By Dr. R Sudarshan
A mother of 87 has a brain hemorrhage and she lands up on a hospital bed, without much hope to improve. She wants to die but her children debate if they should pull the plug or try saving their mother. A daughter firmly believes in the morality of keeping the mother alive and pours out a cruel love of medical interventions and prolonging life. Whereas for an immobile and incommunicable mother, the hospital window is the world where her mind has to form a train of images.
That's one of the greatest commonplace dilemmas of life - whether your love of keeping alive a deeply dying person is moral or immoral. And it is one of life's deepest pains that when you want to die, your own beloved ones won't let you go.
Richard Flanagan is a Booker Prize winner. And any of us could have written this book of familiar thought but not as masterfully as he does.
On the shelf - a deep pain of love of life that stops death.
For any relevant query, message 81051 12990.
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Silverfish Books, Farmer's House, # 1A - 13th Cross, Kalidasa Road, VV Mohalla, Mysore.
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