WESLEY J. SMITH at the Center for Bioethics and Culture has a good post on the sad story of Dorothy Conlon, a Florida woman who at the age of 86 decided to end her life even though she was still in good health. As extensively reported in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, Dorothy recruited a group of friends to accompany her through the process. It was all done in a very civilized, neo-pagan kind of way, with farewell notes to friends and relatives. Until the actual dying started. The friends, initially willing to help, were taken off guard, especially by the nastiness of their dying friend, who bossed them around and ordered them to accomplish last-minute organizational tasks while she was dying from lack of food and water. In short, Dorothy was, forgive the expression, a bitch at the end, which is not surprising for someone who was so controlling as to demand that death come before its time. After all, it wasn’t as if she was going to live forever anyway.

Note the worship of activity which underlies this premature death. When a person can no longer lead an active, busy-busy life as Dorothy had once led, existence is meaningless. The inner life is nothing. Conlon had a son who committed suicide so she was especially at risk. Why didn’t her friends coax her into sticking around?

Note the reverence for Eastern mysticism (yoga, Reiki, daily meditation, reincarnation). One of the women — the gypsy-like character who shows up in the final act of the play, as if her part were written in advance — believed Dorothy was immediately reincarnated as a bird because she found a feather on the ground after her death. This is the kind of fatalism white Western women eagerly embrace, with yoga mats and meditation gardens, when they become detached from the beautiful and lofty truths embedded in their own spiritual heritage. Instead of everlasting love from a personal God, theirs is the great, impersonal Nothingness that obliterates personality. The Nothing Nothingness. According to the Sarasota Herald Tribune:

Influenced by her Eastern spiritual ties — she practiced yoga and meditation daily — Conlon also saw death not as something to be avoided at all cost, but as the natural bookend to birth. She claimed not to fear it, but to anticipate it, welcoming the “wonderful mystery” as the punctuation point to her full and peripatetic lifetime.

That she had no remaining family members or dependents made it possible for her to feel free to go. That she had already packed so much into her 86 years made it seem, to her, a logical and reasoned choice.

“One of my mantras is that I think quality of life is a heckuva lot more important than quantity of life — and I’ve had both,” Conlon said three weeks before her death. “So why draw it out?”

Why draw it out? Because life after death is eternal. We are not reincarnated as chickadees. Human consciousness could not have been created by Nothingness. Therefore we will not end in Nothingness. Hell is painful. Heaven is bliss.

As assisted suicide becomes the new “civil right,” expect much, much more of this kind of thing. The Orwellian world of Compassion and Choices, formerly the Hemlock Society, is growing rapidly. Suicide is cool and oh-so-compassionate. Extreme individualism, feminism and the pervasive loneliness they have produced encourage the trend.

But in the end, everything and anything is a civil right in a society that reveres freedom — all freedom that is, but the freedom that comes with restraint. Even the right to commit self-murder is sacred. The individual with rights has replaced the personality with his soul.

— Comments —

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Note the worship of activity which underlies this premature death. When a person can no longer lead an active, busy-busy life as Dorothy had once led, existence is meaningless. The inner life is nothing.

Never mind that she’s queer – author Kat Duff wrote a book, The Alchemy of Illness,  that you just might want to read.  It puts the lie to the idea that we absolutely must be busybusybusy & healthy as horses all the time to have a meaningful existence/life.  I read this book more times than I can count during hard times.

And she’s come out with another book, The Secret Life of Sleep, just published, which continues with the idea that “doing nothing” is not nothing at all.  Sleep is not something that needs to be hurriedly gotten out of the way, like wiping up a mess.

Too bad that Dorothy Conlon didn’t read The Alchemy of Illness; I can assure you it’s not just for people with chronic, lingering or serious sickness.  It’s for everyone. I don’t agree with every word but the basics are there.

Laura writes:

Monasteries were important in the great Western tradition in part because they helped people value contemplation and non-busyness.

Karl D. writes:

This whole being endlessly busy raises an interesting question for me? I have noticed that there is a huge swath of women from ages of 35-55 that are downright manic when it comes to being “busy.” You often find these types in Blue States and urban areas. They are quite literally always on the go. You can see them running/jogging in the streets, in the gym, doing yoga and pilates before and after work. I don’t see anything wrong with exercise but there is a definite manic look and behavior behind it. You can see it in their eyes and body language. They look like nervous wrecks! There is a new dating app for the iPhone called Tinder. You are required to put several photos of yourself up on it for prospective dates. Every time I take a look at these women’s photos they invariably have several shots of themselves running marathons, mountain climbing, shooting guns, playing paintball, skydiving, martial arts, yoga, sailing, and on and on.

I thought of how refreshing it would be to see a photo of a woman playing the piano, painting a picture, cooking a meal or some other feminine activity. Is this just a symptom of feminism? The absence of God? Pure existential angst? Or all of the above? It seems the last thing these gals want to do is slow down and look inside. Unless it is in some kind of silly new age or Eastern religious way.

Laura writes:

It’s the same thing with parenthood — the constant, manic activity.

Eugene Rose called it “Vitalism,” the worship of energy for it’s own sake. It’s a form of nihilism, which doesn’t make sense at first glance. How can busy-ness be nihilistic? But it does make sense. It’s a flight from the Interior Castle and its demands.

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