The enduring emotion

           When I was about 20 years younger I worked for an instructive

    length of time in a  South Providence nursing home.  I quickly learned

    on a very intimate level that there is no significant anatomical or

    physiological differences between the races of mankind .

        We all fall apart in pretty much the same way. Those sentimental

    death bed scenes in movies are strictly Hollywood fantasy. Most

    people  neither age nor die with great dignity. I recall Leon Trotsky,

    the exiled Russian revolutionary writing in his diary : " Old age is

    hideous !  And at the time he was only in his  early  sixties.

           I remember joking with my sister in law - who now works in a

    nursing home herself - that now and then I craved to see a porn film

    not because I was in a lascivious mood but simply to undo the psychological

    damage  done by those unpleasant nursing home scenes.

            Today in the  Boston Globe I read about a 90-year-old man

    shooting his 84-year-old neighbor in a squabble ( page B 6 ). That

    rifle, I reflected, made him " virile " in his capacity for violence.

         Then I remembered my nursing home experience, my personal conclusion

    that up to the last minute of their life, human beings are capable of

    hate and of acting on the emotion. Every other emotion in them is

    dead - the dying ego is seldom altruistic. But  the little area of

    the brain which makes us hateful is the last to go.

         While there is life there is hostility.

      No wonder at funerals we hear and read : " Rest in peace ! "

      No wonder the " zombie " theme is so popular in horror films. We

    are frightened by the thought of our most enduring emotion - hate -

    enduring beyond the grave.

         It is not for nothing that walking past a cemetery at night

    we dread a frightful fiend stalking us!