I had a dream the other night about Lennie Briscoe, intrepid dog detective. He was still alive, but ailing. We consulted an innovative and probably deranged veterinarian who replaced Lennie’s ruined organic spine with a cybernetic one and also (for some reason) his left eye. The vet said that he could replace all of Lennie’s living tissue with mechanical equivalents so that Lennie could live an indefinitely long life.
I was disturbed. What kind of life would that be for him, never to feel? (Even if it meant he could never suffer the way he suffered on the night before his death.) Still. Lennie forever. For me, that’s pretty close to, “Heaven is real and you can go there.”
It was a rough choice. I was still pondering it for a few minutes after I awoke. Then I realized that it wasn’t my choice to make—that Lennie was gone.
