In light of this week’s national conversation about the “new frontiers” open to us through experimentation on the corpses of abandoned babies (or, as we prefer to say, “embryonic stem cell research”), I was drawn again to a convicting word by agrarian poet-philosopher Wendell Berry:
“Science can teach us and help us to resist death, but it can’t teach us to prepare for death or to die well.
“The question of how you want to die is somewhat fantastical but nonetheless it is one that all the living need to consider, one that belongs to the issue of health, and one that health science can’t answer.
“Do you want to die at home with your people ‘in blessed peace around you,’ which is the death Tiresias foresaw for Odysseus and the one Homer seems to recommend?
“Or do you want to die in the hands of the best medical professionals wherever they are?
“Such questions may seem irrelevant until you realize that they define two very different lives.”
