Slim Novel 17 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage
9. Professor John Edwardes died Sunday, 4 May 2014, a few minutes before midnight as certified by Eddie who functions as his attending physician during the final illness - actually there was no final illness - it was just fiction to mask the planned termination which stricly was illegal. The date was chosen because in Japan it is end of Golden Week, a series of holidays that carry from one weekend to the next and during which daily life and services are limited because most people are away. The year 2014 is his 114th year and he had long planned to take exitus after finishing the symbolic one-million hours of life. He had completed all his planned and hoped for works, enjoyed life to a quite long extent, and, more importantly, he was finding his life increasingly boring and without pleasure despite having preserved his functions better than most because he followed Physician's Notebooks. The inevitable genetic program of human cells was undoing these functions - his food was becoming tasteless because the taste bud cells died off, his muscles were increasingly wearied and painful as the fibers functioned less and less well and fewer & fewer, his sexuality had gone although he had managed to preserve it with wife Yuko into his 90's, and, finally, his brain is deteriorating in the last year and although not yet demented he sees the direction. So, once he decided, he consulted with Eddie and they chose Golden Week because it had the least possibility of outside interference or stumbling in on the plot. They set up a situation where Edwardes appeared to friends and relatives as gradually weakening, and Eddie let it be known that aging had finally gotten to his brain. An MRI of the brain indeed confirmed this. Then, the day before exitus, Eddie had put an IV catheter in an arm vein and that night injected a fatal dose of barbital and, shortly, Edwardes gave a last breath. And Edwardes had not experienced discomfort or mental anguish; Eddie was reasonably certain of that because the barbital had quickly rendered Edwardes deeply unconscious where no dreams occur.
Once Eddie pronounced Edwardes dead, he called the police and no one questioned why a 114-year-old in this situation had stopped breathing.
Edwardes had, months before, talked with wife Yuko and his son by her, and they decided not to say goodbyes. They knew what each felt about the other; they knew he had been a very lucky and very excellent human and father and husband. And they knew that his philosophy considered dying something that should occur with no fanfare, no goodbyes, no tears or laughs. Just one day he would cease; where his mind had been would blank out to nothingness whatever that was. And it did.
Edwardes had asked for an autopsy to be done for scientific purpose to see the effects of his well documented long life on his body tissues and cells and to help teach the medical students who assisted at the autopsy. And it was done at the medical university with a full class of students looking on. Thus a continuation of his sense of Eriksonian integrity: the care and teaching of the new generations
Postscript: Eddie had already lost his older wife, Ryo, Yuko's mother, and it was most natural that after Edwardes death, he and Yuko should become a couple. They did not formally marry.
Thus ends Slim Novel 17. Slim Novel 18, in process, continues the saga. To start
Slim Novel 18, click on
No comments:
Post a Comment