Who Should Die And Who Should Live?

Where is Woody Harrelson when you need him? (as Tallahassee in Zombieland)

My friend the doctor has some really hard choices to make. He told me this week that he's having to write up the "Do Not Resuscitate" protocol for one of the care homes he visits.

The problem is this. What do you do when someone with senile dementia – who needs to be fed and toileted, who recognises no one and nothing, who survives because her nursing is excellent, whose quality of life is zero – what do you do when this person gets rushed to hospital for the second or third time with acute pneumonia, gets dragged back from the brink of death, and sent back to the care home for another month or year or decade of living death?

Someone needs to take the decision to let her die. Someone needs to think ahead, talk it over with the family and prepare the staff at the care home.



Then there's another kind of zombie that' I've just heard about. There are just under 150,000 companies here in the UK, which are stumbling along, neither alive nor dead, servicing their debt but unable to expand or develop. These are husk companies, which banks are not allowing to fail, because it would look terrible on the balance sheet.

Someone needs to make the decision to let those companies die. 

What's maybe more frightening is how this works on an individual basis. A lot of people have debts which they can just about service – no more, no less. But their lives are hollowed out by debt. They're treading water, gasping for breath.

Can these people be left to go to the wall? The entire country would collapse.

I look out at my dying garden. There are the dead flower heads, the mouldering leaves. There is the cycle of the year. It's closure. Here is beauty in decay.

Without endings, there are no beginnings. Simply, if no one dies, there is no room for babies to be born. The old must make way for the young. Zombie companies need to fail or be truly resuscitated, and people need to be helped out of debt, and back into the land of living.

Next year's garden.

November is the month of Scorpio, and tonight we have a solar eclipse at 21° of that sign. Eclipses are said to bring endings – and usually those are necessary, but they are not always nice. Eclipses across the Scorpio-Taurus axis happen every nine years, but this one is strengthened because this year we also have Saturn, the planet that takes account, just in Scorpio too. This visitation happens every 28 years, so it's important. Saturn is here to render account of things Scorpionic – including both death, debt.

D. pruned the roses today, shortening the side shoots and taking out the old stems, so that next year our arbour will be luscious with blossom again. 

What do you need to allow to die, so that you can put your energy into reviving the things that you need to keep?