Discounted nursing home deaths because “they are going to die anyway?” NEWSFLASH! We will too, even you. On a more cheerful note here are some words from Lewis Thomas’ The Lives of a Cell (1974 p50):
Lewis recalls a memoir by David Livingston about his own experience of near-death. “He was caught by a lion, crushed across the chest in the animal’s great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot by a friend. Later, he remembered the episode in clear detail. He was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism , switched on at the verge of death , carrying them through the haze of tranquility.”