The Endgame

Newsletter#3 - Finishing Well

This occasional newsletter looks at issues and events through the prism of the endgame. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing. The importance of the pieces still on the board has changed (e.g., the pawn has a new significance and the king may have to be used aggressively). Zugzwang is a particularly important aspect of the endgame. Zugzwang exists when a player’s only available move is one which will worsen his position.

December 20, 2022

Finishing Well

My wife read the first two Endgame newsletters. “Not bad,” she said, “but where’s your famous sense of humour?” My sister said, “I like them, but they’re a bit grim.”

What do you expect? After all, Endgame is about the endgame. Samuel Beckett’s play “Endgame” is described by Wikipedia as “an absurdist, tragicomic one-act play about a blind, paralyzed, domineering elderly man, his geriatric parents and his doddering, dithering, harried, servile companion in an abandoned shack in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who mention their [sic] awaiting some unspecified ‘end’ which seems to be the end of their relationship, death, and the end of the actual play itself.” You want grim? That’s grim! (P.S., Beckett’s play should not be confused with the 2019 Marvel Comics superheroes movie “Avengers: Endgame.”)

Anyway, the endgame is just an analytic concept, a way of thinking about things, that’s all. Sometimes endgame analysis might even produce optimism, something positive, a touch of humour, sunny ways, sunny days...

I asked the (much overhyped) new chatbot called ChatGPT whether it thought endgame was a depressing idea. It replied: “[I]f you are referring to the end of a particular situation or phase of life, it may not necessarily be depressing. It could be seen as a natural part of the cycle of life or as a new opportunity for growth and development. Ultimately, whether the endgame is seen as depressing or not will depend on an individual's perspective and how they choose to approach it.”

Not necessarily depressing, says ChatGPT.  It depends on an individual’s perspective, says the chatbot.

An octogenarian friend of mine told me that he and some others of similar age meet once a week to discuss “finishing well.” He didn’t mean “finishing well” as a religious concept, “following Christ to the very end of our lives, finishing his assignments for us...” He meant facing up to increasing decrepitude, loss of independence and the prospect of death, with realism, thoughtfulness, and – yes – perhaps even a bit of humour. He meant considering our legacy: What do we leave behind? He meant considering the art of dying: When do we fight for time, and when do we fight for something else? He meant explicitly confronting the personal endgame we all have to face sooner or later, rather than pretending that it isn’t happening or won’t happen. By the way, this doesn’t mean that you have to find the frailty of old age and the prospect of death attractive, or even acceptable. It means you see it clearly for what it is. Finishing well doesn’t preclude a little raging against Dylan Thomas’s dying of the light. You can rage if you feel so inclined, at least for a little while.

Despite it all, my octogenarian friend seems quite cheerful.

But I think people like this wise old friend of mine are rare. And they seem to have left much of the medical profession behind. Doctors like Shoshana Ungerleider, founder of the Endwell Project, and palliative care physician B.J. Miller, argue eloquently that dying is a human and cultural issue, not a medical issue, but they are still in a distinct minority in the medical community.  Atul Gawande, an American physician and writer, begins his 2014 book Being Mortal with this: “I learned many things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.” For doctors, Gawande suggests, dying is a medical experience, pure and simple. Gawande writes, “The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old, is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all.”

Atul Gawande writes, “All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.” Write your own story, right to the end. Do that, and you’ll finish well.