In the July 14, 2011, issue of The New York Times, David Brook commented on Dudley Clendinen's attitude toward life, this way:
I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.”
Instead of choosing that long, dehumanizing, expensive course, Clendinen has decided to face death as one of life’s “most absorbing thrills and challenges.” He concludes: “When the music stops—when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this—I’ll know that Life is over. It’s time to be gone.”
Clendinen’s article is worth reading for the way he defines what life is. Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.
For an eulogy for Dudley Clendinen, click here. For images of or relating to Dudley Clendinen, click here.
For a brief biography of David Brooks, click here. For images of or relating to David Brooks, click here.
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