Most of the time when people die, those that knew the deceased say nice things about them that you can’t help but feel they never, not in a billion fucking years, would have said while they were still alive.
And why? I imagine it stems from the value people place in tradition.
Of course, one could maybe argue the old, existential notion that at the end of someone’s life you’re finally justified in judging them as they were as a whole. At any other point, you’re judging someone who is, by necessity, in development, or at the very least bearing the potential for change, so any judgement with respect to the individuals character is, by necessity, premature. But that it would so often be an overwhelmingly positive judgement seems incredibly unlikely.
The one exception to this traditional, unspoken rule of “The Dead Are to be Treated As Saints” is in the case where the deceased individual in question dies by means of suicide. Then, and it seems only then, people feel a bit more liberated with respect to talking shit, apparently, calling their act of suicide “selfish,” which I find to be hypocritical. Those claiming that the act of suicide is selfish are in fact the ones being selfish, unable to empathize with the deceased and at least try to come to an understanding as to why that person elected to end it. David Foster Wallace, who ultimately committed suicide himself, said something interesting on the subject which I feel is of utmost relevance:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
Comedian and author Doug Stanhope also made an interesting argument:
“Life is like a movie: if you’ve sat through more than half of it and its sucked every second so far, it probably isn’t going to get great at the end and make it all worthwhile. No one should blame you for walking out early.”
As Stanhope has expressed, the most basic form of the right to property notion is the fleshy vessel you’re residing in, and its your right to do with it what you wish — and this includes the right to discorporate.
This doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to care, to protest, to try and convince them to push through and keep on — so long as you realize its their choice in the end. They aren’t selfish for wanting to leave early, at least no more selfish than you are for wanting them to stay.
Chronicles of a Madman. 