The Morning Cremation
It is a tradition in a part of North America, that if a person dies and the medical examiner comes out and decides: suicide, natural causes, death by misadventure- ie there is nothing criminal about the death, the individual who has died is cremated in service surrounded by his friends. There is a special spot where "beloved men" and "beloved women" are taken and their ashes are scattered unto the winds.
A person I had come to know and greatly respect had found out he was diagnosed with lung cancer- he had said that a week ago and said, "I will not stand for it." An older man asked him bluntly: "What are you going to do? Find the cancer and beat hell out of it?" My friend Ed, replied, "No, I will not stand for being poked and prodded and being given poisons to kill a poison which is a result of a switch being tripped which causes these cancer cells in my lungs and which will kill me."
Ed did not say much. If he said something, he meant it, he stuck to it, and whatever he said was worth hearing. You listened when he spoke. If you didn't- your loss.
Ed was a Native American, which is fairly common in the area I am from. He believes in deistic shamanism- that there are many gods and all are a part of a greater good; he believed shamans can interface with those gods, and when a person dies they go back to the good or return to the earth to learn better.
On Monday the 22nd of this week Ed learned his cancer had metastasized from his lungs to his pancreas and his doctors wanted him to begin a combination of chemotherapy, radiation, and a hospice company would visit every few days with pain medicines and anxiety medicines and antidepressants.
Upon returning home, Ed told his wife, Dee, also a Native American, that he had no desire to die of lung or pancreatic cancer but neither was his choice, he had not been a smoker and he had exposed himself to carcinogens. He said he did have a choice about the hospice care making the ingestion of poisons more palatable- and he would not participate in that.
Dee had converted to protestant Christianity some 37 years ago and she attends a church popular in the area among whites and native Americans. The pastor had come over and Ed had no use for the man. Ed had even less use for the pastor when he had said, "Not taking medical treatment and living until God reaped your soul- that's suicide. A suicide burns in Hell."
Ed had replied "A man who thinks like you do is already in a Hell of your own making on earth and you will be in the Hell you speak of when you die if you continue to mislead others."
Ed had told Dee that he wished for no ill words between them and only a happy time to spend with her. They went to a roadside rummage sale, they drove in a park and they walked around a waterfall.
They went home, Ed asked Dee to prepare breakfast for dinner and he bragged on how much he loved it.
Ed met with two or three friends and they played the card game Hearts.
He came in, took a shower, read his Kindle, and then fell asleep. The next morning, Tuesday, Dee found Ed's mortal body dead.
The medical examiner explained that with the condition of the body and a sample of something in his mouth, a poison- Ed was dead. Per tradition he would be cremated on this morning between 5am and 6am.
Dee was inconsolable- her preacher had told her suicides burned in hell. I asked you last night, Sloan, what I needed to say to her as several people said she really liked me and she was inconsolable. You told me to pray for a dream.
I prayed for just that. In the dream I had, the Angel Michael came to me and said, "It is the way of the Creator that all life on earth is mortal. The Creator is not cruel, and he recognizes that when a person decides that their life has been full, and they only face pain of an ailment which will not change, the Creator would not send someone to Hell, especially not a person who lived an otherwise good life of good deeds and living the best he could, and who had just chosen to die sooner rather than later by his own hand rather than deal with the indignity of constant pain. No such good person would end up in Hell."
I related this to Dee during the cremation, and she burst into tears and held me tight for several minutes, and she thanked me. Her preacher was there "to support her". The preacher heard what I said and loudly opined, “When the cremation began you here all bear witness, this mortal sin of suicide and now cremation? God demands our bodies buried so upon his return all those who've been buried will be raised up by the old prophets."
Two large boys about 15 years younger than me, who had spent time at the pleasure of the government lifting weights and eating bad food in order that they be "rehabilitated" escorted the preacher outside and much like the devious little **** known as the Kenny "The Snake" Stabler could put a spiral on a football, they launched this preacher off the premises as though he was a football thrown with a perfect spiral, and the preacher bounced off the red clay, an incomplete human.
I had another dream when I laid down and Michael said: "In man's hubris it will be possible as technology advances that man can continue to extend his life and extend his life even as the quality of life approaches zero. The Creator(under any name) did not put man on Earth to suffer under moneycine and pharmacine, to exist in a perpetual state of extended life with no quality, only prolonging the time in which man must meet the Creator, that is not his way. Having no quality of life but that life being extended by moneycine and pharmacine is cruelty and it is inhumane, and it is against the oath doctors and pharmacists take- the Hippocratic oath has become a hypocrite's oath."
