#192, 8 June 2004

My grandmother is possibly the best person I have ever known. She also has terminal, inoperable cancer. All they can do is give her chemotherapy and radiation in what is most likeky a vain attempt at making her live in pain for another year at best. Poison, nuke, repeat. That's all it is now. It's awful to see how frail she's become; she weighs less than I do, and can't even walk without getting tired. And it's absolutely sickening to know that when she does die, everything she was, her mind, her self, her very being, will be completely and irretrievably lost. To me, she is the last person in the world who deserves to die.

All of this is simply because her body is attacking itself. There is nobody to blame in this case; she is dying needlessly. Our selves, intelligences, "souls", are maintained only by this fragile, high-maintenance, utterly unreliable biological shell. If this was a video game, you would have only one life, no save points, slowly lose health throughout the course of the game, be surrounded by things that can easily kill you, and there is no way to win. If we don't die because of illness or injury, we die of old age. And our minds die with us. The human body is completely inadequate for the support of consciousness. Mortality is unacceptable.

I know many of you believe in an all-powerful, perfectly good deity, however, throughout my life I have seen absolutely no concrete evidence of His existence. Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe that He, the almighty and perfectly good being, would allow 150,000 of His creations (in His image, mind you) to die every day.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Right now, I'm just really angry at mortality, this situation that we're all in, the fact that something with as much value as intelligence is housed in something so weak, and destroyed so easily. We don't deserve that. Consciousness is worth so much more than that. Simply returning to dust is not an option.