Good news / bad news, Wills, assisted dying and social care

31 December 2022

‘Life good in Ashby de la Zouche’ doesn’t sell papers.  ‘Attractive young woman shot dead in club’ does.

This we all know, but why?  Is it that we take ‘good’ news for granted so it’s boring?  Or do we get some sort of voyeuristic pleasure from hearing that something bad happened somewhere we weren’t? Perhaps there’s an element of “There but for the grace of God go I” (a phrase whose origin is attributed to an early 16^th century Christian preacher when he saw a bunch of condemned people being escorted to the scaffold to which he was later taken himself).

But why does the UK still edit films of killings and accidents?  We seem happy to watch films in which ‘deaths’ are shown in graphic detail, heads exploding or people bleeding slowly to death (thank you for that one Quentin Tarantino) but we know they’re actors and special effects.  In real life, film of somebody being shot or knifed in the street is always stopped just before the end so we don’t see any ‘real’ person’s death.

This might be because of a wish to spare the dead person’s family and friends from seeing the actual moment of death, but I can remember seeing a copy of Paris Match from the 1960s which included a photograph of a plane crash, showing the smoking wreckage and the roofless cabin with burnt bodies still strapped into their seats.

We all tend to say “If I die, I’d like …” while the one thing we know for certain is we are all going to die so we should say “When I die, I’d like …”, and yet we’re still curiously reticent when it comes to talking about death.

Many of us also seem to be superstitious about – or just keep putting off – writing a Will, thus risking leaving our partners and families and friends in a labyrinth of paperwork and bureaucracy at a time when they’re trying to cope with their grief.  (So if you haven’t yet written a Will, go and do it NOW and remember it’s Very Important to follow the exact rules;  solicitors and charities will often help do this free.)

But what about dying?  We’re not all lucky enough to die in our sleep and there are some nasty diseases and conditions that kill us slowly and painfully over a long time.  If this happens to me, I’d want to be allowed to make a choice over when I die, preferably before the pain becomes so bad that palliative drugs can only reduce it by sending me to sleep.

My first blog in this series, posted on 19 August 2018, explains why I am committed to the principle that ‘assisted dying’ should be legal in the UK.  Fans of Emmerdale will also have followed Faith Dingle’s struggles with what to do when the pain of her terminal breast cancer became unbearable.  (Spoiler alert:  she died in October.)

The Netherlands already has a much more enlightened approach to letting people die in comfort and with their family;  in Switzerland, Dignitas apparently charges £10,000 and the Australian state of Victoria passed assisted dying legislation in November 2017.  Closer to home, France will hold a national debate with a view to legalising assisted dying in 2023, a Bill is moving forward in Scotland, Jersey launched the second part of its consultation in October, an Isle of Man MHK has been given leave to introduce a private members bill on assisted dying in the House of Keys in May 2023 and the Irish parliament is launching a special committee to consider the subject after a poll showed 63% of people in the Republic supported the idea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the powers that be are miles behind and can’t even get their heads round the problems of social care.   The result is inevitably that the bulk of the support comes from privately-owned companies whose owners are more interested in getting rich than in the service they claim to offer to the UK’s 1 million dementia patients – and all the others who need care – charging their ‘customers’ an average of £75,000 to £100,000 each per year for residential care.  However, we have to remember that these owners are perfect examples of capitalist entrepreneurs worshipped by free-market Conservatives so the present government is understandably cautious about offending potential donors.

Luckily for these entrepreneurs, dementia patients tend not to know there’s anything wrong with them and can’t remember who did what to them so victims of abuse can’t testify against them.  I have a feeling it’s worse for people watching someone develop dementia, seeing the person they knew and loved slowly drifting away and dissolving, leaving only a shell.

The care homes regulating body, the Care Quality Commission, has reported that more than three times as many care homes in England were given the worst possible rating in 2022 as were in 2019.  Their latest report also showed some homes to be filthy and unhygienic, that medicines weren’t properly administered, that patients had unexplained bruising and injuries, and family visits were restricted.

In addition to delaying the dementia strategy it promised in May to deliver by the end of the year, the government has also postponed its promised funding reform to “fix social care”.

As a carer myself, I know just how exhausting it can be, both physically and emotionally.  We pay a private company some £10,000 a year for ¾ hour of help every morning and the best part of £2,000 for a week’s respite care every so often.  When our savings expire, we’ll be broke and on benefits.

In the meantime, the company’s balance sheet shows that it (i.e. the husband and wife who own it and are the only directors) increased in value by £236,000 in the year to March 2022 and by £430,000 in the previous year.  (The accounts don’t say how much extra, if anything, they paid themselves as directors.)  If the service had been provided by the government, that’s an extra £666,000 it could have used to improve and increase care services just in our small local area.  Isn’t 666 the number of the beast?

Still, this is traditionally the time we look back to last year so I’ll limit myself to the good things because I’m getting short of space.

Ummm.

Women showed that football can be interesting and players don’t have to be failed thespians.

That’s about it really so a happier new year to all of you who are starting a new year tomorrow.

PS:  A friend has criticised me for saying last week that we gave away our winter heating credits, a perfectly fair criticism of something which could be seen as an attempt to impress people rather than trying to encourage more giving.  In fact, I gave a lot of thought to this before leaving it in because I had been inspired by a real person (Joan Bakewell in case you’re interested) saying several years ago that she always gave hers away and I thought that, if she did it, then so could I.  And, if somebody read this and thought here’s somebody I know who’s doing it, maybe I could.  Nevertheless, I apologise unreservedly to anybody who found it distasteful and an attempt to brag – it’s not a competition.

Monarchies and republics

11 September 2022

The Queen died on Thursday. 

From the palace’s announcement at lunchtime that her doctors were concerned, it was obvious that her death was imminent but it was still a shock to hear the word when somebody reminded us that Prince William is now heir to the throne because his father is king.  We’ve known the queen for so long that the word ‘king’ gave me a jolt.

Charles had obviously had advance warning because he was in Scotland and able to get to Balmoral quickly so he was with her as she died which is, somehow, rather comforting.

Rumours that she only hung on for as long as she did to receive Boris Johnson’s resignation are likely to be the product of a warped mind.

She certainly hung on for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations so as not to spoil the event for everybody else, and to confirm Liz Truss as the new prime minister;  48 hours before she died, she got up and dressed and stood to welcome Truss with her usual beaming smile, despite what one doctor thought was a bruise left by a canula on the back of her hand.

The initial tributes were predictably sombre with Truss and Keir Starmer appearing to have agreed that the former would cover the boring platitudes while the latter gave a much more human and impressive eulogy.  It was then open house for other MPs to pay their own tributes.  Boris Johnson spoke very well, showing that he can actually talk without erring and umming when he’s done his homework, and Theresa May amazed everybody by making the chamber laugh with a personal anecdote of an encounter with the Queen. 

Other tributes poured in from around the world, including a touching message from Vladimir Putin in a letter whose contents were released by the Kremlin.

My mother used to say the Queen had one of those faces that made her look severe when she was actually just relaxed but she had the most wonderful smile (and laugh) and, had she not been a monarch who took her job very seriously, she’d just have been described as a nice person, which is surely the highest praise anyone can give.

A number of people writing about the Queen’s sense of fun have mentioned the American tourists taking a selfie of themselves with her protection officer, her having tea with Paddington Bear and being parachuted into the Olympic games (it was apparently her idea to greet Daniel Craig as “Mr Bond”).  My favourite story about her came from someone I knew when I worked for one of her son’s charities.  As he’d walked into the room to see the Queen, he tripped over a corgi and was mortified but the Queen said “Don’t worry, it’s his own fault for being the same colour as the carpet”.  What a graceful way of putting someone at ease.

I’ve never had any strong views about the different arguments for monarchies or republics.  I was an admirer of the Queen but the times they are a-changin’.  In the last few days, we’ve been shown ceremonies that have never been publicly seen before.  The pomp of the public parades was certainly impressive but they are for show.  Any power the monarch has is exercised behind closed doors and tends to influence the beginning or the end of parliamentary decisions, but they do have some real power.

One assumes that a British republic would impose similar limitations on the powers of the president so the basic choice could perhaps be reduced to a simple question about whether one has greater faith in nepotism or elections.

In companies, nepotism has proved almost without exception a singularly inefficient way of choosing the next boss but this may be because there is competition and you know my belief that anybody who actually wants to be in a position of power is, by definition, unfit for purpose.

Now we’ve given up regicide and importing foreigners, there’s a fixed hierarchy within the royal family which determines who’s going to be the next monarch so there’s no competition, or choice.  For example, if 58,496,132 Brits all suddenly die, I’ll be king. 

This makes the system dependant on who gets born when but they’re brought up for it from when they first grimace and cover their ears as a bunch of planes thunder overhead so they know what’s expected of them, and that stability is essential.

Presidents are elected for fixed terms more or less democratically and they are part of a political process so their actions and popularity depend on the mood of the moment which is often (always?) influenced by or linked to events outside the country concerned over which neither the presidents nor their governments have any control. 

Even presidents who elect themselves for a life-term in the job rarely die in post and there can be political – and all too often violent – disturbances when they step down or are removed.  A president should have the internal and international respect – and the humility – of somebody like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama, but there aren’t enough of those to go round.

The advantage of British hereditary monarchs is that they are above politics and can provide an impartial sounding board for the leader of whichever party was disliked least in a general election.

The other problem with presidents is how to choose them.  We live with a broken electoral system that allows small minorities of voters to form governments and even smaller minorities to be completely unrepresented in parliament.

As I write this, I realise I’m talking myself towards being a monarchist, but only faute de mieux.  We’ve been lucky enough to have had an incomparable monarch in E2R.  Let’s hope C3R does as well.

So why don’t we make all royals subject to the same laws and taxes as the rest of us, let them stay in power and see how it goes.

Are death and consciousness coterminous?

7 August 2022

Imagine the anguish of parents whose 12-year old son suffered catastrophic brain damage while attempting an internet ‘challenge’, whose heart and lungs and entire metabolism were being kept going by machines and, although there was no sign of activity in the brain stem, they hoped he would recover. 

Imagine the anguish of the medical teams who weigh the chances of recovery in such cases and discussed at length what was best for Archie Battersbee.

Imagine the anguish of judges who had expert medical advice that the boy was, for all practical purposes, already dead and pleas from the parents who hoped for a miracle, and had to decide whether the life support equipment could be disconnected, leaving the boy to die ‘naturally’.

After every possible appeal, Archie’s parents were told last week that his life support systems would be disconnected and he died yesterday.

I’ve written before about the blurred boundaries between life and death and when a living creature stops being alive and starts being dead, and I’ve written more recently about ‘consciousness’.  My own feeling has always been that all the atoms gathered together to form my body will disperse over time and become parts of other things (I know this is an ongoing process and ‘my’ atoms are in a constant state of flux anyway but let’s assume for simplicity that a body is a body).

Since we do associate consciousness with individuals, and therefore their bodies, we rarely consider whether consciousness can exist without a body although there does seem to be some evidence that this is possible.

An American journalist, Leslie Kean, is one of a number of people who have gathered stories that seem to indicate consciousness can continue to exist after death and she (yes, I know, but we know Americans can’t spell and anyway why shouldn’t people spell their names how they like?) spent a lot of time researching cases for when this might have happened and published her conclusions in Surviving Death (Three Rivers Press, NY, November 2017).

It’s easy to dismiss this as nonsense, wishful thinking, unscientific etc but just because nothing we’ve discovered so far can explain it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.  Dark matter / energy accounts for most of the universe and rigorously structured scientific experiments show that something is out there but nobody has yet managed to do much more than give it a name. 

The American philosopher William James said that if you want to disprove the belief that all crows are black, you only need to find one that isn’t.

One of the most intriguing cases she describes involves young children having memories of somebody else’s life.  Typically, these start when a child is about three and have gone before they are six and a friend of mine said, when her son was about four, he said he’d been killed in a car crash.  He wasn’t upset by this, he just said it and, when she later asked him about it, he couldn’t remember having said it.

One of the most famous (and contentious) cases is that of James Leininger who, from the age of 2, was fascinated by old fighter aeroplanes and had memories of a pilot who’d been killed when his plane was shot down near Iwo Jima in the second world war.  Some of the details he gave were detailed enough to allow them to be subsequently checked against official records.  The problem is that his parents are enthusiastically religious and many people have seen James’s story as ‘proof’ of reincarnation while others, less religiously inclined, have questioned the accuracy and chronology of his story and debunked the reincarnation theory.

However, more than 2,500 children have spoken of ‘memories’ of a past life and 1,400 of them have been independently verified.  The majority of these early memories are of the lives of people who have died relatively close to the child’s home and within the fairly recent past (Leininger was unusual in this) and many of them are from cultures that do accept reincarnation.

What nobody seems able to explain is why more people don’t have these memories if we have all been reincarnated;  or how some people’s consciousness can communicate anything after their body’s death.  And anyway, why should apparent ‘memories’ of somebody else’s life automatically mean they were reincarnated rather than their minds had just picked up some cosmic flotsam?

Then there are what are known, conveniently but inaccurately, as ‘after death experiences’ when somebody has been pronounced dead but has been subsequently revived by doctors.

One woman who had suffered a cardiac arrest said that she remembered rising out of her body to look down on the medical team working on it.  She said she had seen a nurse kick a sheet of paper under her bed as they worked on her and then she drifted up and outside the hospital and described in some detail a tennis shoe on an outside windowsill on the third or fourth floor that couldn’t be seen from anywhere else.  After her recovery, she described these scenes and the nurse confirmed they had kicked some paper under the bed;  they also checked the windowsills and found the shoe exactly as she described it.

Dr Janice Holden, professor emerita at the University of North Texas, summed up the problem here rather neatly:  “If consciousness can function apart from the body in a reversibly dead body, perhaps it continues to function after irreversible death” but this can’t ever be proved because of “the methodological failure of researchers to find reliable, irreversibly dead people to participate in their studies.”

One obliging 87-year old had a heart attack and died while he was undergoing an EEG for a deteriorating bleed in the brain.  Recordings of the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped beating showed changes in brain waves, including alpha and gamma waves, whose actions are linked to memory recall.  The study suggests that neural activity continues after blood stops flowing in the brain but this is just one case, which is impossible to replicate, and there is still the difficulty of deciding an exact moment of death when different bits of the body die at different rates.

Some people who died but were resuscitated described ‘near death experiences’ when asked what they remembered from the time they were clinically dead.  A 1988 study of 344 consecutive cardiac arrests in the Netherlands, published in the Lancet in December 2001, reported that 82% had no memories but 18% (62 people) did.  The researchers contacted all surviving participants again after two and eight years and found significant differences between people who had had NDEs and those who hadn’t.  The former had no fear of death, were convinced of an afterlife and felt their lives had greater meaning, but many also suffered loneliness and depression from their inability to share the depth of their experiences with others.

Even more common are ‘end of life experiences’ which one study claimed were felt by 50-60% of people at the end of their lives, with the dying seeing visions that were never frightening and often made them cheerful and relaxed. 

Other events linked to somebody’s death that might show that consciousness doesn’t always die when the heart stops beating include relatives waking from sleep at the exact time, clocks and watches stopping, and pictures falling off the wall.  (I’ve written before about various experiences some friends and I have had which we felt was some sort of comfort offered by the person who’d died.)

There have also been psychic readings, seances and materialisations, which occasionally seem to reveal information that only the dead person could have known, such as the location of something that was lost, but these seem to me to be part of a wider field of sharing knowledge in ways that we don’t yet understand rather than as evidence that consciousness may continue after death.

If consciousness isn’t always tethered to the body and can roam free, perhaps it could somehow communicate with other consciousnesses and account for things like telepathy? (I’ll maybe come back to that someday.)

In any event, I hope that the Battersbees have some sort of experience that comforts them and helps them through their grief.

Remembering, kindness, lessons from Christianity, and other happy things

26 December 2021

This is a season of remembrance, when we think about things that are lost to us, especially people:  parents, siblings, friends, animals and, perhaps worst of all, children.  People we knew and loved, people we knew and didn’t love, and strangers who died of starvation, or as collateral damage in arguments between megalomaniacs they didn’t even know.

In a way, feeling sad for their loss is a way of honouring and giving a purpose to their lives.  There are things in my life I wish my mother could see but she’d be coming up to 104 now and wouldn’t thank me;  then again, there are other things in my life I’m glad she didn’t have to live through.  Nevertheless, I am happy to remember her as she was and feel glad to have known her.

Remembering people who died unnecessarily is more difficult and I find myself trying to find ways in which we can stop more people dying.  It’s glib, but thought-provoking, to think about the slogan from the 1960s “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came”.

I talk a lot about kindness and I mentioned volunteering last week but we can also give money to charities that work in fields we support.  I have a slight feeling that anybody whose income is over a certain figure should be required to give money to charities and, the more you earn, the greater the percentage you should give.

My tax return for last year shows that, because my income was enough to cover my needs, I gave 5% of my income to charities.  I’ve no idea if this is the ‘right’ level but it works for me.

This also, of course, links with my belief that there should be a maximum permitted remuneration and that no surplus payments, whether they’re given as salary, bonuses and other perks, or dividends.  Back in October, some housebuilders the government by saying that the extra costs of making buildings safe after the Grenfell disaster will mean they won’t be able to build as many ‘affordable’ homes.  It appears that this was said with a straight face, either because they assumed we were too stupid to spot the flaws in their argument, or because they were.

What they actually meant was they can’t afford to increase profits and keep paying management and shareholders more each year and pay for shoddy work they did in the past, and they couldn’t possibly reduce these payments and build smaller houses so, obviously, it’s the houses that go.

This is the time of the year when Christians remember the birth of Jesus.  Whether or not you believe he was the son of God, he taught us all some valuable lessons:  he’s on record as saying love your neighbour (i.e.  be kind to people) and for chucking traders out the temple (i.e.  capitalism and religion don’t mix).  But let’s also remember that his father Joseph earned his living as a carpenter so we must contrast his beliefs that individuals who earn their living from their own businesses are not the same as large capitalists who think being rich and being kind to people are mutually exclusive.

He also told the parable of the (presumably) Jewish man who had been mugged and was lying injured at the side of the road, though one hopes he was actually on the hard shoulder.  Jews and Samaritans traditionally despised each other and various Jews passed him by but a Samaritan stopped and helped him, putting racial prejudice to one side and helping him as another human being.  If only such kindness to people could override all racial and religious stereotypes which aren’t worth the paper they’re not written on and everybody could see sons and daughters of other people rather than enemies, all over the world.

This thought was voiced by Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, just before Christmas when he said of the Covid vaccine “… get boosted, get vaccinated. It’s how we love our neighbour …”, and later echoed by Boris Johnson who unapologetically plagiarised the archbishop’s words and congratulated people who are getting vaccinated “not just for themselves, for ourselves, but for friends and family and everyone we meet … That, after all, is the teaching of Jesus Christ, whose birth is at the heart of this enormous festival – that we should love our neighbours as we love ourselves”.

The omicron Covid variant actually seems to be milder and causes 40% fewer hospital admissions but it is very much more infectious so many more people are being infected and there’s no relief in sight for the NHS.  (Incidentally, why has ‘Oh mickron’ suddenly become ‘Ommy kron’?  Should we now start talking about alpha and Ommyger?)

(And, while I’m being pedantic, why does the word ‘probably’ seem to have been replaced by ‘likely’?)

Elsewhere, another missed opportunity for Labour:  an 82-year old Jewish woman who regularly attends her local synagogue, Diana Neslen, is being investigated by the Labour party for anti-semitism for having been critical of Israel and Zionism, including a 2017 tweet in which she said “the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour and I am an anti-racist Jew”.  Good on yer, Ms Neslen, I’m with you.

And some happy things to encourage us into the new year:

• ministers have promised to “reset the dial” on women’s health to eradicate prejudices about the menopause and hymenoplasty (surely a form of FGM?) and to boost awareness of other taboos
• a deaf person, Rose Ayling-Ellis, won Strictly Come Dancing
• a teenager, Emma Raducanu, who pulled out of this year’s Wimbledon tournament because she felt the pressure was getting to her (a very brave thing to do in itself), went on to win the US Open and became the BBC Sports Personality of the Year
• Netflix is adapting a book about a blind girl whose part is to be played by an actor who really is blind, Aria Mia Lobreti
• a hitherto unknown episode of Morecambe and Wise was shown yesterday (isn’t Eric Morecambe’s body language brilliant!)
• Britain’s northernmost inhabited island, Unst, is to host a British spaceport
• police arriving at the scene of a road accident in Florida found two (unhurt) teenagers in an SUV lying on its side with the snouts of two 6’ alligators sticking out of the rear window;  the alligators were released without charge
• in 1927, William Long opened a chocolate shop in Keswick called Friars, which is still owned by the same family, and makes wonderful coffee cream chocolates.  In its latest publicity, they say “We are immensely proud of our heritage. Our rose and violet creams are the same ones that William sold on that first day”.  (All together now:  “aren’t they a bit stale by now?”)

And finally, proof from Australia that some people are still thoughtful and kind and that practical jokes can sometimes be silly and funny and hurt no-one;  how often ‘silly’ and ‘funny’ go together for people who missed out on self-importance …

Nick Doherty from Mackay in Queensland was away from home and texted a friend who lived next door, Carl Stanojevic, asking him to take his bins out.  Stanojevic duly took a bin out and gave it a tour of Mackay, past the duckpond to a massage parlour via sites like a supermarket and a restaurant, even stopping to talk to passers-by and to let the bin make a phone call.  At each place, Stanojevic took a photograph of the bin and made up an album which he sent to Doherty to prove he’d completed his task.  Doherty was blown away by the joke but is apparently now worried to put it out in case it wanders off again.

Don’t we need more people like this all over the world to show there is still love and kindness and fun and happiness in the world and we can all share them.