Members of Dignitas , the famous Swiss ‘death-clinics’, can ask for assisted suicide if their life becomes effectively unliveable owing to acute pain or suffering, if their condition is not anticipated to improve, and if it will eventually lead to a less than dignified death. So, if one should develop a brain tumour, say, or terminal cancer, they have the option for a peaceful and controlled opportunity to shuffle off this mortal coil. They will not be abandoned to endure agony, humiliation and a loss of what makes them who they are, that which makes them human from their own perspective. Of course, the rights and the wrongs of assisted suicide can be debated from now until humans no longer possess a coil, mortal or otherwise, from which to shuffle off.
But my question is this: if it is permissible to assist people in one condition of unbearable existence to decide on the humane way out, why not for others? ‘Unbearable suffering’ is not a state of being restricted to those facing paralysis or slow physical demise, a fate which we all actually face. The invisible burden borne by those enduring acute emotional and psychological suffering, the permanent kind--not accounting for the fleeting difficulties that any life throws up--why is this suffering any less legitimate? Why are those people expected to soldier on, just because you cannot ‘see’ the source of their pain? Is there a dignity to be had when corroding in full repulsive view of one’s family, in the loss of any relationships that one might have been fortunate enough to build up during brief moments of respite, in existing in a world which is mutually incomprehensible with one’s psyche in the most profound way possible? Why is this death, just plain suicide, despised as ‘taking the easy way out’ whilst terminal patients are honoured by ‘an end of life decision’?
The answers might be many. Or there may be none.
Now, anecdotes are never the best form of argument, but I am not really seeking to make one anyway. So allow me to progress. For the good of ‘Queen and Country’, to bring ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to a place too long deprived of it, my brother gave his life. Yes, he returned from the war zone, from a place where his job was to watch over poverty stricken prisoners incarcerated in hot sandy cages dug into the ground. He took the coward’s way out. He placed a pillow covering over his head, wrapped an orange cord around his neck and dangled from a beam in his bathroom for the six weeks it took the Royal Navy to enter his gutted and unlocked apartment, all of his possessions sold except a bottle of rum, a few family photographs and some life insurance documents. This in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land.
Then there is Mr. S., a strong, generous, kind and principled man who came to me several years after our friendship had lapsed,for a help I could not provide. Handsome and with a bright shock of blonde hair, he was the only son of a proud and well respected middle class family. He had no tumour and control over all of his bodily functions. But this did not render his life bearable. His suffering was not any less terminal. He smelt, a poet who had lost all ability to weave together a coherent sentence, and he had scars on his throat where he had stabbed himself several times in a grab for ‘dignity’. Finally, he found his escape, burnt and torn apart by the cruel volts of an electricity pylon. Whether, as with my brother, dental records were needed to identify the corpse is not known to me, his helpless friend.
Why are these people failures? Simply because they were too weak to cope with life? Was their sickness inherently more ‘curable’ than the sufferers of physical ailments? Perhaps, but whose choice was this to make. Is it right that these people should be expected to carry on with a thunder storm raging inside them? Who has the strength for this I would like to know, and why is such strength not expected to be found in others?
The godly will have their answers, as undoubtedly would Nietzsche, even after he had finished off the divine. And a common saying of obscure origins, coupled with millennia of experience, tells us: the darker the night, the brighter the dawn. But who is to decide when winter truly has arrived. When all hope is only a further tool in the torturer’s arsenal? I make no claim to know. I am not even confident the sufferer themselves should be the exclusive judge. But one thing I do know is that the criteria drawn by Dignitas for their most solemn of freedoms is arbitrarily drawn. It reinforces the feeling that column A is an accident of fate, column B a failure of will.
No doubt the voicing of such dark thoughts pushes CEU’s ‘free expression’ envelope farther than most would be comfortable. But this is reality for some--it was for Mr. S as it was for my brother. It is about time that we, the CEU community, talked about it, because few others will. And this silence is the breeding ground for the bacteria that makes a piece like this necessary. But finally, sometimes the least expected sources can provide the best insights. Hence, Bon Jovi, ‘This Romeo is bleeding. But you can’t see his blood. It’s nothing but some feelings. That this old dog kicked up.’
a CEU student
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