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I hesitate to respond - I lost my dad to cancer and by no means do I want to trivialize anyone’s death. So with all respect and sympathy for your personal loss,
by JackFr 5y ago
I hesitate to respond - I lost my dad to cancer and by no means do I want to trivialize anyone’s death. So with all respect and sympathy for your personal loss, that’s not a rigorous analysis.
Had your father not died shortly after your mother he wouldn’t be a data point against the hypothesis, he simply wouldn’t have been included in the dataset.
So if we only are including those who die shortly after an event, what might otherwise have been dismissed as coincidental now looks conclusive.
- adrian_b 5y agoI agree that is impossible to be certain of a causal relationship between his wish to die and his rapid death. Nevertheless, as a witness of how that happened, I find it hard to believe otherwise. Even if he was already ill, until that week the evolution of the cancer had been extremely slow during a couple of years and there had been no signs that the previous forecasts about his remaining lifetime might need any revision. His condition has deteriorated abruptly in his last 4 days, without any apparent external causes, besides his sadness and wish to die, so I cannot see any other plausible explanation. While a temporal coincidence cannot be excluded, the circumstances were such that I consider this as extremely unlikely. Maybe if he had not been already ill, a death wish might not have been able to result in actual death and a weakened body is necessary for the mental state to have a such great influence.