I don’t want to let the week pass without marking the death of Scott Adams. I, of course, knew of and was fond of his Dilbert cartoon. But I didn’t follow his daily morning podcast until this summer, and intermittently. So the pro-Trump stuff, the controversy, even the life-improvement rewiring and mentoring that his close friend Greg Gutfeld talked about in his beautiful segment Adams this week — all that stuff I really wasn’t plugged in on.
But I did happen to tune in when Adams announced his intended death day over the summer. He had a prescription and he was going to “off” himself, as he later put it. At the time he thought it made sense. He thought it would relieve his loved ones of suffering. He later explained how it wasn’t as neatly packaged as advertised and he was grateful he didn’t go through with it — and put his family through it.
It’s a perfect example of the pressure the existence of assisted suicide puts on people who are in need of family and medical care.
Adams died of cancer earlier this week, after daily podcasts showing the beauty and power in life until its final hours. I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to Pope John Paul II — we were on death watch in his final hours, 24 hours on cable news. He showed us how we could die embraced by love. Scott Adams wasn’t the pope, but he had a real connection with people. And it only increased in his final months and weeks and days.
The Little Sisters of the Poor tell me this all the time. I’ve lived it — you may have, too. If a person is loved, people in their homes don’t cry out for suicide. Because they are surrounded by love. And they have care — including palliative care, as Adams did in the final days.
But do we know how to love, anymore? Scott Adams was on an honest journey trying to live life out — with his ex-wife, some famous friends (like Gutfeld and Dr. Drew Pinsky), with his daily “simultaneous sip” listeners. And even talking with Jesus in the end.
The March for Life theme next week is “Life is a Gift.” I’m fairly certain Scott Adams never walked in one. And yet he came to appreciate and demonstrate just what that means — by living it to his dying day.