Everyone keeps telling me, “You don’t look ill! You look great!” I know they mean it as a compliment, but I DO have a belly full of cancer, and I definitely look better than I feel. In truth, I’ll probably be the best-looking corpse at the funeral home later this year.

I’m definitely on a long slow slide downward, with small upticks along the way during which I look and feel better. I spend long productive hours at home weaving, spinning, and writing, when not sidelined by drug-induced fogginess.

The palliative painkillers have certainly saved me a good deal of physical distress, but they create additional problems (some of themdetailed already). As I observed in my earlier blog, dying people are offered handfuls of drugs to ease pain, to reactivate sluggish bowels, to quell anxiety, to fall asleep at night, but we generally are not offered non-drug alternatives that might help us maintain a clearer, cleaner and swifter end-of-life. Conscious death is a movement that has not yet taken hold here, so we have only the drug model to turn to.

Because Indiana is so backward, and because it has permitted medieval religious ethics to taint our laws on assisted dying, there is no death-with-dignity option for me. Because I do not want my death to be prolonged, I instead have drawn up a Do Not Resuscitate order that has been suitably witnessed and registered. But here’s the question: in effect, don’t my painkillers constitute an artificial prolonging of life, since they keep me alive without allowing me to recognize how gravely ill I am? In ancient millennia, without pain relief, people at my point in the disease would simply curl up in a corner and refuse to eat until they shriveled up and died, but modern pain relief is now keeping me alive, and enabling me to eat small meals, since I can’t feel the majority of the pain in my belly.

Many people would at once say “That’s the benefit of modern medicine! It allows you to maintain your quality of life for weeks, even months, much longer than you would have had in a pre-industrial society.” Well, that quality-of-life issue is the sticking point. I’m still on a very low dose of prescription painkillers, and once my cancer has grown sufficiently to require higher dosages, my current quality of life will vanish as I become too groggy to write, weave, spin, or even take a stroll outside without a buddy to watch over my staggering feet. What then? And with my mind increasingly stupefied by narcotics, how can I expect to practice mindfulness meditation, self-hypnosis, or the daily attempts at maintaining a good attitude that have served me well until now?

Are these drugs really the best we can do for our dying ones? I don’t have a lot of answers, or a lot of wisdom; I’m just stumbling down a darkening passageway, commenting out loud as things slowly occur to me. But it seems to me that piles of drugs are not the best option for someone who wants to die peacefully, with dignity and intention, and without any nonsense.