Post #2025171

@pathfinder @autistics """ Hardly anyone lives truly independently of everyone else. There is always occasional and more than occasional food, or help, or just someone you can call on """ Independence as an absolute doesn't really exist, ... except, perhaps, for us. I don't know whether it is our tendency towards black or white thinking, or ... Liberty or death, aye We're all free to choose death, but how many of us choose without thinking and then die astonished? My father died when he grew too old to care for himself. He fell ill, and he got the surgery he needed. But he argued down the staff at the hospital, and he left days before they felt he was ready Home alone, he then turned off the pain with pills leftover from an expired prediction whose expiry he declined to respect Across the next couple of days that got him sick enough that they couldn't bring him back when he did call for help. He just died, though by then he was unwilling And we know, at his death, he left a loaded pistol behind inside the drawer of his bedside table All of us together didn't persuade him to live differently. Going completely off the grid is eventually lethal Can we still change the thinking of someone similar, but still alive now? Really? How.