The Story of Procrustes

Procrustes was the son of Poseidon whose house was located by the sacred road between Athens and Eleusis. He would invite passersby to spend the night in a special bed that fit everyone perfectly. Once inside he would place them on a rack and stretch them to fit the bed or amputate their limbs if they were too long. Our Medicare Hospice benefit can be experienced as this Procrustian bed in which a patient must fit certain criteria to qualify for the service, including a six month prognosis, and once on the program must give up certain treatments seemingly at the whim of the hospice thereby performing a similar feat in which the patient is either stretched or cut down to fit the program.

The Drowning Man

David inspires me to write. Abandon if you will the ramblings of your reasoning mind asking why this tragedy should occur, did occur and what can be done to prevent it in the future. Just take the image as is. A man who is under the influence (unconscious) decides to take his canoe over a waterfall against the protests of the other memebrs of his party. He falls into the water and is immediately in the grips of a force created by the falling water and it is pulling hime under. He instictively tries to struggle against this natural force to reach the surface. But he cannot and eventually becomes passes out. As his body beocmes limp he is immediately pulled under and resurfaces a few seconds later down stream, the escape strategy revealed too late. If he had simply let go he would have survived. If he had thought counter to his intuition he would have survived.

This image has stayed with me from the first time I read it in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline many years ago. It taught me how natural systems can over take us if we do not understand them and are overtaken by them. It's the letting go that we must learn. Many years ago HBO produced a film called Letting Go about the hospice industry. It has been used in hospice to teach about how hospice can support the terminally ill and their loved ones through a diffuclt journey.

What exactly are we letting go of and what are we so resistant to. Where do these two approaches come from? What is the heroic stance we take against dying, something that is not only in our thinking but seems to be hardwired in our bioneurology. WE have been living and dying for millions of years yet we act as though it's never going to happen to us.

Ernest Becker investigated the source of war and violence and religious hatred and studied the origins of psychoanalysis settling on Otto Rank who offered him the most toward his eventual theories. He came to believe that we all walk around with an unconscious, deeply unconscious fear of death, and have evolved elaborate cultural mechanisms to convince us we are invulnerable. At the heart of this is our medical culture that has done much to convince us that we can live forever. As the longevity curve continues to move further out beyond 80 years it is not surprising we are allowed to wake up every day without the belief that at any moment we could be annhilated. It remains deeply rooted in our unconscious until something reminds us that we are vulbnerable. That could be a death of someone we know, an accident on the road, the world news any given day, bombs and terrorists and war oversees. It could be a new medical diagnsosis that makes us think about our own mortality.