Near the End

March 2005

It is now about 14 years since my heart attack and surgery. Though I seem to have well out-lived the ten years the surgeon thought I would last after the surgery, I feel sometimes that sooner or later my heart will give out. I am having this feeling that my physical strength is slowly ebbing away — I no longer walk as well or as vigorously as I did only a few years ago. The doctor listens to my heart and is satisfied (I guess) with what he hears. But he ventures no comment

Meanwhile in the past two or three years I have had two strokes that have affected my left side so that my use of my left arm, particularly the hand, is impaired. My walking has also been affected. But I can still walk (as I did today in the halls of the main building here for about half an hour).

Not long ago I was in the pharmacy downtown here in Ashland and changed to encounter “Jimmie” Matoush. She is married to Lyle Matoush and who has had recently a rather incapacitating stroke. He was a member of the art faculty at the local university. She was apparently at the pharmacy to pick up some prescriptions, perhaps for Lyle. She asked how I was. I told her my walking was not the same as before. She said rather sadly, at least you can still walk. I guess Lyle cannot anymore. I thought that is true enough but I feel nonetheless that I wish my existence were over.

I am writing this, sitting near the third-floor library in the main building. Jean’s knitting group is in progress and I have absented myself, going on my walk and mow writing this addendum to my life story. My walk is shorter currently. It has been a difficult time for me in the last month or six weeks. First I am convinced I have had several “TIAs” — minor, transient strokes from which recovery is more or less complete. But I feel there is nonetheless an accumulative affect of declining ability to walk, do other physical activity. I feel as though I have no stamina — I do something and then all I want to do is sit and rest.

Then I have had trouble with my back. The sharp discomfort in my upped back has more or less disappeared but this had been followed by a general “achiness” throughout my back. But what bothered me the most, at least on a temporary basis, was the bad cold I had which dragged on for about a month. Currently I feel improved but my prognosis is that I will never recover to where I was before my first stroke. I shall face a slow decline in my physical well being. I am dying, whether there will be a crisis of some sort — another heart attack or a truly debilitating stroke — or whether I shall gradually fae in incompetence remains to be determined.

At this stage in my life I feel the urge to sum up what I have decided about life. It is true that I have earlier summarized my current thinking. But I find that I continually revise and change my previous thoughts, perhaps not decisively at this point, but at least “around the edges” as it were.

Let me begin my current remarks with the observation that I have recently read The End of Faith by Sam Harris and an article of some length in the New Yorker magazine about the life and thinking of Voltaire. Both Voltaire and Harris deal harshly with religion — all religion without exception. What they have to say strikes in me a most responsive note. I am convinced that all religion is an aberration of human thought. Religion has contributed immeasurably to the ills of mankind. And I am including not only such evidences as the Catholic church, the Islamic beliefs, other religions, eastern as well as western, Judaism, but also the softened kind of Christianity found in more “liberal” groups, including the Christianity of my parents and their forebears.

[This is the last entry in the five notebooks my dad wrote under the collective title “Recollections of My Life.” In December 2005, he was hospitalized with pneumonia. Following his discharge, he entered hospice care, and on January 8, 2006, died at home from congestive heart failure. —LRS]