Dialogues with Jay
On Life and Afterlife
Donald R. Fletcher
Dialogues with Jay
On Life and Afterlife
Copyright © 2017 Donald R. Fletcher. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1898-7
hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-4495-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4494-7
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To you who are ready
to raise hard questions.
Acknowledgments
I gladly acknowledge my debt to Plato, in his Dialogues, for a pattern of friends meeting to exchange ideas on a major theme. The thoughts here expressed are mine, gathered on life’s journey. I claim no authority nor explicit scholarship behind them, but hope that they may serve as a stimulus to talk and reflection. Jay’s poem at the end of Dialogue VI is my own.
For help in preparation of the final text I am indebted to my literary consultant, Roger Williams, of Washington, DC, and, supremely, to my daughter Sylvia, who provided encouragement all along the way, with tireless attention to correspondence and to detailed work that would surely have been beyond me.
Donald R. Fletcher
Lions Gate
Voorhees, New Jersey
May 19, 2017
I
I met Lucas in the shade in front of the town hall, as we had agreed. It was his lunch hour, but he said he could extend that. We both knew that Jay—Uncle Jay to many—might want to talk for a while. He’d once asked us to drop the “Uncle,” when we were a pair of young graduate students—Luc in chemistry and I in English—setting out to build a log cabin in New Hampshire, and Jay was giving us advice and moral support. Maybe our roles would be reversed now, I thought. Time will do that.
Luc led the way, just two short blocks, to the Athens CCRC (continuing care retirement community). In the lobby, the concierge was brisk, but pleasant. Luc signed us in, and I followed him to Jay’s apartment. I wondered how Jay would look. It had been thirty years, and at that time in New Hampshire he was in his prime.
“Jay,” Luc was saying, “I told you that Don might be visiting soon. Here he is with me, to see you.”
Jay was sitting by an open window, the light directly on a book he was holding. He stood rather quickly, which impressed me, although I noticed that his left hand went to the back of a nearby chair. His eyes were bright and the hug that he gave me was strong. He was still lean, as I remembered him, and there was a suggestion of the old vigor, even though, expectedly, his face had sagged a bit, leaving deep shadows under his eyes.
“Don, it’s so great to see you again! We’ve both had a lot of years, but I’ve been with you through some of them. Luc has brought me up-to-date on your travels and accomplishments, your ups and downs.”
We stayed a long time that afternoon. Luc assured us that he was free to stay. Jay wanted to talk about us, but in the end we got him to share some of his own reflections.
“Sure,” he said. “To get one’s existence into focus, I’d say that it helps to be near the end of life, of the here-and-now. But, mortal as we all are, it’s a good, healthy thing—not morbid—for each one to come to terms with her or his own death.”
He left a pause, so I asked, probing him, “What really is death?”
Jay turned to Luc. “Luc, you’re a scientist with a lot of study about the brain. How do you define death?”
“Just the brain shutting down,” Luc said. “There can be all kinds of causes, of course—disease, drastic injury, injury elsewhere in the body that shuts off the blood flow bringing oxygen, so that the brain cells suffocate. That’s what death is, I’d say, in terms of human life.”
“What about loss of consciousness or going into a coma?” I asked.
“There the brain hasn’t completely shut down,” Luc answered. “A part of it is still working, the part that directs involuntary functions like breathing and heart action.”
“And if those are sustained by artificial means?” I challenged.
“To somehow keep that much going is not to keep the person humanly alive, in my opinion,” Luc said. He turned to Jay. “We know that this isn’t a word game—‘alive’, or ‘not alive’. Intense legal battles have been fought over it. The issue becomes the possibility or impossibility of restoring cognitive brain function, which is what defines human life.”
“That’s interesting,” Jay said, joining in. “You suggest that possibly one can keep the body at least partially alive, but that if the cognitive part of the brain has stopped functioning and can’t be restarted, that person has died.”
“Right,” Luc said.
“So,” I put in, “when those cognitive brain cells, all the billions of them, are shut down, whether by disease, slow attrition, or by sudden catastrophe, that’s the end, the final curtain?”
“That’s it,” Luc nodded. “Physiologically, that’s death.”
“Well summarized,” Jay said. He left a space for silence in the room. I looked at Luc to see if he might indicate that it was time to leave; but before any move was made Jay was speaking again.
“Well summarized, and for many people—maybe for you, too, Luc—that ends the drama.”
“What else?” Luc asked. “For that particular actor, at least, the play has ended. There’s nothing more. As Don said, it’s the final curtain.”
Luc didn’t say that dogmatically. He clearly knew that Jay would not agree with him, and I could understand that he cherished Jay’s friendship in spite of—or, really, because of—Jay’s different point of view.
“You have studied the brain much more than I,” Jay was saying to him, “and, I imagine, more than Don, either.” I nodded agreement. “You know what is known so far about the functioning of the hundred billion brain cells and the trillions, perhaps, of connections among them—the uncanny mystery of thought and feeling that makes possible the sort of talk and ideas that we’ve been sharing.
“Now, the marvelous advances of brain science, like any other branch of science, are founded on, and limited to, observation, right? The goal of science, I submit, is the accumulation of information—knowledge—about everything that exists in the universe in which we find ourselves. Such knowledge is objective. It is built up by careful, accurate observation. And the results of such observation, to be reliable, are to be checked, and re-checked—only so, to be added to our knowledge of the universe.”
“Yes, I’ll buy into that,” Luc said. “And according to scientific knowledge, the universe is to be measured and understood along its two dimensions: space and time. Everything we know in the cosmos is conditioned by and belongs to space and time.”
“Good,” I put in. “I’d agree with that, where knowledge is concerned, and add that in our human curiosity, we’ve been exploring and pushing out the limits on those dimensions any way that we can. The dimension of space limited our forebears.