About Death's Lesson on Lying with Good Intentions

One of my post midnight thoughts about the phrase "lying liars and the lies they tell" as another play of words from the book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. The book has nothing to do with this post but I just wanted to share where I got the catchy words that led me to think about lies.

Taken from my old mahwa review on Regarding Death also known as About Death.

Plot:

People from all walks of like enter a place and meet an old man who claims himself to be God. The encounter becomes an examination about their lives and how people come into terms with it to move onto what lies beyond the light.

---

Spoiler Warning: If you're interested in the manhwa based from the plot above, there's a link to a review that contains no spoilers. Proceeding below assumes you're only interested in knowing one episode in the series and how it relates to the premise of this post about people view lies.

![SPOILER WARNING FOR HE,RO CHAPTERS]
There's a 2 part episode within the series that are titled "He" and "Ro" respectively.

Yoon Hyeon-Hee is a fire fighter who responded to an emergency involving a burning building. While in the process of rescuing trapped civilians, he noticed a silhouette that resembled a small human figure and tried to investigate whether it was another person that was left behind.

But before he could confirm his suspicions, the building was already near collapse and he was forced to abandon what it was and left him with a few burn injuries. During recovery, he asked about the casualties during the incident and was given the assurance that nobody else died. He was able to continue with his life after that.

Years passed and he lived a fulfilling life as a fire fighter and died on duty, he comes face to face with God. God asked what he needed to know or talk about. Hyeon-Hee then recalled the incident and telling God how much it still weighed his conscience down despite the assurance that was given to him. The thought of leaving a life behind was something that burdened him and he carried it for years. God looked at him him as said the silhouette he found was only a bag of groceries the home owner had that day.

Hyeon-Hee was moved to tears and felt like a great weight was lifted from him. He was able to pass on without any regrets. God stared at the fire fighter that passed through the light while feeling a dark handed silhouette tugging his clothes. This was when God spoke about forgiving the man that failed to save that child.

Now I know it's just an author's creative interpretation of what a merciful deity would do but my personal opinion on the matter is not to be conceited and judge beings of higher order based on human morals. Deities live and see the world differently and their concepts of morality are not of human. What struck me most was the application of the a lie and carried out by an authority that is known to be the paragon of truth.

In that scenario, telling the truth would be inconsequential but by human mercy, god was considerate to withhold that shred of truth. Is telling the truth all the time even necessary when the pay off isn't even worth it?

A lie is still a lie. It is intentionally depriving someone else of the truth no matter how one tries to sugar coat the process. But some examples we see in real life shows that it's not a clear cut rule that being truthful brings about positive consequences.

In the case of the story He,Ro, a catharsis of emotions is required before individuals could pass on and be incorporated back into the cycle of reincarnation as an act of purification, but individuals have no time limit and may just end up staying in limbo indefinitely if they chose to. The god in that story reminds me of my exposure in caring for an elderly with dementia in a psychiatric ward.

Let's call my patient Laura, a 65 year old female who recently had an anxiety attack and had an underlying Alzheimer's disease. She was admitted for observation by her family due to fears of self harm and aggression. While Psychiatry isn't exactly my strong point when I was in med school, human observation was still something I was proud of as a skill set. Laura was a sweet granny and loved to tell stories but she easily gets upset when interacting with her visiting children.

The problem is how these children would follow the text book advice of reorienting the disoriented Laura that we're not in the 1970's and her husband is dead whenever she forgets. And her memory can be in a span of minutes to a goldfish. While I know these children were just following advice about reorienting the confused, the zealous nature can trigger some caregiver strain and burn out. At some point, I also got tired of losing count the number of time Laura baptized me as Michael, John, Marvin, Stephen (her eldest), Pedro.. and so I just leave it as is when I'm Adam.

The point is, shoving the truth even with good intentions doesn't bring about positive effects especially when it's not even worth stressing over. I know I could upset Laura by reminding her about the bloody calendar and people she recently met for the nth time, but there's no winner in this scenario. I could just keep things chill and let go as the way she understood things as long as it's not really causing any direct harm on her. I'm not sure if I'm even in a position to call my actions the right thing in times when I purposeful told Laura her husband will be back soon just so she could calm down and take her meds.

And this chapter alone made me review about how I view people that lie and the lies they tell. Sometimes it's not really black and white as what we want the kids to learn because there are gray areas that come up and us adults have to pretend like we've figured out to be role models.

The lies we tell and the good intentions we meant by those lies. Would the people we told them even appreciate that it's all for their sake or would they see past our bull shit and call us out for it? If someone here doesn't relate to how difficult it is to tell a lie or lived with small lies as part of their daily life, good for you, I hope you never have to live in a position that requires you to fall from grace.

The psychiatric department is one of the best places to get firsthand experience with how people cope with their lies. I get to see the show at the front row how out of school youths get into gangs, how drug addicts tend to rationalize things, how even familiar members contribute to their patient's problems without them taking some accountability, it's a fuck up world full of lies we live in and I ended up bending over trying to accommodate some of them.

A lie is still a lie. Anyone can tell you that telling the truth is the right thing to do but I'm better off listening to people who understand the gravity of telling the truth all the time and knowing which truths make good hills to die on.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.