Intimations of mortality

It has been over a year now since I last posted. In some ways, the past 18 months have been difficult ones, and indeed I had thought they are what I would be writing about now. But I've heard some bad news now that puts my own complaints into perspective.

My uncle has been diagnosed with ALS, the motor neurone ailment known as 'Lou Gehrig's Disease' from the famous baseball player who succumbed to it. My uncle is in his mid 60s. He will now gradually lose control of his muscles and then, in three or four years, he will die, probably of asphyxia. (The long progression of the disease in Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed when he began his postgraduate studies and is now himself in his mid 60s, seems to be highly unusual.)

Though we have not been close in recent years (no falling out -- we simply see each other very rarely), I adored my uncle when I was a child. He is a jovial man, enormously fun-loving. Throughout his working life he took one astounding risk after another, yet always landed on his feet. (I am myself highly risk-averse and security-conscious; hence, perhaps, my admiration for my uncle, so very different.)

My uncle is also deeply religious. I am not quite an atheist, but I can share neither the form nor the intensity of his belief. Few of us would begrudge a dying man the comfort his religion provides, even where we think the religion false. But my uncle's religiously-driven view of his condition seems a bit more nuanced than the usual 'it's all part of God's plan' stuff one often hears. He is not despairing in the least. Rather, he thinks the knowledge that he will decline and, in the fairly near future, die is a 'gift' because it spurs him to make the most of his remaining time. He now knows that he has to focus on his wife and family, on the people and things and ideas he finds most worthwhile. Another man, his attention unfocussed by a terminal diagnosis, might give all these short shrift and fritter away the next three years making a lot of money or what have you, only to walk under a bus.

My uncle's attitude, it seems to me, is as healthy as it could be under the circumstances. Now, if you spend time at Pharyngula (and you should), you'll have noted that one of the ideas PZ Myers and many of his commenters often emphasise is that one doesn't need religion to be moral, or altruistic, or serene in the face of death. And they're undoubtedly right. But, although I do not agree with my uncle's religion, it is his religion from which his equanimity springs. This element of religion, at least, is not one that I can damn as false or evil.