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  June, 1985

To Paul, John, Mark, Ruth and Thor:

I first decided to write this while I was recovering from my heart attack more than a dozen years ago. That was my first close brush with death in which I had time to think about it be- forehand.

I had had perhaps a closer brush in an automobile accident when I was in college before World War II. I was riding as a passenger in the right front seat of my roommate's car as we were driving to visit his parents. It was after dark on a two-lane black-top highway with numerous headlights coming from the other direction. Suddenly, I saw the back end of an unlighted truck that was pulling into the highway ahead of us.

In a flash, I realized -- I cannot describe it as a thought process -- that Charlie could not see it because his vision was more affected by the oncoming lights than mine. In the same flash, I yelled the single word, "Truck!" I recall feeling the effects of our brakes, which could not have reduced our speed much before the crash. I do not recall the crash, and my next memory was that I was outside the car stumbling along the side of the road with some fuzzy notion of finding out if Charlie was all right, but that was only a brief recollection.

My next memory was waking up in a hospital bed. It was in the hospital in Durham, N. C., where my sister was a nurse, and I found out that a great deal had happened in the meantime. I had first been taken to the same hospital where I had been born in Raleigh, N. C., which was the nearest to the accident scene. At first they told my sister they thought I was already dead or soon would be, but when they cleaned up the bloody mess of my head they found that I had only been scalped rather severely. Then my sister had me transferred to her hospital. I no longer recall the length of time involved before I went back to school.

I do not recall any fear at any time. That's not because I am fearless. I have been badly frightened by much less serious occurrences both before and since. I do not recall having thought about the possibility of death until some time afterwards when I realized how nearly I had come to death. Even then the thought was not disturbing, perhaps because I was young and by then I knew the danger was over.

I had given death considerably more thought in connection with the deaths of others, especially, those whom I had loved and who had loved me.

The first funeral I have any recollection about was that of my mother's father. I have no recollection of my own feelings. I just have flash pictures of the casket, of the ornate horse drawn hearse, of my mother crying when she got the "letter edged in black." Oddly the letter comes last in my memory although it was the earliest to occur.

Then there was the death of a cousin -- a grown man who lived near me then. Of this I remember only the church service with the coffin in front of the altar. I remember seeing his body in the coffin. So far as my memory goes, I might have been the only person I knew who attended, although this seems unlikely. I just remember the inside of the church, the flowers, and Raymond's white face.

The first death that I have any recollection of apart from the funerals -- was that of my father's mother, Sally Foy Carden. She was very close to me. She had lived with us a great deal of the time while I was growing up, and I spent a lot of time sitting in her lap and listening to her stories. She was the most marvelous story teller I ever knew.

She was at my Aunt Ethel's house in the country when she realized she was approaching death. She sent word for my father and mother to come and get her in his 1935 Ford pickup truck, which had a more spacious and comfortable front seat and softer springs than most trucks then or later.

She asked to be driven around to see various places she wanted to see one last time, and then said, "Take me home."

I saw her every day after she came home, but so far as I can remember she was always sleeping. She died peacefully a week later.

She was a devout Methodist, the widow of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher (the grandfather I do not remember). She did not fear death and she had no doubts there was life after death, and that it would be beautiful.

I do not remember anything about her funeral except seeing her in the casket at the funeral home. I remember noticing that the one long hair in her right eyebrow was still sticking out defiantly with a sharp bend in the middle. I have one just like it, but a barber cut it off while I was dozing through a haircut many years ago. It grew back, but it' s just a droopy long hair now.

Since Grandma's funeral, there have been many other deaths that have touched me deeply but none that I could approach with the wide-eyed optimistic curiosity of a boy who had not yet learned why grown folks cried when people died and went to heaven. In fact, I had not yet begun to puzzle over that question.

I had, however, begun to think about all the religious information that I had absorbed at home, at public school, at Sunday school, and in church services.

Not long before Grandma Carden's funeral, I had been shocked by the preacher of the Methodist Church I belonged to. I had, in all innocence, asked him to explain something he had said in his sermon that had puzzled me.

I wish I could remember what it was, but his angry response wiped it out of my head. He accused me of talking to atheists. At that point, I had not knowingly discussed religion with anybody outside the largely Methodist and partly Baptist people with whom I associated. I didn't even know what an atheist was.

Whatever it was, I dropped the matter and asked no more questions of him, but I began to listen more closely to try to learn the answer to what I had asked him. I do not recall whether I ever cleared up that forgotten question, but I sure learned that there were a lot of apparent contradictions embedded in what I had been taught.

I also learned, of course, that a great many of what appeared to be contradictions to me were not actually contradictory when understood in their contexts. I don't think I knew the words "contradiction" and "context" at the time, but I now know that they accurately explain the nature of the problem and of one solution to many of them.

Gradually, over a period of years I came to understand that my fundamental problem was in understanding that "faith" was the ultimate answer to questions the most learned theologians could not otherwise answer in a way that I could understand.

I will not try to relate my full efforts to understand, involving questions to every priest, rabbi, preacher or layman I met who might know the answers to my questions. Suffice it to say that I have found a faith of my own. I would have more trouble explaining my faith to anybody else than the best minds I could call upon during my quest had in explaining theirs to me.

It has seen me safely through all my most difficult times -- my mother's death, my father's illness and death, the senseless death of one of my sons in his prime, the deaths of several good friends, and many less cosmic times of stress.

Most cheering of all, it was sufficient to see me through the only occasion to date in which I stared the prospect of my own death face to face, knowing I was having a serious heart attack. I was literally unafraid. The last thought I can remember crossing my mind before the anesthetic began to take effect was this question to myself: "Have I remembered to tell Myrle all she needs to know?"

I had not, but she managed. One of the first resolutions I made when I returned home was that I would write down what she or anybody else who might become responsible for me ought to know about my affairs and my preferences.

But it takes a lot to reform an old procrastinator like me, and in all the intervening years tomorrow never has seemed too late to do it.

Today, I am finally getting to it, primarily because the legislature passed a law authorizing "living wills," and Myrle responded promptly to my suggestion by copying the prototype text included in the statute. As usual, I didn't like the draftsmanship, and I started trying to re-write it. Finally I decided to execute one in the statutory form and supplement it with this letter.

This is not being written on any premonition of imminent death or disabling affliction. I feel as immortal as I ever did; it is only intellectually that I recognize that either could happen at any moment.

I do not fear death, but I am not fearless. I fear the kind of pain I know can go along with heart attacks and various afflictions of the back.

But more than that, I fear the kind of slow dying my father suffered. Fortunately his last illness came along before a great many medical "advances" began to offer a new form of "eternal" life attached to tubes. No fundamentalist ever managed to dream up a hell like that, which must be suffered not only by the sinner but by the people who love the sinner.

I deny that it is a crime of any degree to withhold treatment earlier than the time some physician decides "there can be no recovery."

The standard should be that the plug may be pulled when resumption of a reasonably normal and pain free life becomes unlikely. This is particularly true with respect to old duffers like me whose productive life is already going downhill, and who would reject any government assistance even in such an extremity if he retained the power of choice.

I have been hooked up to tubes before, and I did not like it. In that case, I accepted them, and I would accept them in a future case of temporary physical disablement. But as the years go by, even temporary disablement gets longer and longer, and periods of enjoyment of life even upon full recovery grow more limited, both in time and in quality.

Nor is my fear of the medical establishment limited to what it would do to my body. I also fear the burdens it places on its victims' families.

Even if the government should pick up the costs I would resent the burden imposed on unwilling taxpayers to keep me breathing beyond my time.

Indeed, I have often thought the Eskimos had the right idea. I'm told that -- at least before the do-gooders put them on welfare -- old duffers who realized they were too much of a burden on the young folks simply took off their clothes and walked out into the arctic darkness.

In short, my message to those who may be responsible if the question of pulling the plug on me comes up is this: If in doubt, pull the plug!

Now for the next question: What then?

If Myrle survives me and is able to give directions, she knows my views about funerals and other methods of disposing of dead bodies. She knows that she is not bound by them and that I want her to direct things in whatever way that she may then think will make her feel best about it.

But I need to go further and consider the possibility that she will not survive me or may not be able to take the responsibility.

In that case, my primary concern is that I would like to be able to think while I live that I shall have so expressed myself as to minimize the possibility of family friction over the religious questions that unavoidably arise in considering arrangements for disposing of the body upon death.

Many folks seem to torture themselves to do what the dear departed would have wanted. That always seemed absurd to me except as a device to avoid conflicts among the dear survivors. If funeral formalities have any use, it is primarily to comfort as much as possible those who might grieve. A secondary purpose that has occurred to me since I began attending funerals of friends in my own age bracket is to give friends of the departed an opportunity to express their regrets or to give a last salute. If any friends I leave behind would like such an opportunity, I hope they will have it.

Of course, the religious question is most important, particularly among family members who have taken different courses in their searches for Ultimate Truth. Except to encourage you to think seriously about them, I have tried not to intrude in those choices, and I do not wish anything I say in this letter to be interpreted as suggesting any disapproval of what any of you has decided. It is only to the extent that my death may cause you to try to compromise your various views about death and funerals, that I venture now to suggest a procedure that allows each of you to follow your own convictions. I therefore suggest:

1. That my body be taken to a well-run funeral home and placed in one of their lowest priced caskets.

2. That the funeral home hold the usual visitation periods, preferably with some level-headed family member present. I do not like open caskets at these things. If anyone wishes to pray I hope they will do it silently.

3. That the burial be conducted as privately as possible and that there be no religious ceremony.

4. That everybody who thinks a religious ceremony is called for should be encouraged to conduct such a service in his own home or church.

5. That everybody who thinks a few toasts are called for be encouraged to gather together for that purpose to commemorate my virtues and sins with the liquid of their choice. And let one of the toasts be to liberty.

As to place of burial, I like the idea of being buried in a national cemetery. It is the only one of my veteran's "rights" that I would be proud to accept. Furthermore, if this decision should fall on my children, Myrle probably would already have been buried there. She agrees with me that it will be nice to think that we will share a single lot together in a national cemetery.

However, I do not wish to foreclose any alternatives all of you can agree on without resentments.

You can even catalogue all my sins that you know about, but I'd rather you wouldn't.

Finally, I'd like you all to know that although I have been awkward and hesitant in showing affection, I love each of you, and each of my grandchildren, not in pursuance of any parental duty or natural prejudice but because of the very satisfactory individual each of you and them has been and has become. And I have learned to love each of the spouses you have brought to my family, and I think that's quite extraordinary.

Signed "Daddy" in blue ink.
 

The letter was typed without obvious erasure or correction. That probably means Dad typed it on his old mechanical typewriter and Mom retyped it.

Phil Carden's death was long and of the nature he most feared but not artificially prolonged. He is buried with his wife in the National Cemetary in Madison, TN. At his wake we toasted liberty.

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