My grandmother went to her grave thinking I was a God loving Christian. And I’m not sorry that she did. (Even though I’m not)
But did you ever lie to her? Or did you simply allow her to continue believing something that you knew to be untrue? The two arent the same.
Good question.
I said grace a the dinner table when she asked me to.
So… I’ll let you decide.
“God is great, God is good, let us thank him for this, um fud?”
No lies where told. 
I wouldn’t want to be lied to, so I wouldn’t do it to someone else.
Well, if they were dying from cancer, that would just be mean.
Just before my beloved grandmother in law became really ill, my SO and I broke up. When we went to go and see her in hospital, we really thought it was to say goodbye. So we decided not to say anything. I suppose it wasn’t exactly a lie, we just didn’t say anything.
That was 2007, she got better and only died a few months ago. She was very sad when she heard we’d broken up. We got back together and I was with her the day she died. I loved her very much, and I wouldn’t have wanted her to die thinking I was “leaving” her family somehow.
So I’m okay with it. Not the peace in the ME, but some things I’m okay with.
A good friend of mine was in this position. He was running the rescue operation in a collapsed building. Some people were alert, but there was no chance at all that they would survive long enough for the crane to lift the concrete and steel off of them, and get them to the hospital. And even then, they were too damaged to survive even with the most heroic medical measures - he said even if you could build an operating room around them, they wouldn’t have survived.
So he told them the truth - that they were going to die. All he could do was give them morphine for pain.
He’s never said, but I suspect that he gave them enough to take them out. I would hope he would if I had been in that situation.
Is there fresh snow? The lifts close at 4pm. Can they hang on that long?
Agreed. My mother decided not to tell my father and me that he was dying. My other siblings knew. I was a teenager at the time, not a child. Her charade made it impossible for my father and me to really talk to each other, and to say good-bye. Fifty years later, I still want to throttle her.
Well basically it’s same as asking “Is it OK to lie as long as the person will never know the truth”, which in itself, the answer is no: the fact someone won’t know the truth doesn’t change anything. People care about the truth because they care, not to just make themselves feel a certain way.
But OTOH, telling a small “white lie” in whatever circumstances can often be justified, particularly when it’s just to spare someone’s feelings and the truth of the matter is not so important anyway.
I don’t think the kind of lie in the OP though could constitute a white lie. It’s a major shake-up of the person’s world view. Sure, they’ll never know the truth, but if that makes it moral, then that would mean many situations in which you can lie to non-death-bed people “morally”.
This thread reminds me of the (I believe) US senator who went to France for a commemoration of the D-day invasion. Apparently he had been wracked with guilt for decades because, as a pilot or bomber he had dropped a bomb which landed directly on a French farmhouse. He said he knew the house was occupied at the time because it was noon, and therefore lunch time. He assumed because his family ate dinner at noon every day, it was the same everywhere. Anyway, some old French guy was found who claimed it was his house, it was empty, and he said if it shortened the war by 5 minutes it was worth it. I thought at the time it would be interesting if the guy was an actor brought in to assuage the old senator’s guilt.
Brighten up my day by telling me that Jesus has returned. I’d be so like damn glad I was going to die just as the Apocalypse was getting started.
The link is to a classic Mark Twain short story (now in the public domain) about a pair of maiden aunt sisters who live with their widowed niece and her daughter.The sisters are uncompromisingly stern about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; a lie was “unthinkable,” and the gravest sin.
Then the widowed, who is sick with typhoid, unintentionally infects the daughter, and the aunts’ resolve is tested – they can’t bear to tell their niece that her daughter is sick and dying. Having given a long, defensive speech about how all lies, no matter their motive, will be punished by God, both in turn find themselves unable to reply truthfully when the dying woman asks after the health of her daughter.
And then, finally, the daughter dies, and the mother soon after, still convinced that the daughter is healthy.
In mourning, they are visited by an angel, and confess that if the situation were the same, they would again lie. The angel promises to return with God’s judgement upon them.
The last chapter of the story is a single sentence, which also serves as the title:
Was It Heaven? Or Hell?
Ten years or so ago, one of my first cousins was dying of AIDS. The disease had eaten his brain, pretty much destroyed his short-term memory, and left him emotionally labile. His parents had both died within the previous six months, and our Aunt “Jean” and Uncle “Bert” both refused to come visit him in the hospital because he was so SINFUL. Anyway, as he lay dying, he began asking first when Jean and Bert were coming, and later Mom and Dad. If we told him the truth he’d get heartbroken, and half an hour later would forget his heartbreak and the reason for it, so we (his boyfriend, cousins, and siblings) decided to just tell him that the people he loved were on the way and would be here any minute. Every time we told him that he got incredibly happy and forgot about his pain and despair.
Only a monster would have told him the truth under such circumstances.
What if it were you on the receiving end of these oh so well meaning lies,** iiandyiiii**? Not a hypothetical ‘they’.
The process of death tends to rob us of our last bits of dignity. Unless we die suddenly there are decisions to be made about care, about finances, about all of the little details that we used to be in charge of, but no longer can control. All power is lost. People who have led a full life often get reduced to the rights level of small, helpless children
So you would add deception to these final insults? Would you prefer to be lied to by the ones who should be your closest allies, your family and friends?
You are probably looking at this issue from the vantage point of a young and healthy person. I am still one of those too.
But again, the question is, what if it were you?
Dallas, when my cousin was on his deathbed, should I have told him his beloved aunt & uncle had disowned him because of his gayness and sent him into a spiral of pain and grief? Please explain your answer.
Oranges are not the only fruit, and honesty is not the only virtue. As a rational actor, it is my responsibility to assess a situation and decide what is the kindest and more effective action I can take, not to blindly follow some deontological rule whose primary purpose, it seems to me, is to free me of the pain of having to make my own decisions (and thus risk making a mistake).
My great uncle died of a heart attack while my great grandmother was on her death bed. I was too young to know any of this stuff, but apparently the adults in the family had quite a discussion about whether to tell her he’d died or not. I’m not sure how that turned out, I think they wound up not telling her.
If this story was exactly the same, only your cousin suffered no brain damage (and the resultant mental and memory problems) but was still dying from AIDS, would you still behave the same way with him?
Probably not. But so what? You’re basically asking if I would have behaved differently if the circumstances had been different. The morality of a given action depends on its context, not by slavish adherence to rules.
I once got into a shoving match with a crazy homeless guy because he was attacking a little dog that was tied up outside a Walgreens near my apartment. I wouldn’t have gotten physical with him if he hadn’t been hurting the dog, or if I hadn’t been bigger and stronger than he. Different circumstances, different reaction.
Telling my cousin the truth about our aunt & uncle hurt him to absolutely no purpose. Lying to him made him happy for a few minutes at a time, until he forgot about the earlier question & answer, at which point it was time to lie to him again and make him briefly happy. We couldn’t do much else for him, but we could do that.