I think that the decision to not think about D&D is OK. You may be a person who becomes so anxious or depressed when considering D&D that doing so is not worth the cost. I would feel even more comfortable with your decision if you would consider revisiting the topic from time to time, just to see if your reaction is different, or if there have been developments in the area which might make a difference to you.

People differ in the way they react to emotionally-charged problems such as those presented by D&D.

At one end of the scale are problem repressors who try to avoid or deny problems and to suppress the emotions that go along with them. The repressor benefits from not worrying about things until he must.

At the other extreme are the problem vigilantes who are always on the lookout for something that might go wrong. Anxiety accompanies both this vigilance and the problem-solving attempts that follow. When a vigilante, resolves a problem, there can be a sense of accomplishment as well as relief from anxiety. But, there will soon be another problem on the horizon ...

People differ in how readily they respond to problems with anxiety or with moodiness-depression. Note that these describe a person who is especially prone to react, rather than a person who is always feeling one of these ways. So, when things are going well, a person with a high potentials might not be anxious or depressed, but would be to an unusual degree when things were going badly.

Impulsivity is the tendency to skip planning and consideration of consequences before taking action. The impulsive person might feel an internal pressure to do something right away, or he may not know how to plan.  

Risk-taking is different from impulsivity in that it assumes some awareness that a risk is being taken. Most our lives are not filled with risk, but you can probably think of a few times when you may have risked a job, or a relationship, or when you decided that the thrill of a dangerous activity was worth the possibility of harm. The opposite of a risk-taker would be a person who seeks safety or security, even at the cost of boredom:

Changes in the above characteristics could make a difference in your reactions to D&D, as follows:

• Reducing anxiety or moodiness can decrease the desire to leave life.

• Toning down impulsivity, repression, anxiety and moodiness can make you more comfortable with thinking about and planning for D&D.

• A willingness to take risks could translate into a willingness to take your chances with an unknown afterlife.

•   The problem repressor's ability to not worry about a problem like D&D could be quite useful. He might be more willing to work on something unpleasant if he knows he can stop thinking about it when he wants to.

Your place on the vigilante-repressor scale and your readiness to respond with anxiety or moodiness can also affect your reactions to the rest of the LLQ. If you are a highly anxious or moody problem vigilante, you may be upset by the questions and have a more difficult time forgetting about the thoughts and images the questions evoke.

If you are an anxious or moody problem vigilante you may want to check section 12:Moving away from D&D: Returning to life as usual to see whether the suggestions there would work for you. If you are not good at putting problems aside when you want to, maybe you'd be better off not thinking about D&D, as discussed in the Prelude: Choosing to not think about or plan for D&D. Keep in mind, though, that the questions proceed from least- to most anxiety provoking, and you can stop at any point.

In figuring out what to do during the next hour, day, week or stage of our lives, most of us use some variation of the Western scientific approach to decision-making:

1)  First, we make enough observations to predict the results of different courses of action.

2)  Then, we look over our observations, and compare the costs and benefits of each alternative.

We can explain our decision by talking about cause and effect in a logical way. Others can understand what we are saying and evaluate our conclusions using widely held rules for observation and analysis.

There are other channels people use to tune into different realities, and other ways to process whatever data that reality provides. Instead of reason, some people base their actions on instinct, habit or addiction. They may depend on intuition, which can be described as listening to feelings or to your inner self.

You can also let others define your reality for you. For example, you can live in a reality suggested by a religious authority, guru or other charismatic leader or teacher.

There are also different ways to process the same set of observations. Liberal politicians, fundamentalist preachers, academic pundits and hormonal teenagers will come to different conclusions about the same set of circumstances, and will act very differently.

In the case of D&D, it seems that information vitally important in deciding what to do in the last stage of our lives is missing: We do not know what the consequences of acting a certain way while alive will be for what happens afterwards. There are numerous – some would say infinite – possibilities. You can imagine that some after-life scenarios would lead us to cling to life until the last possible moment, while others would reduce or eliminate fear of leaving.

So, the question becomes: What do we do when our usual method of decision-making cannot be used because there is no way to get information on the consequences of different courses of action?

Your experience of the D&D of others is another influence on your feelings and ideas about these events, as are the personality characteristics and the experiences you had as you were growing up that you thought about in the preceding section.

The questions that follow are a bit more likely to make you uncomfortable because they will bring to mind images of actual D&D. So, before we begin...

If you are not going to continue, I’d invite you to visit 12:Moving away from D&D: Getting back to life as usual. If you have comments or suggestions for improving the LLQ, please go to Your reactions to the LLQ.

What’s ahead in Sections 3-9:  In Section 3 (this section) there are questions about what you have thought or done about your own involuntary or voluntary exit. You are asked whether have taken ordinary steps such as making a will, and about any times in the past when you considered leaving voluntarily.

Sections 4-8 cover factors that could affect the decision to leave: your reaction to Very Old Age, your quality of life, your value to your family and society, and the possibility that leaving might be more accessible and socially acceptable in the future.

Section 9 offers you the chance to review all the factors that might go into a person's choosing whether or not to leave.

If you are not going to continue, I’d invite you to visit 12:Moving away from D&D: Getting back to life as usual. If you have comments or suggestions for improving the LLQ, please go to Your reactions to the LLQ.

Some people say that they have considered voluntarily leaving life; many will admit that the thought has passed through their minds. If

you are one of the former, this experience will certainly affect how you think of leaving life as a way to deal with the problems of Very Old Age or of meaningless, interminable

suffering.

Because so many people are living so much longer than previously, it is probably time to talk about a new life stage, called “Very Old Age”. But first, let’s back up. There is Middle Age which has now been pushed to later in life to encompass the active years late in one’s career or early in retirement. Next is Old Age, when dying brain cells and the wearing out of the physical body result in some changes in the type and level of activity. 

In Very Old Age, your mobility and functioning are restricted to the point that many of the activities that gave you pleasure or a sense of accomplishment are no longer possible. In addition, you must spend a lot more energy and money on body maintenance. There may be things you must do each day to deal with chronic health conditions or with physical and emotional pain. Your life expectancy may be less than five years; it may be zero or less. Of course the conditions of Very Old Age can be brought on by an accident or by serious illness, as well as by advancing years. As with other life stages, Very Old Age presents both positive possibilities and some new challenges.

There are several personality characteristics that can make a difference in the way you react to Very Old Age:

People differ in their response to adversity, such as that which is presented by being Very Old. Some people are fighters. They rise to a challenge and are energized by struggle. If there is nothing to fight, they will look around for something to attack and overcome. Others seek security and a life that proceeds at an even, predictable pace. They avoid challenges or try to find the way around them that takes the least energy.

For the fighters, Very Old Age is just another problem that they will meet as they have done in the past: head-on and with confidence. Some security seekers may find solace in leading a restricted life. Others might want to escape by leaving life.

People differ in their capacity for pleasure. A high capacity here means the ability to enjoy a great many things and to enjoy them a lot. Its basic level depends both on brain chemistry and on heredity. Its level can vary depending on general health, sleep, nutrition, and exercise, and level of stress. A low capacity can be increased by antidepressant medication.

People with a high capacity for pleasure will be better able to enjoy activities with low levels of stimulation such as those allowed by the restrictions of Very Old Age.

People also have a physical pain threshold that may be independent of their pleasure threshold. This threshold may increase or decrease with age, and is of course affected by medication. New medications are constantly being developed, and aggressive treatment for pain is becoming the norm. Pain is also affected by environmental and psychological factors.

Trying to predict your response to the increasing pains of aging is difficult because you may become less or more sensitive as you get older. It appears that some people can adapt to almost anything, so you may be able to get used to a lot more than you think. Also, pain is a complicated response that is affected by psychological and social, as well as physiological, factors. Still you may have developed a sense of your responsiveness to pain that may have some relationship to your potential for suffering from the changes of aging.   

Your response to emotional pain or your emotional fragility is another characteristic which may predict how well you will cope with Very Old Age. A history of emotional problems suggests that a person may not do well, especially if treatment has been unsuccessful. On the other hand, sometimes people get their first effective treatment during old age and are as happy, or happier, than they have ever been.

Very Old Age may bring a dulling of the emotions that can protect the person from emotional pain. The tendency of Very Old people to live in the present and in the distant past can protect them from the frustration that comes from comparing their lives to those who are younger.

Still, the transition from active Old or Middle Age to Very Old Age with its disappointments and frustrations can hit hard ...

Many Very Old people don’t seem terribly upset with their lives, at least on the surface. They don’t continually complain, or say that they would rather not be living.

Your Very Old Age may last a long time, and will last longer as medical science continues to extend our life expectancy. Your quality of life during this extension may not be very good. The questions that follow ask you to think about how you might react to the changes that can occur during this stage of life. Remember that you may be able to adapt much better than you imagine now, and that many of the problems listed are partially preventable.

If you are Very Old, you may want to skip this question and those like it rather than be reminded of losses to which you have already adjusted. Otherwise, you can respond to the questions as if they were asking you about your current thoughts and feelings.

The next two questions are similar to the one above. They ask about your adjustment to possible losses of Very Old Age.

Not everything about Very Old Age is bad, and some changes may be very welcome. For example, there is a continuation of the reduction of job and family responsibilities that began in previous stages. There is a lessening of the immediacy of the needs for sex and power that can create such turmoil earlier in life. Also, there are ways a person can reduce or compensate for the impact of the kinds of losses listed above. For example, there are the “Four S’s of Very Old Age”: Socializing, Spectating, Sitting, and Sleeping. And there can be many more ... 

How can you determine how your well life is going now and how it will go in the future, so that you could decide whether you want to consider leaving?

Evaluating QOL is not so difficult if your life is either just fine or simply terrible most or all of the time. For example, for most people, if job, family and health are acceptable than life is OK.  On the other hand, if your life is full of ups and downs or in the process of change, it can be difficult to make an overall judgment or prediction.

Furthermore, it can be difficult to imagine the bad times when things are good and or the good times when things are bad. This makes it difficult to make an overall judgment of your life.

Related problems are those of “faking good” and “faking bad”. Faking good can be motivated by the desire to look good to others, or to avoid admitting to yourself that things aren’t going well. Faking bad or “catastrophizing” can be used to elicit help or attention, or to provide justification for avoiding responsibility.

Your responses to the questions may also be affected by the social conventions that come into play when someone asks you how things are going. Asking this question is usually a way for someone to give you a little stroke and then move on to other things. He does not want you to respond with a recital of your problems. If you do this too often, people will begin to avoid you. Avoiding acknowledgment of problems is the easy way out for you, too. You might ask yourself to what degree this social convention is operating when you consider the questions which follow, many of which ask you in different ways, “How are you doing?”

A question about QOL requires a comparison. Should you compare yourself to others who are similar in some way? Should you compare how things are with how you expected them to be or with how they used to be? Should you compare yourself to people who seem to be much worse off because they are ill, injured or handicapped, or because they are the victims of war, flooding, or other catastrophes? Or should you anchor your judgment in your own internal standard of acceptability which comes from your own physiological responsiveness to different kinds of pleasure and pain?

Once you have settled on how things are going now, you must predict the way things will be in the future. What things about yourself or outside yourself might make things better or worse than they are now? Will time or your own problem-solving lead to improvement? Are there new medications or other treatments in the pipeline that might change your life for the better? Do you have pre-Alzheimer symptoms or other indications that your health might rapidly deteriorate?

Deciding whether to stay in situation or leave it is often a problem. Think about the difficulties in deciding whether to change jobs, end a relationship, stop playing a slot machine, or, as a proxy sufferer, to have a pet put to sleep.

You must try to:

· Pick a time span to use in your assessment of how well things are going,

· Weight good and bad experiences or observations according to criteria of importance or intensity,

· Add or otherwise combine your good and bad experiences into an overall rating,

· Predict how things will be if you do what you can to make things better, taking into account the possibility that things beyond your control might improve or get worse.

You must also accept the fact that there is no way of knowing for sure what will happen if you leave life.

The questions that follow below will help you to make the best assessments of QOL and level of suffering that you can. In addition, you can try to be honest and accurate in your ratings – to resist any tendencies to look good or bad. It will be up to you to pick a period of time to use for your assessment. Try to pick one that is long enough to predict the future.

It will also be up to you to choose a standard of comparison. The questions do not restrict your choice. The reference point most people use is a minimum level of pleasure/satisfaction/contentment that has developed over the years and that is a combination of the factors mentioned above. 

The hope is that you will come away from the sections on QOL and suffering with the realization that assessment of these areas is not simple, and that a decision as to whether to stay or leave should not be based on how you happen to see things at a particular period of time. The hope is that responding to the questions get you thinking about ways your QOL could be improved.

The best way to deal with the emotionally-laden complexities of any important decision based on evaluation of QOL or suffering is to consult an expert, such as a counselor or therapist. The questions he or she will ask will help to make sure that your assessment of QOL is as accurate as possible.

Of course the main job of a counselor or therapist is to help you to improve your QOL.

There are many different approaches to measuring QOL. Some examples are included in the Measures of QOL in Appendices at the end of the LLQ. You can begin your consideration of your own QOL with the questions below. If you want to go further, you can try some of the other inventories. Unlike the questions which follow, some of these other inventories will give you a score, and some will sample feelings over a period of time.

The questions which follow ask you to rate areas of your life in terms of pleasure/discomfort and feelings of accomplishment/failure. These often occur together but are not the same thing. You can get a sense of accomplishment from something that is unpleasant to do, and you can get pleasure from some activity that accomplishes nothing except to recharge you so that you can tackle a more worthwhile activity.

You are also asked to rate the importance of each area’s contribution to your sense of well-being. Very low pleasure and accomplishment ratings in very important areas identify problems that need improvement. If they cannot be improved, they will be the ones that provide the strongest pressure to leave.  

Because this QOL assessment is supposed to help you to decide whether or to consider leaving, you are also asked to predict the potential for positive or negative change.

So, low or negative pleasure or accomplishment ratings in important areas that have low potential for improvement will be most likely to create the impulse to leave.

The other side of QOL is suffering ...

Some people believe that suffering always has meaning or value:

· Suffering ennobles the sufferer. Anyone who suffers is a hero and, like the mountain climber or other extreme adventurer, is an inspiring example of what human beings can endure.

· Suffering leads to spiritual growth by focusing a person’s attention on answering a series of important questions beginning with “Why?”.

· A person becomes closer to his God by suffering -- in the case of the Christian religion, by suffering as Jesus did – or by making a connection between his suffering and God or Allah’s purpose.

It is also possible that suffering may have physiological or psychological benefits. In some situations, certain kinds of suffering may stimulate the release of the body’s natural opiates (endorphins). Suffering is typically followed by a feeling of relief that is uniquely pleasurable. Suffering can also relieve guilt and shame.

A significant number of people believe that pain of suffering in the last stages of life is balanced by opportunities for spiritual growth and for becoming closer to those you love. They believe you will discover an immense peace and a sense of worth in finding meaning in your suffering and in improving or resolving your relationships with significant people in your life. Both you and your survivors will benefit in ways that you and they couldn’t if you left life voluntarily.

If you do believe that suffering is an always a positive or meaningful experience, the conclusions you draw from your responses to the questions that follow will be different than those who find that suffering is often meaningless. You will say, “Yes, I do (or will) suffer, but because suffering has benefits or positive meaning for me, I do not consider it to be something to be avoided".

A version of this next question will be asked at several points later on, as you consider other factors that affect your thoughts and feelings about leaving life:

Before you leave this section, you should realize we don’t ordinarily spend much time looking backwards in order to make a serious judgment about how well we are doing. Most of us simply forge ahead and assume things will improve or we work hard to make things better. So, you should realize that the sense of dismay from remembering bad experiences is created partly by this scanning backwards and may well disappear when you return to living more in the present and future.

Often we treat others differently from ourselves. We may be kinder to others or we may hold them to harsher standards, condemning them for things we may be blind to in ourselves. In any case, expressing how we think other people who are suffering should behave or be treated leads to the question, “Shouldn't this apply to me?”

There are people whose suffering is meaningless to them, and below their level of acceptability and who have almost no hope for improvement. They are in “persistently intolerable discomfort (“PID”). Some of these PID’s might welcome the opportunity to leave life if there were a painless method available to them and if certain other conditions were met. In this category would be some people in prisons, nursing homes, mental hospitals, as well as those in refugee camps and in very poor countries. Some people who are handicapped or who have chronic incurable diseases might also want to leave. (This is not the place to talk about the significant problems and unintended consequences that offering such a choice might create. For a brief discussion of one issue, see 8:You and the ‘slippery slope'. These problems are touched on in some of the questions below and are discussed more fully in the book.)

In this section you are asked to consider the effect that your leaving would have on your family and on others close to you, and on society or the world as a whole.

We can now re-visit a slightly different form of an earlier question:

... and this one:

If you do not believe in anything unless you can see it or measure it, you still may be able to benefit by pretending that you do. Simply choose a belief that satisfies your needs and is in line with your values and act as though you believe, even though you really don't.

If you knew that you could temporarily dispel the instinctual fear of leaving life and allay concerns about what might happen afterwards, the experience of thinking about your exit from life would be quite different. Even a modest reduction in this fear might mean that you could deal with the question of leaving life as you do other challenging problems. (A widespread reduction in this fear would have a great many other consequences that will not be discussed here, but are in the book (see book Table of Contents).

I’d suggest that there are times when you don’t have this fears.

One situation is when you feel so miserable that the thought that you would rather be dead – or at least unconscious or fast asleep -- crosses your mind. Being down with the flu or in physical pain, or being humiliated or grief-stricken can bring out these thoughts. Of course you not serious about leaving because you know the discomfort will go away. But what if you believed that it wouldn’t, as would be the case with a chronic or terminal illness? You might be faced with such a situation in the last stage of your life, or even before.

Another situation is when you feel exhilarated or supercharged with energy. You might be high on a recreational drug or on a medication taken before an operation or diagnostic procedure.

You might be totally immersed in some exciting activity. During these times you may have noticed that while you are involved in that activity you aren’t afraid of anything – that it is your intellect rather than your emotions that keeps you from doing something like flying out the window. 

Some possibilities: listening or dancing to rock music, engaging in hard competition or exercise, speeding along the highway on your motorcycle after a few beers, standing on a mountain top, returning a kickoff for the winning touchdown, or taking your bows at the end of a performance to thunderous applause.

Others situations might be: firefights or hand-to-hand combat in war or in street fights, being part of a mob, bungee jumping, skydiving and hang-gliding, free rock climbing, and religious ecstasy. It may be that in all these the levels of adrenalin or of other hormones protects you from fear of D&D. Could virtual-reality simulations of these situations be created to be available when you needed them in order to make leaving easier?

Virtual reality technology is developing rapidly. Consider this historical sequence: story-telling, printed books, radio, phonograph recordings, movies, TV, IMAX theaters, Disneyland and theme parks, computer simulation games, virtual reality goggles that respond to head movements with changes of scene, and the use virtual reality in control of pain.

I expect that the TV, movie and computer screens that we spend so much time in front of will become more enveloping by becoming larger and by involving more of the senses and shutting out more of the real world.

Society, through its laws or customs, may decide to allow easier access to a pain-free and sure exit from life. This has already happened in certain parts of the world, and is beginning here in the USA in the form of attempts to pass laws legalizing what is misleadingly labeled as “physician assisted suicide”.

A further step would be to support or permit an increase in the number of people leaving voluntarily by increasing the benefits of leaving and the costs of staying. This is also already happening in the form of the rationing of health care, as certain expensive treatments that might help the patient are withheld in certain situations. Publicizing the threat of overpopulation and the huge cost of keeping people alive for the last six months of their lives will help this trend to continue.

Whether increasing access is a good idea is another matter. The costs, benefits and unintended consequences of these courses of action are discussed in the book.

In any case, looking at some ways that society could make voluntarily leaving easier or more prevalent may give you some ideas that you could apply to your own exit or that you might want to work to bring about -- or to ban -- in the sub-culture in which you live.

General acceptance of voluntarily leaving life when life becomes “persistently intolerable” has its problems. For example, people would have to worry about making a decision about whether to leave, whereas before they didn’t have to think about it at all unless they were forced to.

And, won’t people, as their market value decreases, be constantly looking over their shoulder wondering, “Is it time for me to go?” or “Do people resent my staying around?”.

There will also be the unsettling effect on the acquaintances of the person who has left: “Did my friend make the right decision?” “Did I do all I could to allow him to stay?”

In addition, there would be abuses, such as pressure on certain people to leave. As we enter the 21st century, we are in what has been called the “era of greed”, with personal happiness, status and the growth of our economy all being based on everyone's buying lots of things. Very Old people are using up money and resources that could go to younger people, who might be able to enjoy their possessions more. From an economic point of view, giving money and resources to a younger person who is still producing would be a better investment.

Another source of the pressure to leave would be the inconvenience and emotional drain of having to care for or be around people who are suffering. When both husband and wife are working, they have little time or energy to spare taking care of Very Old parents.

Pressure might also be applied to anyone whose QOL seems low: prisoners, the chronically ill, the physically or mentally handicapped, or anyone who is bedridden. They are also expensive and unpleasant to care for.      

One way to control both abuses and the number of people leaving is to make approval of their exit contingent on certain conditions, such as those listed in the next question.

The term “slippery slope” refers to a series of events that will inevitably follow one-another. The idea is that the events at the top of the slope may be acceptable but those which will follow are not. Indulging in the acceptable activities gets people more used to the idea of going ahead with those they initially considered to be wrong. 

In the case of leaving life, the progression would be from providing the means to leave for a few carefully selected terminally ill patients to pressuring those whose treatment is expensive or inconvenient, who are unhappy or of little value to society, or whose money or other resources are coveted.

Psychological and instinctual processes pushing us to the bottom of the exit-from-life slope would be survival, aggression, sadism, self-interest and the rationalizations that disguise these needs. Is there really any hope that these can be significantly tamed in the near future?

The slipperiness of the slope is increased by anything that gets us used to the idea or image of leaving life voluntarily. This would include any media or other presentation that starts us thinking about the act of leaving life in a positive way without arousing our anxiety to the point where we turn away and never think about it again. Learning that people we respect have accomplished the act painlessly and with the support of others close to them would be an especially effective means of desensitization.

If you voluntarily take your own life, won't you will be another case that, in a small way, will make it more likely that others, especially those close to you, will follow in your path? 

Many of those who oppose increasing access to leaving life admit that making a painless exit available to people who are in great physical pain and who have only a few months to live might be a good thing. Would the benefits from the reduction of suffering of the patient and the relief from empathetic pain felt by those who care about him would outweigh the costs? Consider what these might be:

· the possibility of missing the months of life which could come from a    wrong diagnosis, from an inaccurate prognosis or from the discovery of a cure;

· missing the opportunities for spiritual growth or family closeness that some believe can occur only in the very last stage of life; or,

· upsetting those who believe that voluntarily leaving under any circumstances is wrong.

Many are concerned about the abuses that could accompany any benefits that come from abandoning the principle that life must be preserved at all costs. The specter of Nazi Germany lurks in the background as a reminder of dark potential in all of us. Some point to the alleged stretching of the law in the Netherlands which was originally supposed to allow physicians to help only certain patients to leave life but is apparently used in cases where consent is assumed.

Another indication of how strong the impulse to abuse can be is the fact that there have always been people who do away with parents or spouses for the reasons listed above at the considerable risk of being charged with murder.  

So, the “slippery slope” idea leads us to ask these questions about making the voluntary exit from life more accessible:

The preceding are questions for those who make the law or who make policy for doctors, nurses, social workers and others who might be involved in the process of leaving.

The same kinds of questions can be posed at the personal level:

As mentioned above, advocates of the slippery-slope model predict that the more people there are who leave life voluntarily, the more all of us will get used to the idea and the more likely we will be to accept people’s leaving in circumstances we initially rejected. So, they are dead-set against any relaxation of the rule against leaving life voluntarily under any circumstances.

The problem is that when a few people do something, the benefits may outweigh the costs, and the action seems like a good thing; however, costs outweigh benefits when a certain frequency level is reached. It can be like what happens when a few people violate a “Do Not Walk on the Grass” sign. There is no harm in a few careful persons’ doing it, and they benefit from getting someplace faster. Inevitably, though, other people follow their example, and, at certain rate of use, the grass will be harmed and everyone will suffer. Also, the new group of violators may include people who are irresponsible and will harm the grass, drawing attention to themselves. The resulting in a crackdown is likely to affect responsible and irresponsible alike.

You now have some ideas about making the decision as to whether to leave life. Someday, you may have to do this for yourself or for someone else. Part of planning for such a situation can be to see what making such a decision might entail.

Your experiences with D&D as you were growing up, and the personality characteristics that affect your approach to D&D will provide the context for your decision-making, as indicated in the sections covering those topics. For example:

· ...how you react to confronting the fact that at some time you will leave life will be affected by being a repressor vs. being a problem vigilante, your readiness to react with anxiety or moodiness/depression, your levels of impulsivity and risk taking, your reactions to D&D around you as a child

· ... what you predict the effect of your leaving will have on others will be affected by your observations of survivors’ reactions in the past.    

The questions below ask about things in the present that you might think about as if you had to make a decision for yourself or for someone you cared about.

Even imagining making this decision is not easy. Immersion in such an instinctually anxiety-laden area is extremely unpleasant. It is tempting to stop because the anxiety would most likely cease if you did.

The decision process is also difficult. Not only must you come up with correct predictions based on good information, but you must weight your responses and combine them to come up with the best course of action.

In the case of one of the above items, there is no information available at all, and, as discussed previously, it is the most important question! This is the one asking you about your image of the afterlife.

(The reasons that what happens after you leave life is so central to everything you do have been discussed previously in I: General ideas...:Making decisions without enough information. I do not mean to minimize the problems of making a decision when the consequences of one alternative cannot be discovered by the usual processes of observation and analysis. But the fact is, we can all be forced into the unknown by an intolerable situation. Also, if history is any guide, someday we may learn something about the afterlife.)

So, why not avoid the decision altogether? 

Waiting around until you must do something can be like being chased to the edge of a cliff by a hungry lion, or being forced to a window on the upper floor of a building that is on fire. You are weak and under pressure to act, you have little or no information about what will happen if you jump, and you may not make the best choice.

In the above cases, there was no time to develop a plan of action. Contrast this with Captain Cook and other explorers who sailed off into the unknown even though they risked falling off the edge of the earth. Even though they knew nothing about what would happen to them, they undoubtedly planned and prepared as best they could.   

If you do not plan ahead, you risk creating unnecessary suffering in yourself and others. You risk finding yourself pressured by great suffering on the one hand and the unknown risk of the afterlife on the other. By the time you are suffering to the point that you might want do the best you can to take action that would help both you and those you care about, and possibly, society, you will probably be:

... in a hurry, in a weakened state and unable to focus on anything except yourself and your pain or mortality. You will not be able to summon the energy gather and process the necessary information, and assert yourself so that others carry out your wishes.

You will, therefore, be dependent on others to decide things for you. 

If the answer is “Yes”, you will want to do all you can to make sure you that the experience of your leaving and its effects on your survivors are as you want them to be. Some suggestions for planning this follow in the next section: 10: Things to do before voluntarily or involuntarily leaving life.

Imagine that you were told that you had six months to live. What would you want to do for yourself and those around you? Perhaps you would like to plan ahead while you are good shape. The questions in this section suggest some ways to prepare.

Writing down your unfinished business and your “Thank-you’s” etc., can make them easier to say. Or, if you can’t or don’t want to say them, you can send or leave them as letters.

One easy first step is to check the internet for more information about the topics you have explored.

Now that you have finished dealing with D&D – at least for a while -- you may want push all thoughts, feelings and images connected with this area out of your awareness.

The common-sense solution is to fill your mind with something else. You can get busy and to keep busy: “Don’t stew, just do”, or "Cope, don't mope". 

A variation is to plunge purposefully into a “transition activity”. This is something that people do to blot out the previous part of the day so they can proceed to the next part with a clean mental and emotional slate. The best example used to be the cocktail hour during which people would switch gears with the help of alcohol. Some people still drop into the pub on the way home, while others exercise, meditate, listen to music, watch the evening news, or go to their study for a brief period, Hopefully they emerge ready to be totally involved with family or friends.

Discussing the day’s events helps some people to move on, but for many it is simply a continuation of the day’s problem solving. It may simply stir things up especially if there is no progress towards resolution. In any case, it is a good idea to do some transition activity afterwards.   

Another kind of transition activity is to indulge in stimulating behavior, such as the extreme sports or other activities mentioned in Manipulating the number of people who leave life through payoffs and costs. Doing so will put you into a state of exhilaration or aggressive arousal that crowds out concerns about leaving life. It can give you the reassuring feeling that you are fully and powerfully alive.

You can also call on danger-reduction rituals. For example, you may believe that if you worry enough, the feared event won’t happen. You may find that prayer or doing good works will also help you to feel safe.

The other approach is simply to wait. You can firmly remind yourself that most things fade into the background if you give them enough time and if you do not reinforce their presence by obsessively worrying about whether you will be able to get over them.

Counseling and medication can help if you cannot leave painful feelings or images behind. A counselor or therapist  can suggest ways to stop thinking about something, and she can help you to plan a strategy to deal with unwanted thoughts or exaggerated fears.

If you have made your way through much of the LLQ, you have thought about a lot of things that perhaps you would rather not have. I hope that now you are able to return to life pretty much as usual, except that you now have the potential to help yourself and those you care about in some new ways.