My thoughts and feelings about death have changed several times in
my life.  My visit to Lakeside has changed them yet again.  First let me
explain my thoughts as they’ve developed.
     I believe the first time I ever gave serious thought to death was when I
was around five years old.  Though I knew what death was and I knew it
happened to everyone, it did not necessarily occur to me that I myself
would die as well.  The thought didn’t scare me, but it made me look at my
life from a new perspective.  Till then, the events in my life I anticipated
were never longer than a year away; another year till my birthday, summer
vacation in another year.  The events I focused on were relatively short
term.  Death, on the other hand, was very different.  I could not see it on
the calendar, I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew it would.  My
mental timeline of my life was suddenly stretched outwards another eighty
years and it was perplexing to say the least.  What would I do from now
until then?  Who will I know then?  Where will I be when I am older?  The
realization of my own death brought on a whole slew of questions I had
never contemplated before.
     And so I continued on with this perception of death as an event.  It was
a long while, however, before I asked myself the question of what
happens after death.  Is there an afterlife?  Or is my consciousness
simply extinguished?  Not knowing the answer to this question disturbed
me far more than not knowing the answers to the questions I had asked
before of when and how I would die.  Religion teaches of existence after
death and that is a comforting idea.  However, it did not make sense to
me logically.  The concept of an afterlife was too ambiguous for me to
accept without some skepticism.  I concluded that it was most likely that
after one dies, there is no more.  The soul is terminated and awareness
ceases.   It was a harsh and cynical point of view, but it was what I held on
to.
             Around the time I was ten years old, I came upon another realization.  I
know other people died, and I knew I would die, but I had never thought
about how I would react if someone close to me died.  It then hit me that
my pet would die, my parents would die, as well as my grandparents and
my friends.  How would I react to that?  At that point in my life I had never
known anyone that died.  (Well, my grandfather died when I was two, but I
was so young I don’t remember him)  I realized then why people see
death as a cruel thing.  Not cruel in that they had to die, but that they had
to
die before their time.  Until that point I was still viewing death as an event
(one which nothing comes after) that occurs after one had completed their
life.  But what if their life wasn’t complete when they died?  How cruel for a
young brilliant life to be taken away when they could do so much more. I
began to see death as a premature and unjustly imposed deadline on
one’s life.  Because of this thought, I came to have more fear of death.
When I started to think about these things, I reexamined my thoughts on
the religious ideas of life after death.  It is, after all, very comforting to
say
that God has a plan and it was that person’s time to leave this world.  For
the most part, though, I held onto the idea of death being the extinction of
the soul.
             Such is how my thoughts developed until I was in high school.  At
some point in a stream of thought, I realized that there really isn’t a point
to being worried or afraid of death.  The reason for that is because after
I’ve died, I won’t be able to reflect upon it.  The real feelings we have
towards things that have happened are what we feel when we look back
on them afterwards.  My moment of death may be peaceful or horrific, but
only for that moment.  Afterwards I won’t have any consciousness with
which to reflect upon how peaceful or horrific it was.  This brought great
peace of mind to me.  What ignorance could be more blissful than the
inability to acknowledge one’s own death?
      This is how I thought until last week when I visited Lakeside.  From my
experiences there, I saw a whole new face of death’s cruelty.  I went from
thinking death to be cruel when it comes too early, but now I see how
death can be cruel by not coming at all.  I no longer fear death because I
now understand how it is better to die than to live an overextended life
devoid of independence and one’s basic faculties of comprehension.
      With the exception of a few spirited women I saw there, all I could
think
was the same bitter sentiment.  Time has raped the residents of
Lakeside of their dignity and mental capacity.  What does it say about us
when we are happy for a person who has lived across a century, lived
through wars, dozens of presidents and seen the nation take shape to
what is today, and then we coo at them like they are a toddler for shaking
a tambourine?  It is insulting.   I felt embarrassed for them.  I felt ashamed
that I was expected to help perpetuate this.  I felt frustrated with the rise
of
emotions that came over me because these people are my "elders" and I
have to respect them, but anything that I would have respected escaped
their bodies and minds years ago.  Is this what our lives are to come to
now?  Are people eager to live longer than their own good and decay
slowly into a wheelchair until the medications can’t keep our organs
running anymore?  It appeared that most of them couldn’t walk, speak,
hear, see, eat, drink, go to the bathroom, or do any other act without some
sort of aid.  Is this their reward for a long life of trials and
accomplishments?  Is this the ideal?
              As for the Native American ceremony, it as well set me into a spell of
confusion.  Were the people who performed it valid authorities on Native
American cultures?  What are their credentials?  What specific tribe was
that performance derived from?  Was it authentic to an actual ceremony in
any way?  There were scores of different kinds of hand held instruments.
Which ones would Native Americans actually used?  Were those
authentic prayers?  Were those authentic songs?  Was it authentic in any
way at all?  I noticed that there was a labyrinth on the floor and also one
hanging in a hallway that looked similar to the ones we constructed in
class.  What does the labyrinth have to do with the ceremony?  Is
Lakeside doing some sort of project with labyrinths?  The questions go
on.
              Something that concerned me was that if I had such a narrow
understanding of what was going on and why, what did the residents
understand?  What did the residents that can’t hear or remember or
communicate gain from this imitation ritual?
        My comments may come off as harsh.  I may be missing a lesson you
were hoping that I would have learned from visiting Lakeside.  If this is
such, I am sorry, but this is what I gained from my experience.  Though my
thoughts are less than positive, it is still insight and an expansion of my
mind.  This in and of itself is valuable.