This is the question... and what a question! I think those who have already asked this question should answer it, obviously, if they have an answer.
A new challenge from @galenkp, from the suite of proposals and suggestions he makes in the #weekend-engagement to all those who have at some point less inspiration. Especially on weekends!
I admit that this question has been haunting me for a while. I think it's normal after a certain age and after a certain amount of time spent with a partner to think about it, it's the question you ask individually, secretly, or with your partner after you start noticing fewer and fewer friends around. When you realize that most of your favorite actors are no longer in the movies you see. When you have all the signs that you're getting older, when you realize you don't have to argue with anyone anymore because you probably don't have time to make up...
Of course, this hard question can be asked by younger people but I think, if I think about my life experience, that there are extremely few people who think about this, I think only those who love their partner very much.
I belong to the category of those who cannot avoid this question, after a marriage of 45 years, a good marriage in which we were each a support to the other, loved and still love each other, wanted and still want the best for each other.
The answer is difficult to give, it is an answer influenced by the selfishness or selflessness of each person, by the physical and mental situations and states of each person. Of course, a partner who is ill and unable to care for himself will not want to die after the one who takes care of him...
Apart from such situations, the answer to the question is influenced by how much you love your partner, by the answer to another question: could you live without that partner? Then fear comes in, in two guises. Fear of death or fear of not being able to live alone.
If you consider that you can choose, then it's ego, or selfishness that pushes you to want the best for yourself (and in this case, you can choose from both options) or altruism, to want the best for the other (here, too, either option can be chosen).
I've gone on about too many issues to avoid getting to the answer as much as possible. I'm afraid to give it, I'm afraid of the arguments that might help me answer!
I have to answer, if I started writing this then I have to answer, even though the thought of it is extremely painful...
If I had to choose (and my wife agrees with this choice), I would like to die last. I am a selfless person, so say most people who know me ( unless I have managed to fool them all!). That would force me to offer to go first, but...
My wife would need more help to have a normal life in her old age, help that cannot come from children (a boy), relatives, or friends (as I said, less and less). She is much more dependent on me, especially in family and home life.
The problem is that she is slowly, slowly losing her eyesight and we haven't found a remedy for that.
This is the answer and the choice in our situation at the moment but the future may disprove both the arguments and the choice.
Obviously, there is the ideal option. So that we can both leave at once! I know such cases.
Now, if we're going to "leave", whether we want to, whether we don't want to, whether we'll be the first, whether we'll be the last, we need a place of "eternal rest".
In the Christian religion, at the burial ceremony, the priest speaks of the place where the deceased will go. They say it will be a place of greenery, which is not bad at all.
We can say: environmentalists to the death... and after!
The photos used above are from a cemetery some three hundred years old, in the village where my wife was born, and it is a place where she wishes to spend her final resting place. The village is in Transylvania, in the northwest of Romania.
People's desire to be close to home even after death has led many to bury the family dead in gardens. I didn't know this was possible and was surprised, walking through the garden, to see a small cemetery...
This is no longer possible.
Is it good, is it bad?
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