The future, revealed in the faces of our children, reminds us that our goal lies beyond us, and that even in the nightfall of our life we must prepare a shelter for our descendants. We do not build with the same materials if the house is to last but a few years as we do if it is to last for centuries.
V
We must not think that, in developing in ourselves the love of life—of the whole of life—we create a greater fear of death. Our life is not in proportion to its length. Very short lives often give out more perfume than long barren existences. The important thing is not to grow old, but to fill up all one’s days until the last, knowing well that the last will come and give to our life its finished form. For the acceptance of the whole of life includes the acceptance of death.
Figaro opened recently a rather curious discussion among the doctors, which must interest all of us, since it is true that we all must die. It inquired of a certain number of “princes of science,” members of the Academy of Medicine, professors of faculties, eminent surgeons and practitioners, all men with degrees and honors, concerning the following case. A doctor is attending a patient, and finds that the illness is incurable, that the end is only a question of months, of days, or of hours. Must he say so? Must he tell the patient himself, or only the family, and in the latter case, which member of it?
The answers were almost all the same. They might have borrowed the epigram from Pascal: “Men, not being able to cure death, poverty, or ignorance, imagine they can make themselves happy, by not thinking about them; that is the only consolation they have been able to discover for so many ills.” Our doctors, unable to do away with death, think they can do away with the thought of it. They chloroform us morally, in preparation for the operation of the Fates.
There are some very timorous writers who will not even allow the subject to be discussed. They think it irritates their readers and so push it aside with all their strength. Or else they take shelter behind their conscience, which is presumably the only judge of their actions. But the greater part of them have an opinion. They invoke humanity as if it were some new god, who requires lies and demands cowardice. “Nothing must be told the patient which is not cheering,” one of them informs us. “It is charitable to leave a light of hope till the very end,” says a second. A third expounds this maxim: “It is no one’s duty or right to tell a patient that he is lost.” And M. Vaulair, a professor of the University of Liège, declares that when the science of medicine is powerless, its most pressing duty is to give the unhappy one who believes in it the help of a lie. All except one are agreed in maintaining that the patient, the principal person interested, has no right to hear the truth.
Must this truth be told to the family circle? Yes, up to a certain point. One must try to avoid giving pain to a wife, to children, to a father or a mother, who might be overwhelmed by the blow. Tact, prudence, reserve, moderation, hints, counsels, allusions, such are the varied stock-in-trade of the doctor in a case of this kind. He chooses a distant relative, strong and courageous, to whom he gently breaks the news, so as to make sure that he will not succumb to the shock. This relative can do what he likes about the matter. There is nothing more to be said; the family has been warned. A brave man knows the secret, it will be well kept. The doctor is the sole judge in the choice of this confidant. The important thing is that it must not be a near relative, who might be frightened. These doctors are tactful people. We believed them armed against grief, impassive, indifferent, brutal. How mistaken we were about them! What apologies we owe them! They are as gentle as little girls, as compassionate as sisters of mercy. They could not inflict pain without suffering themselves. And when the patient is dying they look for the most distant relative, the hardest and toughest, to confide to him stealthily that a mortal man is about to die.
Thus life will come to a painless end. Is not everything preferable to the terror inspired by death? Everything? Not quite. Certain doctors think that we may well allow a poor old man to die who is of no use to anyone, without telling him; but when they think of the head of a great business or of one of those capitalists who manage some huge concern, they are quite out of countenance. You see, the case becomes serious. What is to happen to all this vast business? What is to be the future of all this capital? Must we not “assure the interests of the heirs”? Yes, the importance of such material things justifies torturing the dying man. In his last moment he must pay for the importance he has enjoyed on earth. They will make him understand that he alone has no right to die quietly and is doomed to be worried till he has made his will, divided his goods, settled the fate of his business. Afterwards they may give him some hope, on condition that he does not use it to destroy what he has just done.
But who is really deceived? What is this comedy that they pretend to play round deathbeds? Do we not know, that some day we must die? Does not this certainty of death impart to life a peculiar significance? Can this be destroyed by not thinking about it? “Really,” M. Brunetière wrote recently, dealing with the subject of the “Falsehood of Universal Peace,” “life is not the greatest good if the foundation of all morality is that many things must be preferred to life; and really death is not the greatest evil, if we are men, so to speak, only in so fair as we rise above the fear of death.”
Our early youth, for which death scarcely exists, knows nothing of the value of days. It thinks our strength inexhaustible and squanders it idly. When we begin to see, around us and in us, the charm and the sadness of transient things, we feel life in all its fulness because we are amazed at the incessant flight of time. Our days are numbered. But the divisions of time are purely conventional. How many days do we lose when again the fervor of life concentrates itself in a few minutes of consciousness? The last minutes that we are destined to live may be the most intense. They may become an important part of our existence if we know that they are the last. They have this tremendous power of summing up in themselves all our past days, of completing the design of our life, of defining its outlines, and sometimes of revealing them for the first time. They bring us the supreme opportunity to correct our faults, to perform the most imperative duties which we have forgotten, to mark the current of our thoughts which has been running to waste in our ordinary pursuits. What right has anyone to steal these minutes from us? It is indeed to steal them, if they are left to us, stripped of their real importance. The man who is about to die should act like a man who is about to die, not as a man who has plenty of time left. You think, you doctors, to soothe him by hiding his danger from him; you take away from him a part of his life whose importance could never be measured in duration. He will waste his remaining strength, if he has kept his mind intact, in guessing at the truth, in scrutinising the blank faces around him, in questioning the throbs of his pulse, the beating of his heart. He will be a prey to all the terrors of doubt, when he has the right to finish his life by preparing for death. By what right do you still decree that the question of his bequest alone shall occupy him? What do you know of his thoughts, of his soul, of the future life, of God? Who has solved these questions? And if you have solved them for yourselves, where do you find the authority to solve them for others? Do not take useless responsibilities on yourselves. Everyone has his own, and that is sufficient. It is not for you to set yourselves up as judges, to ask if the dying man has any affairs to settle—he may have some of which you know nothing—you have no right to choose your confidant, and to be inhuman and cruel. For it is not human to injure life by deforming it, and it does deform it to banish from it all thought of death, which gives it all its significance. A beautiful death is the indispensable complement of a beautiful life, and the ransom of a wicked one. Yes, we must raise ourselves above the fear of death, and for that we must begin to see life as it is, so that we may live bravely, fully, nobly. The fear of death is one with the fear of living, which makes us shrink from the great efforts, the boldness, and the sacrifices that life demands from us. Only one of all these doctors understood this, and that was Sir John Fayrer, a member of the Royal Society of London, and head of the Sanitary Department in India, who dared to say, in the midst of a flock of his colleagues bleating with fear: “An experience of more than sixty years makes me declare very clearly to you: I do not agree that death should surprise a patient; he should be prepared for it.”