Trying to be funny and winding up with something simply ignorant, stupid, and grotesque is not an outcome I would wish on anyone.  And yet, that is what happened to BBDO Worldwide, the advertising agency that created the Frito-Lay “Senior Moment” commercial aired on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast.

The current uproar about the Super Bowl centers on a tasteless half-time show (which I had the good sense not to watch) but I suggest some indignation should be saved for this commercial.

In case you missed it, the 30-second ad shows an old man and an old woman, presumably a couple, vying with one another to reach a bag of potato chips that had fallen on the floor. As the woman lurches toward the prize, the man reaches out, catches her ankle with his cane, and sends her sprawling.

As he totters by her, he presses his cane into her back to keep her down. When he captures the package, he looks back at her triumphantly.  With a gloating grin, however, she looks up at him and holds up a full set of his false teeth.

Does this seem funny to you? A group of MBA students at Washington University in St. Louis voted it the third best among this year’s Super Bowl commercials. This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the students held the competition, after evaluating the ads with faculty members and visiting advertising agency pros.

“Who would have thought ole grandpa had such spunk? Could you ever imagine a  gramma as feisty as she?  What a hoot to see these old codgers ready to do violence to one another for potato chips!” (Such may have been the level of critical response to the ad from these future business leaders of America.)

It escaped them entirely that the ad might have conveyed an image of elderly people that is not only unflattering but full of prejudice. The students are supposed to be whetting their critical intelligence, but instead they accepted as funny a commercial that trades on stereotypes.

Two Harvard undergraduates of my acquaintance, Jackie O’Brien and Stephanie Hurder, also found the ad innocent: “I do not think the ad made fun of the elderly in a harmful way,” says Jackie. Stephanie adds: “Perhaps the reason I found the ad entertaining was that it portrayed old people being feisty, when it’s usually assumed that old people are docile and incapable of physical conflict.”

In stressing humor, they have a point. But I wonder in this instance if they are not missing something. There may be a generational difference at work here. Perhaps you have to be closer to my age to feel offended by ads like this one. And maybe you also need a more seasoned view of American culture and the advertising industry that reflects our values.

I side with longtime ad watcher John Carroll, currently executive producer of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV, who labels the ad as the “cheapest, lamest, grasp at a laugh.”

Another friend, Robert Katz, a long-time advertising executive, finds this ad to be in “very poor taste.” My age peer Emerson Stamps regrets “an acting out of the violence of society” while Donna Svrluga says simply: “I was appalled.”

The views of the students at Washington University and at Harvard would be welcomed by the people at Frito-Lay in Dallas. I spoke to the company’s director of public relations, Charles Nicolas, who told me the ad has proved so popular in other countries that Frito-Lay decided to present it on the Super Bowl broadcast. He admits, however, that they have received negative feedback as well as positive.

Nicolas confesses not knowing how to react to the criticism. “It was an attempt at humor,” he says, and adds. “We didn’t mean to offend anyone.” Fortunately, the company has no plans to show it again in this country but it is currently airing it in Mexico and eight other countries.

Maybe they would have profited, as I did, from the work of the “Media Watch,” a committee of the Gray Panthers that used to monitor television programs and commercials for evidence of mistaken views of elders.

Members of this group raised my own consciousness in the 1970s about the often subtle stereotypes of older people that were more common then. Not without a certain militancy, the Panthers would go after the producers of the ads and growl at the networks that showed them.

You may wonder if I am making to big a deal out of this.  After all, it was just an ad. What difference does it make except to sell more potato chips?

But ageism, like racism and sexism, exerts harmful outcomes on society. People lose their jobs because of it. Older Americans get shortchanged in quality health care because of ageist attitudes. And many people are made to feel worthless because growing older is regarded in so many quarters as the road to irrelevance.

The kind of prejudice behind the “Senior Moment” ad (this title itself I find patronizing) is subtle and covered over by an attempt at humor. That does not make it any less objectionable.

Richard Griffin

This is one column that I hope puts you to sleep. Or, at least, alerts you to the value of dealing with difficulties you may have in sleeping.

I write, not because of personal problems with sleeping but through my awareness that many age peers labor under the burden of insufficient or poor sleep. Sitting through years of dull lectures in an overly long academic program may have given me an unfair advantage.

Professionals who have studied sleep problems estimate that more than one-half of Americans over age 65 have them. About one-third of us suffer from insomnia in particular.

Dr. Robert Butler, whose name looms large on aging issues, says: “The best way to help secure a good night’s rest is to exercise regularly.” Founding Director of the National Institute on Aging and currently President and CEO of the International Longevity Center in New York City, Butler last fall convened a group of experts to explore the subject of older people’s sleep and its relationship to their health.

The medical professionals at this conference rejected the common view that sleep problems are a normal part of the aging process. Not without some inconsistency they do, however, recognize that later life, with its physical and psychic changes, is a time when problems with sleep are more likely to occur.

They see sleep difficulties as linked with such serious issues as memory malfunction, depression, and greater likelihood of falls. Bad effects on the nervous system and a lowering of the immune system’s resistance to disease are other perils that can result from failing to sleep well.

Fred Turek, one of the conference experts, calls these connections a “vicious cycle” because of the ways they affect one another. Problems such as depression can serve as both cause and effect of poor sleeping habits.

Professor Turek is director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology at Northwestern University. I spoke to his colleague, Kathryn Reid, Ph.D., who shared with  me fascinating information about sleep, something she calls “a new area of research.”

I do not know much about circadian rhythms but I often feel like going to bed earlier than I want to retire and I often get up earlier than I wish. That means that the inner clock in my brain and my feelings of fatigue are not entirely in synch.

On most afternoons, I experience a slump period. Usually I take this as a signal for me to nap for 15 or 20 minutes, something I do with pleasure.

Research reveals that naps of this length are better than longer ones. If you sleep more than a half hour, you may awake feeling more tired than when you nodded off. However, Winston Churchill, the patron saint of naps, went in for longer ones, apparently without ill effects of this sort.

Dr. Butler worries about sleeplessness going unrecognized as a medical condition or being treated inappropriately. Physicians sometimes share the stereotype that considers problems in this area simply as a necessary byproduct of aging. Perhaps that is why there is only a 20 percent chance doctors will ask you about your sleep.

Participants in the New York conference freely admit to insufficient knowledge about many sleep issues. Currently, research studies aim to learn more about responses to light therapy, drugs such as melatonin and valerian, and the value of short naps.

Insomnia has never been one of my problems. For that deliverance, I attribute  major influence to a habit formed long ago of winding down at the end of each day. I turn down bright lights, do tasks requiring little serious thought, and settle down interiorly. My goal is to create an atmosphere conducive to falling asleep readily.

Experience has taught me the wisdom of not allowing upsetting thoughts to invade the precincts of my brain during the later hours. Then and during the night such thoughts assume inflated proportions. Faucet drips become floods; minor noises turn into thunderclaps; pygmies grow into giants. Problems that during the day are manageable get magnified a hundred times at night.   

About another problem threatening sound sleep, namely apnea, you’ll have to ask my roommate. I like to think myself unable to snore but I suspect otherwise. At least, I try not to do it during sermons, political speeches, and academic lectures.

Like just about everything else that affects the human body and psyche, sleep and its problems are complicated.

However, even in the face of incomplete knowledge, experts recommend that people with serious sleep problems get medical help. It is unwise to allow such difficulties to fester when appropriate intervention can go far to provide remedies.

A carefully designed program that combines exercise and diet reform, for instance, may reduce one’s weight enough to make sleep much better. It is unwise to be resigned to sleep problems without getting help in investigating them.

If you wish to read either a summary of the report or the complete text, you can find them online at www.ilcusa.org. You will need to select Press Room.  

Richard Griffin

“I think the human race needs to think more about killing.” This sober advice comes from Robert McNamara in the compelling new documentary film “The Fog of War.”

Interviewed by the marvelously creative Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara at age 85 talks at length about his life and the wars (and near-wars) in which he was closely involved. The film held me transfixed for all of its 106 minutes and made me relive the traumatic times it depicts. As Morris himself says, “This is a movie filled with existential dread.”

Besides monumental issues of survival for nations and the civilized world, the documentary raises questions about the life of an individual man whose decisions led to huge and agonizing losses of life. How, in his later years, does he live with himself? After such a record of involvement with mass killing, how can he find any interior peace?

Errol Morris reportedly disagrees with those who see McNamara as not tortured by his past. But the filmmaker does not push him to reveal his inmost thoughts or to admit feelings of guilt. The aged McNamara never says to what extent he regards himself as a person responsible for acting immorally on a grand scale.

Though the Vietnam War looms large in the film, other events in McNamara’s career are shown to have significant consequences. While still in his 20s, the future Secretary of Defense was an officer on the staff of General Curtis LeMay, working to select targets in Japan for raids that firebombed 67 cities in 1945 and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. (LeMay will always connected with the suggestion that we might bomb our enemies “back to the Stone Age.”)

McNamara also gives the 1962 Cuban missile crisis major attention. The former Defense Secretary attributes our narrow escape from nuclear war to blind luck rather than rationality. Yet, he credits a now little-known figure, onetime United States ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, for giving crucial advice to President Kennedy about how to deal with Khrushchev and ignore the Soviet hardliners.

The film takes its structure from 11 lessons that McNamara draws from his experience. For the missile crisis just cited, he advises: “Empathize with your enemy.” Yet he appears not to have done so himself. When, in 1995, he went to visit the wartime leaders of Vietnam, he was amazed to discover that his former enemies viewed the basic conflict in that country as a civil war rather than as part of a Communist campaign to take over southeast Asia.

From my days as an opponent of the United States’ role in that war, I remember clearly the realization I shared with other resisters that the war was indeed an internal struggle between North and South Vietnam. We also knew that the “domino theory” was altogether too shaky a reason to justify intervention. McNamara and Lyndon Johnson seem to have been ignorant of, or to have ignored, both these realities.

The film shows horrific scenes of bombing in both World War II and in Vietnam. How anyone could think it moral to firebomb or clusterbomb civilian populations puzzled me then and still escapes me now. But McNamara judges these actions with a relativity that has already attracted wide attention.

Recognizing that if we had lost World War II he might have been prosecuted as a war criminal, he asks: “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” The question qualifies as valid but it suggests that he has been adopting an inadequate standard of judging morality in the first place.

The writer and social critic Roger Rosenblatt believes that McNamara is indeed tormented but at the same time unable to ask for compassion. Though in the film his eyes ask us to tell him how to live with himself, Rosenblatt says, he remains technological man, accustomed only to solving problems not to coping with moral issues. However, in this instance, only he can answer the agonizing questions of individual responsibility, no one else.

Were I close to him, I would reach out to him with compassion. Even though so much of his life has been implicated in the killing of fellow human beings, many of them of them innocent, he has done some beneficial things too, as the film brings out.

Among his lessons, number nine reads: “In order to do good, you have to engage in evil.” To me, this adage is flawed but I can understand something of what he means. My own response to McNamara’s situation is to see it as basically spiritual. Like all of us, he must come to grips with the mystery of evil and his part in it.

To an extent, we are all compromised by evil but, unlike the rest of us, he has been implicated in life and death issues on a grand scale. Anyone among us can offer him compassion if he asks; no one of us can offer forgiveness. That goes beyond our power but I believe (and this is faith rather than reason) forgiveness is available.

Richard Griffin

“My child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives; even if his mind fails, be patient with him; because you have all your faculties do not despise him. For kindness to a father will not be forgotten, and will be credited to you against your sins; in the day of your distress it will be remembered in your favor.”

These words date from around 180 B.C. and appear in a book called Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus). Protestant tradition groups this work among the apocryphal books of the Bible, whereas the Catholic Church considers it an authentic part of the Hebrew Scriptures. In any event, Sirach belongs to the category of Wisdom literature and is grouped with other such sacred writings.

What has prompted me to focus on these words was their proclamation in the liturgy of the Eucharist in which I took part this past Sunday. They struck me with special force on this occasion, sounding altogether modern to my ears, as if they were written by someone with current gerontological consciousness. They seemed to speak to a situation facing adult children of aging parents all across America.

They also made me reflect on my own situation, standing on the brink of old age as I do, and gradually becoming better acquainted with some of the ills that flesh is heir to. Inevitably, I also thought of my only child as I wondered what role might await her when physical decline changes the conditions of my life. The ancient words of the author Sirach struck me forcibly in their exhortation to compassion on the part of adult children confronted with parental need for support.

The reference to the father’s mind failing sounds especially modern. The writer seems to speak as if he knows about the widespread dementia that has afflicted so many older Americans. To him, as to us, it strengthens the case for reaching out to help the older family member.

Unlike most contemporary books dealing with care of aged parents, this ancient sacred writing invokes divine rewards for such caring. Responding to parents this way, the author promises, will lead to forgiveness of sins. God himself will be minded to discount the wrongs done by those who reach out to their father and mother when it comes to a crisis or before that time.

Sirach also suggests that when those adult children themselves grow old and need help, God will remember the way they helped their parents. This promise, of course, includes both parents; though the passage quoted at the beginning mentions only fathers, other lines extend the same considerations to mothers too.

In our time, taking care of parents has become a normative stage in the life course of many, if not most, adults. The time comes, often in early middle age, when grown-up sons and daughters are confronted with the need to respond to their parents’ changed situation.

Often this happens when a sudden crisis hits, such as father or mother suffering a stroke or losing a partner to death. Then the family must get involved and take some responsibility for the well-being of the older person.

Most adults when they think of this situation associate it with the word stress. They know from the experience of others or some of their own how difficult it can be to take on the caregiving of older family members. Especially when they may already have responsibility for their own children, the burden can seem insupportable.

However, thinking about the situation exclusively in terms of burden and stress obscures invaluable benefits that can come from the experience. I like to quote Mary Pipher on this subject:

“Parents aging can be both a horrible and a wonderful experience. It can be the most growth-promoting time in the history of the family. Many people say, ‘I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever,’ or, ‘The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have waned things to be different.’”

After going through this experience herself, Pipher came to understand it as a crucial opportunity for younger adults to grow up. Caregiving of older family members, in this framework, emerges as a precious occasion for maturing and becoming better persons by reason of having assumed the burdens of their elders.

This latter way of looking at the experience clearly differs from that of Sirach but remains in harmony with it. Both authors stress the benefits of helping relationships between the generations. I take inspiration from the two of them and reflect on their words to help me appreciate even more one of the most important silent happenings in contemporary American life.

Richard Griffin

When we came home from a recent weekend in Manhattan, there was no one to greet us at the door. After almost 13 years of a welcoming presence, Susan and I now found the house empty. Phileas J. Fogg, our family cat, long accustomed to arrive in the front hall from wherever he had been in the house, was no longer there.  

A few days before our leaving town, Susan had arranged for Phil to be put to sleep. Gone was the legendary ferocity that had made him attack a long series of medical providers.  Reduced to only a bony shell of his former self, he was dragging himself around the house.  We felt sad to see him in such decline from his former vigor and wanted to save him from further suffering. The visiting vet handled Phil’s demise with much sympathy, easing our pain for the loss of a beloved pet.

So this is the last of my columns about Phil. Through the years I have detailed many of his adventures, and ours, starting in 1991 when he joined us. At that time, our daughter was 11 years old and finally had accumulated enough “cat points” to qualify for receiving a kitten. Dutifully, she signed a contract at that time, agreeing to discharge all the duties of ownership, a responsibility that she graciously ceded to her parents.

In previous columns I wrote about Phil’s various attempts to escape from our house, about his growing older, on his contemplative nature, of his resistance to all efforts to tame him, and other facets of his life with us. From those essays it must have become clear how he influenced us as much as we him. Unsaid, most of the time, was the growing affection that flowed in both directions as we came to appreciate one another more deeply.

In a French film called “Lumière” a daughter says: “My father wants a dog that won’t die.” There is, of course, no such dog, at least yet, nor is there any such cat. The trouble with domestic pets remains that their life span is shorter than ours, so that unless our own lives are cut short when they are with us, we are bound to experience their deaths.

Susan and I are currently in withdrawal. We are changing habits of the last 13 years, many of them provisions to guard against Phil venturing into places where he was not allowed. No longer do we have to close the doors to our living room for fear he would scratch the furniture. Now we can leave open the bathroom doors kept closed to prevent him from slurping water from the toilet. And the entrance to our cellar, formerly his lair, now remains open for easy access.

When we go away we no longer need to make provision for Phil’s feeding and other kinds of care. Neighborhood children or their parents will not be pressed into service to provide for him. Our friend and next door neighbor George will no longer have to don his heavy gardening gloves when asked to look after the house in our absence.

Mind you, I had frequently fantasized about the freedom that would come with the demise of Phil. For years I had chafed at the restrictions on my personal freedom around my own house imposed on us by our resident animal. When would it ever come, I wondered, the day when I would not have to share domestic facilities with that beast?

But now that the day of liberation has arrived, it does not feel as gratifying as I expected. Yes, the house is entirely my preserve now but I must admit missing Phil.  He had become an assuring presence, a kind of cousin who shared our lives and was always there to receive our affection. Yes, I know that political correctness calls on me to affirm Phil’s life as his own and not merely as a being that existed in relation to me. But my mentality still smacks of the old attitudes that see animals as created for our pleasure. Perhaps some evangelist of animal liberation may convert me some day and induce me to renounce this medieval thinking.

Meantime, I have no one to kick around anymore. Though this practice used to alarm purist friends it is what Phil most like about me: I was the one who would gently move him across the rug with my foot to his accompanying appreciative purring.

Nor do I now see him at my office door watching me at work typing my columns at the computer. Susan likes to compare this scene to the classical ones of St. Jerome doing his biblical scholarship as a lion gazes at him. However, my vanity stops short at welcoming any comparison to a saint, even a notoriously crusty one. But our own resident lion was every bit as crusty as St. Jerome’s.

We miss him.

Richard Griffin

“My child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives; even if his mind fails, be patient with him; because you have all your faculties do not despise him. For kindness to a father will not be forgotten, and will be credited to you against your sins; in the day of your distress it will be remembered in your favor.”

These words date from around 180 B.C. and appear in a book called Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus). Protestant tradition groups this work among the apocryphal books of the Bible, whereas the Catholic Church considers it an authentic part of the Hebrew Scriptures. In any event, Sirach belongs to the category of Wisdom literature and is grouped with other such sacred writings.

What has prompted me to focus on these words was their proclamation in the liturgy of the Eucharist in which I took part this past Sunday. They struck me with special force on this occasion, sounding altogether modern to my ears, as if they were written by someone with current gerontological consciousness. They seemed to speak to a situation facing adult children of aging parents all across America.

They also made me reflect on my own situation, standing on the brink of old age as I do, and gradually becoming better acquainted with some of the ills that flesh is heir to. Inevitably, I also thought of my only child as I wondered what role might await her when physical decline changes the conditions of my life. The ancient words of the author Sirach struck me forcibly in their exhortation to compassion on the part of adult children confronted with parental need for support.

The reference to the father’s mind failing sounds especially modern. The writer seems to speak as if he knows about the widespread dementia that has afflicted so many older Americans. To him, as to us, it strengthens the case for reaching out to help the older family member.

Unlike most contemporary books dealing with care of aged parents, this ancient sacred writing invokes divine rewards for such caring. Responding to parents this way, the author promises, will lead to forgiveness of sins. God himself will be minded to discount the wrongs done by those who reach out to their father and mother when it comes to a crisis or before that time.

Sirach also suggests that when those adult children themselves grow old and need help, God will remember the way they helped their parents. This promise, of course, includes both parents; though the passage quoted at the beginning mentions only fathers, other lines extend the same considerations to mothers too.

In our time, taking care of parents has become a normative stage in the life course of many, if not most, adults. The time comes, often in early middle age, when grown-up sons and daughters are confronted with the need to respond to their parents’ changed situation.

Often this happens when a sudden crisis hits, such as father or mother suffering a stroke or losing a partner to death. Then the family must get involved and take some responsibility for the well-being of the older person.

Most adults when they think of this situation associate it with the word stress. They know from the experience of others or some of their own how difficult it can be to take on the caregiving of older family members. Especially when they may already have responsibility for their own children, the burden can seem insupportable.

However, thinking about the situation exclusively in terms of burden and stress obscures invaluable benefits that can come from the experience. I like to quote Mary Pipher on this subject:

“Parents aging can be both a horrible and a wonderful experience. It can be the most growth-promoting time in the history of the family. Many people say, ‘I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever,’ or, ‘The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have waned things to be different.’”

After going through this experience herself, Pipher came to understand it as a crucial opportunity for younger adults to grow up. Caregiving of older family members, in this framework, emerges as a precious occasion for maturing and becoming better persons by reason of having assumed the burdens of their elders.

This latter way of looking at the experience clearly differs from that of Sirach but remains in harmony with it. Both authors stress the benefits of helping relationships between the generations. I take inspiration from the two of them and reflect on their words to help me appreciate even more one of the most important silent happenings in contemporary American life.

Richard Griffin

A few years ago, Chester Nimitz, Jr., age 86, and his wife, Joan Nimitz, age 89, residents of North Hill in Needham, MA, took an overdose of sleeping pills and thus killed themselves.

To Americans over a certain age, the name Nimitz will reverberate. Like his father, the famous commander of the Pacific fleet in WWII, Chester Junior served in that same theater of war, eventually becoming an admiral himself. He later went on to notable success in the business world. His wife Joan, a native of England, was also distinguished and had been trained as a dentist before coming to this country.

In recent years both of them had experienced multiple infirmities. Among other things, Joan had become blind, while her husband’s heart problems had grown more severe. Approaching age ninety, they decided to take drastic action rather than face “physical limitations on our quality of life” and the continuing loss of independence.

Chester Nimitz was used to being in charge and did not welcome the sure prospect of losing his ability to control events. As Nancy Nimitz, the admiral’s  sister, told The New York Times, “They didn’t want to think in any way that their final days would be controlled by some whippersnapper internist at the hospital.”

Typical of him, Nimitz left everything in good order and even wrote a note threatening legal action against anyone who might try to resuscitate him and his wife.

I feel sympathy for this couple who lived their old age in the midst of such burdensome disease and disability. Were I confronted with the similar suffering, I might well be tempted to take the same lethal action.

As one who, last July, got up out of a hospital bed, stripped the monitoring wires from my chest, and successfully demanded of the resident in charge that he release me, I know how doctors and hospitals can impose their will on you. I can relate to Nancy Nimitz’ feisty (though somewhat ageist) statement about the young internist.

I do not want anyone’s life extended by technology contrary to their wishes. The prospect of being hooked up to a respirator, instead of being allowed to die, fills me with dread also.

Killing myself, however, would go against some of my deepest convictions. Even in a situation of great duress in extreme old age, doing so would violate my view of human life as a gift. In its catechism, my spiritual tradition affirms: “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.” That is the way I continue to see my own life.

But aside from such teaching, the action taken by the Nimitz spouses strikes me as expressing a kind of rationalism that leaves out vitally important considerations. It also seems rooted in some aspects of American culture that many of us older people, and others, consider dehumanizing.

In this rationalism, dependence is regarded as something to be avoided at all costs. Retaining control, no matter what, is exalted as a supreme value. Suffering is perceived to have little or no worth. Better to put an end to it all rather than undergo physical deterioration.

Does not resorting to suicide in old age when daily life becomes very difficult, suggest that the life of those myriad elders who have become dependent on others for care lacks meaning? I believe that we retain our dignity as persons, no matter the changes that may deprive us of control.

And does not suicide make of dying an isolated individual act deprived of social character? Ideally, at least, we die with family members, friends, and care providers around us to support us in our departure and, if possible, to receive our blessing.

Isolation from family members and friends also deprives them of taking some responsibility for our care and entering into our experience. Agonizing as it can be, some of these people will testify that the opportunity to provide support for dying people has brought out the best in them.

The writer Mary Pipher tells what it was like for her and her parents: “The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have wanted things to be different.”

I have had enough experience of death myself not to romanticize it. As a young man, I worked as an orderly at Boston City Hospital. Among other duties, I attended to the physical needs of dying men and bound up the bodies of these patients after they died. Later, I served as a chaplain in the same hospital, ministering spiritually to dying people.

If the time comes when I can no longer cope and face unavoidable suffering, I want to trust others to care for and about me. I also hope to enter into an experience that may contribute to my own spiritual growth and that of others. Resorting to self-killing as an alternative strikes me as a blow against the values that make life and death so precious.

Richard Griffin