We have quite a lively debate in the western world surrounding the right to die. And, the right to choose one’s own death. Many cultures allow, or insist, an elderly person to take action in this regard. One striking example is the Aymara. A documentary on a valued elder, Alejo Mamani, depicts his struggle with clinging to life for the sake of his daughters who have not married well and the leadership of his community on the one hand, and his desired to ‘go to the cliffs’ and join his lost peers. He struggles with possession but, to a western audience, we view his struggle as psychological, the internal war between the will to live and the desire to die because the future seems empty. This is a struggle that some elderly face as they watch their spouses, siblings, and friends die and find they do not have the energy to, yet again, build a new life with new people in it.
Here, in the west, for some reason, we believe that individuals are not capable of making these choices for themselves. I understand that in many cases, the desire to die might be temporary and born of pain (physical or emotional) that will fade. Sometimes we do hit those patches where the outlook is bleak and pulling through those times with the support of a community of a sort is all that is needed to find the joy in life again. But, there are many cases where a person legitimately has looked around and ahead and made a decision, not out of pain or loss, that their time is over.
The right to die with dignity extends to a narrower set of circumstances in the sense that the gray area in assisted suicide is tied to those with terminal illnesses. Rather than waste away from cancer or some other debilitating conditions with artificial support and no available treatment, some would rather select their time when conditions dictate. Very few people want to die full of tubes in a hospital. The story of the widow, Madame Gaillard, who raised Grenouille in Suskind’s Perfume: the Story of a Murderer is profound. M. Gaillard worked hard to avoid the nameless, mass death that her husband suffered in the hospital (l’hotel de Dieux) but did not avoid it and ended up buried in a mass grave after living far longer than she had desired in life.
This morning I saw an article on the BBC that lowered the threshold for indignity in death. A woman who collapsed on her way home was defiled while a group of bystanders observed. She died. Her last experiences in life were to have a cold bucket of water thrown over her body and then to be urinated on and covered in shaving foam. There are no words to express the sadness I felt in reading this. Goodbye cruel world.
The family holds the young man who committed the act (for a youtube video) and all who watched and laughed as equally responsible. Rightly so. The perpetrator’s three year prison sentence should be shared with any and all who watched and did not intervene. Complicity is, to me, as great a crime. Actually, I could argue it is greater because by observing and not intervening, one sanctions the behavior and justifies oneself as not responsible by lack of action. This goes back to the definition of evil that I talked about in a previous blog.
And so begins The Tempest, one of my favorite plays and the tale of many things including a deformed, rejected, and misunderstood Caliban: O brave new world that has such people in’t.
One has to be brave with such people in it…
Dignity in death
We have quite a lively debate in the western world surrounding the right to die. And, the right to choose one’s own death. Many cultures allow, or insist, an elderly person to take action in this regard. One striking example is the Aymara. A documentary on a valued elder, Alejo Mamani, depicts his struggle with clinging to life for the sake of his daughters who have not married well and the leadership of his community on the one hand, and his desired to ‘go to the cliffs’ and join his lost peers. He struggles with possession but, to a western audience, we view his struggle as psychological, the internal war between the will to live and the desire to die because the future seems empty. This is a struggle that some elderly face as they watch their spouses, siblings, and friends die and find they do not have the energy to, yet again, build a new life with new people in it.
Here, in the west, for some reason, we believe that individuals are not capable of making these choices for themselves. I understand that in many cases, the desire to die might be temporary and born of pain (physical or emotional) that will fade. Sometimes we do hit those patches where the outlook is bleak and pulling through those times with the support of a community of a sort is all that is needed to find the joy in life again. But, there are many cases where a person legitimately has looked around and ahead and made a decision, not out of pain or loss, that their time is over.
The right to die with dignity extends to a narrower set of circumstances in the sense that the gray area in assisted suicide is tied to those with terminal illnesses. Rather than waste away from cancer or some other debilitating conditions with artificial support and no available treatment, some would rather select their time when conditions dictate. Very few people want to die full of tubes in a hospital. The story of the widow, Madame Gaillard, who raised Grenouille in Suskind’s Perfume: the Story of a Murderer is profound. M. Gaillard worked hard to avoid the nameless, mass death that her husband suffered in the hospital (l’hotel de Dieux) but did not avoid it and ended up buried in a mass grave after living far longer than she had desired in life.
This morning I saw an article on the BBC that lowered the threshold for indignity in death. A woman who collapsed on her way home was defiled while a group of bystanders observed. She died. Her last experiences in life were to have a cold bucket of water thrown over her body and then to be urinated on and covered in shaving foam. There are no words to express the sadness I felt in reading this. Goodbye cruel world.
The family holds the young man who committed the act (for a youtube video) and all who watched and laughed as equally responsible. Rightly so. The perpetrator’s three year prison sentence should be shared with any and all who watched and did not intervene. Complicity is, to me, as great a crime. Actually, I could argue it is greater because by observing and not intervening, one sanctions the behavior and justifies oneself as not responsible by lack of action. This goes back to the definition of evil that I talked about in a previous blog.
And so begins The Tempest, one of my favorite plays and the tale of many things including a deformed, rejected, and misunderstood Caliban: O brave new world that has such people in’t.
One has to be brave with such people in it…