The Western Man Will Do Anything to Avoid Pain

We really do not like to “memento” our “mori”

In the Catholic tradition, and especially during the penitential season of Lent, the faithful are called to memento mori, to “remember their death.” In advance of the memorial of the death and resurrection of Christ, we discuss and pray about the Four Last Things; Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. According to the world, Catholics ponder these inevitabilities mostly because they have a taste for the macabre.

But I think the world, and especially the Western one, could use a little quarterly dose of pondering their demise. This sober self-assessment is especially important in light of the Western medical establishment increasingly encroaching onto what was once God’s, or at least Nature’s, turf — that is, the exact circumstances of how you will exit this life.

In the throes of a recent bout with a strep throat-induced fever, I had an ample opportunity to consider my death. Would it be painful? Would it be sudden? Would it be because of this fever? In the midst of pondering these questions, I decided it was a brilliant idea to read a book about the very topic at hand.

The book — Time to Die by Nicolas Diat — details the death tales of monks across France. While some of the stories are uplifting, others grim, a distressing throughline in the book is the oppression of the French healthcare system and its grating against the monks’ way of life — and death.

One of the abbots lamented:

“By relentlessly repairing the living, like robots, we will end up in tatters. When we put a pacemaker in a brother with Alzheimer’s disease, we are caring for the heart in order to prolong the disease of the brain… 

Man has created a technological world that humiliates him, and makes him feel ashamed… In this system, the error is necessarily man…In a hospital, healing follows the same logic. The patient is a machine. Surgeons repair a liver, a kidney, a heart, a stomach, until the machine is so worn out that it has to be thrown in the trash.”

Another said, of a monk’s slow succumbing to pain medication prescribed as part of palliative care:

“For the first time in my life, I had been confronted with a situation where painkillers could precipitate death. The line is blurred. Can I speak of disguised euthanasia?...The fight against pain can become a way of killing. Forty years ago, we were powerless in the face of pain; today, the problem is the opposite.”

With the innovation of avoidance measures, such as pain medication and the smartphone, the world has become enamored with comfort. But what past wisdom have we lost in the process? 

For one, I think the imposition of heavy doses of pain medicine and sleep aids to one dying can separate them from the knowledge of their own fate. As humans, we have the right to meet our birth head on, despite its inherent suffering, and it should be the same with death, regardless if both events involve blood, kicking, and screaming. 

Also, I believe that pain medication is at least in part a means to make the patient compliant and quiet. I saw this first hand with my great-aunt who could barely move her pinky when I went to say my goodbyes. Of course, an underlying motivation of sedative use, most obvious in Canada’s odious medical suicide program, is lowering the emotional and physical burden of an invalid on one’s family, friends, or society as quickly as possible. Private-equity run hospitals and hospices just need that bed. Homeless shelters and therapy services just don’t have room.

This instrumentalization of humans is repugnant to our dignity. But it is difficult to know what to do when faced with a hospital or hospice system which seems to make decisions for us without explaining the consequences in a way non-medically minded people can understand. And on the patient side, we really do not know what to do with pain, as our culture has become awash in opioids, no thanks to our Mexican amigos down south cooking up fentanyl-laced pills.

While I am not against pain relief, I am against treating the vulnerable among us like things by rendering them to the level of awareness of a houseplant. In fairness to the medical establishment, we just as often do this to ourselves. As C.S. Lewis states in his book of prophecy known as The Abolition of Man; “If man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be.” We choose to treat ourselves like raw material by numbing out on food, alcohol, drugs, porn, or social media. We drown out uncomfortable silences and uncomfortable thoughts by listening to music, podcasts, or working overtime.

If you are feeling shame right now, so am I. I struggle with some of these self-soothing techniques immensely. But I also know that I want to be cogent and confessed-up at my death, if God wills it, and my suffering training starts now. My end may involve suffering or it may not. But when I leave my loved ones to embark on the journey to (hopefully) meet Him who loves me, I darn sure want to have an awareness that He is on His way.