’s the worn “badge of superiority”..
We the Left Behind are simply not worthy of their be-Sainted-ness!
For how can we. as selfish living mortals. ever understand their Eli Lilly-provided transcendence?
Think of it this way.. when WW3 begins in July with some Iranian false flag we will all be ENVIOUS of those who have already died!~
Quick death by Christmas?
Getting to leave this toilet?
FANTASTIC!
Bring it on!
🙂 haha
What must I do to be saved?
Believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, obey the moral law and get baptized.
This is the natural order of things, so there is nothing to be saved from.
Believe in the Lord Jesus only. Place your faith in him for forgiveness of your sins. Then rejoice!
Consider the Biblical book of Acts 2:37-38:
“When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
””Acts”¬ ”2:37-38”¬ ”NIV”¬”¬
https://www.bible.com/111/act.2.37-38.niv
You think it´s only to pay mortgages they will fuck you over for? There are no doctors with gambling addictions? What do you think a doctor with gambling addiction will do to patients until his license gets revoked? If it gets revoked… And how do you know the fucker has an addiction when he is giving you treatment? I more and less can tell cunts nowadays. Dealt with so many scammers. There are some traits I immediately see.
And when they operate you. They see something bad which wasnt in the scope of the surgery. And they don´t take care of it. They will wait for the patient to become sick and then fix it.
Also it´s just another day for them. It just becomes numbers. People are numbers.
Recently in a corruption case involving a lawyer and a judge. One of the arguments presented by the lawyer in his defense was he would have never bribed the judge. Because the defendant got acquited too fast. LOOOOLL. Key here is “too fast” You understand? If the judge was working with him. They would have kept the defendant more time in trial so that the lawyer could squeeze more fees out of him. Imagine? “your honor i´m innocent. Because I would never have done my job the right way..”
I´m a capitalist. But health should be public. 100% public. Paid by taxpayers. There should be not 1 ounce of profit logic in health. Not one.
A reform on the health establishment is definitely necessary. Big one:
https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/06/pfizer-buried-data-showing-arthritis-drug-also-prevent-alzheimers-9832597/
“I´m a capitalist. But health should be public. 100% public. Paid by taxpayers.”
You are not a capitalist…
“A reform on the health establishment is definitely necessary. Big one:”
Yes, it’s called competition…no drug company/AMA/insurance company/Medicare monopolies!
The monopolies and free taxpayer money is what causes all the problems.
You think that giving control of your health care to government bureaucrats is going to “fix” the problem?
You are fucking insane.
What it will mean is that long, horrific, painful, debilitating treatments will be mandated. You will no longer have the right to make *any* decisions about how you are treated. You (or your dying child) will be handcuffed to the bed and forced to take the prescribed, approved, and absolutely *wrong* medicine.
Didnt the “socialized” healthcare system in Britain literally have a death panel decision for a little white kid they thought was going to croak anyway despite even the pope (despite being a corrupt sack of shit) offering to help the kid and bring him to Rome for treatment? That would be/will probably be our future in the US/world in general…while 75 IQ Obese Somalians get bailed out every chance they get…really makes you think.
I agree with everything in this insightful post, but something crucial seems to be missing. Arguably, it is more preferable to exist than not to exist. Some philosophers like Kant even argued that this applies also to such extreme cases like your sister (may she rest in peace!). Furthermore, it is probably more common that people wish to die due to depression, than due to rational decision making.
Thus, the efforts of physicians and family to keep their beloved ones alive as long as possible makes perfect sense if, but only IF, death is the ultimate end of existence. If there is reasonable hope not only for an afterlife, but even for being reunited, letting go should become considerably easier. Thus, the ultimate reason for the terrible things you describe seems to be not the self-deceit of physicians and family, but the complete loss of Christian believes in one part of the population, and the taboo of making major decisions based on Christian believes in most of the rest.
I am a physician with a few atypical opinions on this subject I think add to what you wrote.
The first was that a book called Medical Nemesis was written by Ivan Illich in 1975 (he also wrote a great one about education) a mentor referred to me that detailed the history of Modern Medicine and made numerous observations about medicine which are just as true now as they were 44 years ago. One point that really stuck into me on it was how the relationship with death used to be something that was viewed as a lifelong partner you celebrated and walked with, but doctors gradually assumed the role of conquering disease and beating death, and eventually enslaved people to the industrialized model we have now where people agree to lifelong servitutde in exchange for a medically and scientifically managed death…leading to the absurd situation now where we constantly pretend to fight off death but in reality are just torturing the person to make money and increasing their suffering big time.
The second one is that I have done a lot of eastern and christian spiritual work that has evolved around the dying and reincarnation process, including my own near death experience, being with a lot of patients during and after their time of death, plus studying under hard to find but legitimate masters in the field who have much more experience than me. My own belief is that the most important moment in your lifetime is the time of death and if you handle it properly, it has major long term consequences for your soul, while if you handle it poorly, it has major negative ones.
The reason I am mentioning this point (which is a bit out of left field) is because so many of the things modern medicine does really fuck up that process and set people up to have a shitty death, spend a lot of time in purgatory, and then have a bad reincarnation. It is so good at doing that, I have often wondered if it is intentional.
Excellent comments””thanks. For what it”™s worth, the reality of death is regularly acknowledged in Orthodox Christianity.
To be clear””we don”™t believe in reincarnation.
Legitimate Masters
Any suggestions or direction on finding the legitimate ones?
This is both a distressing and insightful post. The senselessness of your sister’s death made worse by the disorienting bad faith of modern medical practitioners is a heart-wrenching price to pay for this perspective.
You’ve put into words and given context to a lot of the suspicions and misgivings I had about the medical treatment my Mom received and the reporting and advice we were given when she was dying of cancer.
My relationship with her was frayed and the situation was very painful. I buried a lot of these thoughts and feelings, but I was left with a jaundiced view of modern medicine and patient care without ever scrutinizing the precise reasons why.
With an aging father and my family’s health history, this post gives me food for thought for reexamining how one should relate to doctors and consider medical advice.
As for my mother, she opted for her own treatment methods which were also ineffective. But she went out on her own terms.
My condolences for your loss.
I.a. Every “disease” – hereinafter called Significant Biological Special Program (SBS) – originates from […] an unexpected, highly acute, and isolating conflict shock that occurs simultaneously in the psyche, the brain, and on the corresponding organ.
I.b. The content of the conflict determines which organ will be affected and from which area of the brain the SBS will be controlled.
I.c. Every SBS runs synchronously on the level of the psyche, the brain, and the organ.
II. Every SBS-Significant Biological Special Program runs in two phases provided there is a resolution of the conflict.
III.
IV Microbes don”™t cause diseases but play instead a vital role during the healing phase.
V. Every so-called disease is part of a Significant Biological Special Program of Nature created to assists an organism (humans and animals alike) during unexpected distress.
w-w-w-w-what???
The Private Man decided to go on style after it was clear that his cancer was unstoppable. He refused treatment and let himself go:
https://theprivateman.wordpress.com
Death came fast, but at least he had a good quality of life and only suffered the last week of his life.
Great article.
Most people consider it “morbid” or “inappropriate” nowadays to discuss death. It upsets people and most have not thought about it seriously, even though it is the one thing that is completely unavoidable and puts life into perspective for literally everybody.
Reading this brought Heidegger to mind, who believed that in a society where death has no meaning, life has no meaning. Counter-Currents made Heidegger accessible to me and I thought it was worth it to discover his work. His insights are obvious to the religious person but he tried to make religious ideas palatable to the atheistic modern man who would reign supreme in the 21st century.
https://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/martin-heidegger/
Spiritual death is inevitable at your 6ix.
wot means?
Hey,
Is it possible that if you had not pushed for treatment that then you would be having the opposite regret? Don”™t be so hard on yourself.
A main factor I believe why western people fear death is their distorted perception created by Hollywood.
Good point. It also instills a completely wrong idea of what feeling normal or the nature of reality feels like. Hollywood knows exactly what they”˜re doing.
The death industry is quite full of fake people and actors. Big hospitals have a grieving room next to the ICU ward where a fake clergyman who wears many costumes will come in like a plastic faced televangelist and console you. It’s all an act. The head nurse too will enter the room and console the anxiety filled family that it’s time to pull the plug on said loved one because some other new patients need the bed space. This too is an act on the part of the nurse. She’s used that line a thousand times before among her many other lines to divert attention away from medical incompetence for example. The truth is the hospital is always eager to harvest organs and tissues. She’s lying. They have plenty of beds. And the grieving room is so tacky and fake with the Costco fake painting of Jesus, the urn with plastic flowers and the pictures of flowery fields right out of Soylent Green and to top it off the plug in Renuzit deodorizer underneath the tissue table ‘lilac lavender blossom’ smells like a damn PTA meeting, cheap and fake just like the rent a preacher’s toupéé.
The social worker/counselor at Planned Parenthood is another paid fake and actor for the death industry. She’ll coax an ‘on the fence’ aborter to have their offspring killed by saying “Sweetie, it’s okay. It just isn’t this baby’s time yet.” Jesus can you believe that horsesh¡t? What a whopola turd with corn of a lie that is!! Like some dumb pregnant confused girl is supposed to buy the ridiculous logic that the same baby somehow returns and recycles out your tubes again after they’ve been previously aborted. Abortion baby butcher shops actually use that line that “It’s not their time yet”. Absolutely unbelievable.
The death industry professionals are mostly all fakes and actors. A mortuary ‘artist’ is no respectable person of talent whatsoever and certainly not an ‘artist’ other than a con artist. They bilk thousands to spray tan and make-up a cadaver like a piñata. True they’ve even been known to gut from the backside the head and torseau and stuff the cavities with newspaper. That’s no honorable burial by any religion.
THE FAKE LIARS of the death industry really get my goat when they blatantly lie and mislead patients and their families about holistic and natural remedies like fasting to ‘starve’ a cancer, making the body into a non cancer friendly environment. The allopathic MD’s, most of them will say nothing when a new cancer patient wants milk shakes, fries, twinkies and trans fatty crap brought to their bed. THEY LIE and say there’s no proof that such and such crappy frankenfood causes such and such malady. They won’t even try to get someone off GMO corn syrup until their pancreas is destroyed. Then they advise aspartame for sweetness instead – along with insulin. They get their insurance bucks. A he|| of a lot of insurance bucks they get. It doesn’t benefit their racket to peddle preventative pure living and diet. If a diabetic or cancer patient could take their health into their own hands by living healthy, there’s still no way they could convert all those insurance bucks back to them self. That money is earmarked for managing and perpetuating your sickness and death. All that money could buy you a big house otherwise. But you can’t touch the death industry’s money once they got their hooks into you. The racketeers of the death industry cash in and get it all. They clean up as usual. What a bunch of actors and outright liars they all are.
I’d speculate a large portion of health ‘care’ workers should rightfully be classed instead as ‘death industry’ workers. They’re in the business of death and they are greatly compensated for managing and procuring suffering and death.
That was unusually insightful, along with that unmistakable tone that comes from experience. Just reading it draws out my latent hatred for these same liars and insincere fakers.
I’m not shocked a Ho$pital would want to organ harvest a patient then stuff their warm corpse full of newspapers, while holding your hand. (((Things))) like these is why I find society so off-putting and why I just can’t quite drum up the enthusiasm to “contribute” to this massive scam we call our country. Modern Western “culture” proves conclusively that there is nothing more contemptible, reptilian, and subhuman than a person without a spiritual core. To enlust yourself so much into material externalities that you suffocate your soul really forfeits the purpose of being a human in the first place. These snakes will find themselves in a much more fitting body in the next many pathetic lives to come. Until they are reincarnated into the literal dirt that they are.
In a nutshell, you have no idea what you are talking about. Health care workers are in the business of preserving and saving lives. Sometimes I think you just love hearing the sound of your voice as you type away such utter nonsense.
Do you enjoy being an ass clown?
I am the only person I have observed at my hospital who eats healthy food.
We just have to accept that the great Christian European culture has died, and that we’re back in Babylon where all manner of different cults held power. But just because the establishment is no longer in God’s favor doesn’t mean you can’t be.
The de-spiritualization of our European culture is the greatest crime jews have perpetrated against us.
It began with Christianity and the overthrow of our indigenous Pagan beliefs; all but extinguished that only cringy we wuz Vikangz cosplaying remains.
Luckily, these ancient truths were preserved in the East long ago when our Aryan cousins ventured that way. They wrote the Vedas: the most consumate and profound religious truths I have ever read. The Scythians/Slavs are unsurprisingly receptive to the old religion, which is why Russian Vedism is a discernable religion in the East. Even as far away as Afghanistan and South Asia subtle remanents of these traditiins persists where Indo-European people still live. This is the religion of karma, dharma, and reincarnating until we are spiritually complete. In this context death is just the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.
“Death is assured to all those born, and birth assured to all the dead.” ~ Bhagavad Gita 2:27
Aryan Vedic religion is superior in every way to any crude and bizare religion the Semites have ever thought up in their barren deserts.
I spent years studying the Bible in all its facets, contexts, and interpretations across many denominations. I have even studied much of the Qu’ran, and being red-pilled on the JQ has also taught me a lot about Judaism. And yet I can pick up the very brief Bhagavad Gita and in it I find mountains more wisdom and guidance than all that Semitic trash put together.
Very powerful article Roosh. I have noticed when i visit my relatives from abroad they are much more at home with death being from a significantly poorer country. They’ve seen enough death that they really live and they make the most of the time they have and don’t prolong things.
Being a religious person myself i am against euthanasia as much as i am against suicide and abortion, we believe that when people come to end of life loved ones can pray for the cure for their beloved or that they pass peacefully away.
People tend to die once the people around them forgive them and let go. Its what happened with my grandmother.
I already told you the circumstances that happened with her but had she lived it would not have been a normal kind of life by any means. would be constant pain
I believe that as people get closer to God they start to cherish that the time they die is the time they die. And sacrificing quality of life at the end and pain is sometimes just too much.
But its hard, loved ones want their beloved to stay.
Its a very tough subject but needs to be talked about.
People can go at any time
Western culture really engorges your ego by stressing materialism and attachment to externalities. Your ego then identifies with this illusion. But the problem is that this counterfeit version of yourself is extinguished at death. That is why death is such a painful and drawn out process for a Westerner.
But the most real and essential part of you is your internal soul. Only this part of you is authentic and capable of immortality. Because your soul is a continuation of God and God wills immortality. When you understand this truth, like so many outside the West, then material death is nothing other than shedding your costume and changing into new clothes. The soul reincarnates, either closer or further away from God in accordance with your karma.
But if you spent a life engorging yourself on ephemeral material lies, then there is not much left of your soul for the next life. You could find yourself in the body of a pig or an insect if your previous human existence was such an affront to God’s will for a human. Everybody eventually gets what they want on a visceral level.
Everyone has the mindset to live in the present moment.
Quite a few may even have the mindset to live an entire life.
But only the rare know how to live beyond life itself.
Roosh,
I read an article about a guy who got a cancer diagnosis. Instead of hideous chemotherapy with a 2-4 year prognosis, he sold everything and moved to the small Greek island where his parents were born, where everyone raised their own chickens and vegatables, and every errand took a day to complete at best.
10 years later, he’s still in spontaneous remission.
After my heart attack and stroke/paralysis, I’m prepping to find and move to that island. WTF do I have to lose?
Yeah man, if i was “diagnosed” with cancer, i’d sell up & move to Thailand & live it up away from the Western nanny-state and devious medical industry. I currently live the lifestyle you describe above, but for me now it’s become very routine and boring, so off to SE Asia asap for me…
Why does that not shock me?
Allophathy gaslights you to death.
@metka I found your comment very insightful
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear” CS Lewis “A Grief Observed”
This article implies that you haven”™t come across https://thetruthaboutcancer.com yet. Their documentary series is eye-opening, if you believe what it says that is. I would urge you to give it a chance.
As my wise Buddhist Rinpoche once said, “The cause of death was birth…”
And the sage Chilean dictator Pinoche exclaimed “The cause of death was by the dropping out of a helicopter”.
Now read ‘Aubade’ by Philip Larkin. A great English poet.
So true about the charity industry:
“all while they lop off 50% of your money in “administrative” costs, and all you”™re left with is colored ribbons made in China that you eventually toss into the trash when you realize how hollow their compassion really was.”
I super support charity, but it is really hard to find legit ones.
It was night. About 11:00 PM. I sat on the bus outside the airport in San Diego, CA. It was my first time there. I realized how close I was to Mexico. I also realized if I am sent to war, I can be killed. With only minutes to go to arrive at MCRD, I made peace with death. I was 17. It was Monday, 22 March 1982. I’ve been at peace with it for a very long time.
My deepest sympathies to you and your family for the loss of your Sister… I’ve been pondering this same scenario lately as I’ve had some health issues this year. Also, after watching my Aunt and Grandpa die of cancer last year. I saw them become empty shells, devoid of any quality of life, and they played the game… Because what else were they really supposed to do? It’s almost like the Drs and medical industrial complex don’t want you to know there are alternatives. So Grandpa and Aunt Terri just kept shelling out money for treatments which made them worse. If I were to get a cancer or other terminal diagnosis, I’d refuse conventional treatment. I don’t know that I’d just resign myself to die but I certainly wouldn’t leave my family financially destitute and traumatized due to watching me die so horribly. We’d probably take our kids to Disney and I’d pursue alternative much cheaper treatments.
This article really touched me Roosh. That and your Eulogy on your sister…my condolences to you. Its made me think about my sister and myself in relation. Shes a complete product of the age and corruption to the core and lost in more ways than one. Drunken, lazy, crass, selfish, hedonistic.
I’ve tried my best to guide her and aide her in what ways I could but one man can only do so much even for family.
This article and the Eulogy made me think of what would happen if something would happen to her as happened to you and your family.
If such a thing happened, part of me truly thinks she would have a moment of truth even if it would be a little too late but better late than never. However part of me thinks she would just sink deeper into the morass and denial as so many people do and sadly the idealist part of me is all but completely dead.
I love her as my sister but as a person well…its a shame. To see something with such potential wasted and willfully so…
Don’t EVER beat yourself up about your sister! You KNOW that she would completely understand that you have done what you did because you loved her.
”Because most people want to live, and have never deeply considered the fact that they will one day die, they quickly fall under the spell of the medical industry. ”
A brilliant thought, and the best philosophers would agree with you. All the most eminent philosophers in history learned all about death, starting from the
I too have a similar problem as yours. My mom died very young of cancer, many years ago. I think of her every day. Learning about other’s grief has helped me immeasurably. Most contemporary writings about death it’s crap: it’s banal, weak, shallow. I avoid religion. No one more than philosophers and some more existential psychologists, know about death. Some of the best contemporary writers and books on death:
”Bereavement” (Colin Murray Parkes)
Viktor Frankl
‘Existential Psychotherapy” (Irvin Yalom)
I was interested in Die Wise, but the format is not for me….I only read non-fiction.
The Letters by Seneca are HUGE on death. It’s the only book I re-read continuosly. But almost any philosophers can offer huge insights about death, and it’s opposite, immortality (i.e. the value of it or the lack thereof).
Don’t EVER beat yourself up about your beloved sister. Imagine her hugging you and tell you that she completely understand why you did what you did. She would have done the same for you. You KNOW that. There’s no shame in doing the best you did out of love for someone else. What is to blame is our lack of knowledge. All we can do is learn as much as possible. And whilst I blame doctors for their bullshit, the reality is that ALL of us bullshit ourselves. Yes, denying death is EVERYBODY’S fav thing. Everybody runs away from it, everybody says stupid shit as ‘don’t be gloomy’ and think you are a weirdo. Death is one of the fav domains of philosophy. The best thing to do is to learn from them, and get away from the ignorant crowd, which is most of us.
and yes, what’s sweeter than a sweet death, when life becomes intolerable because of a serious illness? F**k it. ‘Living well, not living long.’ – Seneca (and by ‘living well’ he meant something very different than the meaning the crowd has of it)
another thing I wanted to say: untimely death is a VERY different thing that just death. VERY different. When I hear of people weeping over someone who dies at 75, I just don’t see the point. I don’t say they should celebrate, but what these idiots were expecting? We are really stupid, all of us. Like you wrote, ”we always look at death as something external to us” (which was also said by Schopenhauer!)
This is a great article. Thanks, Roosh.
Often it’s not the doctors that want treatment, it’s the family of the patient and to a lesser extent the patient itself. They want everything done, no stone left unturned, even if there’s only a slim chance of survival. You’re putting too much blame on the medical establishment.
I’m very sorry things are this way. This piece may be very uncomfortable or even painful to read but Roosh says some very necessary things.
(I hope this isn’t misunderstood) I had death training at a relatively young age, & it (as I now realise) has affected the entire way my psyche works & sees the world. The culture Roosh describes is now alien to the way my mind works.
I think Frank Herbert gave a glimpse of “death training” that’s worth reading/knowing. However, it has to be internalised. At the end of the day the path is an individual one.
I am reminded of the Screwtape letter (CS Lewis) where the description is of a society where death is taboo & even the dying person in hospital can’t be told they’re dying (“doctors, family, priests who lie”) etc.
Do not fear death, fear an unlived life.
Watched Griefwalker, it is Dying 101 for Western Normies basically. It is good for people who have literally no spiritual compass which sadly in our completely fucked up society is a vast majority.
For those with some spiritual grounding nothing is terribly groundbreaking in this docu. It is also a bit of an ego stroke for Steve Jenkinson. The docu is light on content and heavy on self promotion. “This is the right way to die, not the way you think.” That is something close to his message and its comical. Says who? A white dude that has deified native americans as somehow more in touch with the earth / death / spirit? Wrong.
They are a primitive people and their myths and legends are no better than any other cultures. I do agree with him that this irrational fear of death is a very Western phenomenon. But when you start dictating the ‘right way’ to die you have jumped the shark. It is a wholly individual experience just like life itself. I understand why people go to men like him because you are trying to make sense out of something that is incomprehensible. The death of a young child in the movie is a prime example of this. The problem is, you are attempting to understand the Prime Mover, the Universe, God, whatever through the lens of your human experience. It would be like you building a spacecraft and launching into space while an insect pondered what is just observed.
You have absolutely no way to understand this while you are still here. When you are ‘there’ it will become clear as you become one with the source power again. In fact, you will wonder why you even cared so much at all. Enough people with near death experiences (myself included) have related as much. They look at their existence as a bit of a joke when they return because they’ve seen just a glimpse of the true magnitude of reality. Not this lame illusion we are moving through.
On one episode of Band of Brothers, there was a green recruit who could do nothing during combat but curl up in the bottom of his foxhole. Since cowardice in battle is universally one of the most reviled behaviors among soldiers, this guy was setting up for a big fall. But the Lieutenant (who IMHO was way cooler than the Captain) took him aside and talked to him gently, explaining the situation like this: the new recruit was terrified because he feared that he would lose something (obviously, his life: freaking MG-42’s and 88’s will make any man shit himself and cry for his mother). But the only way a warrior can function is to assume that everything is lost already. Then he is free.
I thought it was a marvelous lesson that holds true always and everywhere.
two years back i was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis B.i went through numerous expensive tests.the Radiologist said the results showed my body was going to produce antibodies to fight off the virus so i did not need medication.the Doctor said my results were too bad i have to start medication right away.am contented with the Radiologist but the Doctors remarks still haunt me.any one here who knows of herbal remedies can tell me instead of opting for the modern medication.
To boost your body’s imuune system you can continuously take a good quality organic elderberry supplement (https://www.amazon.com/Elderberry-750mg-180-Capsules-Vegetarian-Sambucas/dp/B07KY6F1C4),
and echinacea root which is best taken in cycles as the body gets accustomed to it (https://www.amazon.com/Solaray-Organic-Echinacea-Angustifolia-Supplement/dp/B0027AF6A0)
Zinc glycinate and selenium for better zinc absorption supercharges your immune system, a quality probiotic or organic sauerkraut for good gut bacteria as it accounts for 75% of the immune system.
Vitamin C, you could even try IV mega doses which helped a lot of people with sepsis or pneumonia.
Organic oregano oil keeps bacterial infections away so the body can focus its resources on the virus.
The links below deal with hep C but may be useful in your case too, prayers and be well
https://knowledgeofhealth.com/comprehensive-dietary-supplement-regimen-for-hepatitis-c/
https://articles.mercola.com/hepatitis-c/treatment.aspx
https://articles.mercola.com/hepatitis-c/diet.aspx
https://healthwyze.org/reports/468-treating-and-maybe-curing-hepatitis-c-with-natural-and-holistic-methods
I can sympathize because i feel the same way. Watching my father waste away during treatment was horrifying…it killed him so much faster than the cancer would have, and he suffered greatly the whole time. Before it started, he could still walk. In two weeks he was an invalid, and died 2 days after treatment was over. The doctors knew he was dying, and WOULD NOT tell him. It was painfully obvious that he wasnt long for this world, but he never had the time or clarity of mind to even write a will, much less make any decisions.
From what ive read, treatment is NO MORE effective than NO TREATMENT AT ALL. its 50/50 either way…why would you let them torture you for those odds? They gave no shits about the effects, they literally try something, then try something else, pushing it on you as fast a they can…they charged 20,000 dollars to kill my dad
Im 30 and i have cancer, they just won’t let me die even though im not able to even walk anymore. they want me to drag my body to the hospital every week so i can get chemo. i know they love me and dont want me to suffer more pain when the disease reaches its final stages. i know they love me but im sure they dont want to understand and possibly never will. Thank you for opening your heart and sharing this with us.
I pray that you and your family can reach the best decisions for your health care.