by Alicia Priest
For a society that acts as if life is endless and its members immortal, it’s remarkable how much we’re hearing about dying these days. Not death, but dying. It’s a tricky distinction.
Most often what we see in popular culture is sudden, violent and brutal death: gunshots, explosions, car crashes. The other way we like to think about death—especially our death—is that fantasy where we either go to sleep and never wake up or drop dead from a massive heart attack. If only it were so simple. Anyone who works with the institutionalized elderly or who cares for an aging, ailing parent knows those two ways of exiting this world are rare.
What most people experience is a slow, steady deterioration brought on by illness or aging. Both lead to a loss of mental and/or physical abilities, increased dependency, and an often bleak, degrading, and painful final stage of life.
It’s our culture’s flagrant disconnect with this reality that makes films such as Quebec’s The Barbarian Invasions, America’s Million Dollar Baby, and Spain’s The Sea Inside so unusual. These films focus on physically incapacitated individuals who reach a rational decision to end their lives but need help doing so.
In real life, end-of-life issues have been much in the public mind with the controversy surrounding Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman at the centre of a bitter legal battle between her husband, who wanted to remove her feeding tube, and her parents, who did not. While the media frenzy that ensued triggered a torrent of right-to-die discussions, hers was not a right-to-die case. Schiavo was incapable of choosing her fate. Her circumstances revolved around complex ethical, legal, and family rights.
Nonetheless, now may be a good time to revive the complex, messy, but essential subject of legalized euthanasia. It’s a topic that won’t go away, despite our unwillingness to deal with it. Given the fanatical American political climate, the rapid aging of a huge number of baby boomers, and the non-stop barrage of medical machinery designed to sustain life at all costs, we’ll be hearing a lot more about euthanasia in the near future.
On a personal front, a close friend recently grappled with these questions when her ailing mother swallowed a cache of sleeping pills she’d been hoarding for who knows how long. A vibrant, vivacious lover of life, she’d had a stroke and wanted out of her prison-like existence. It made me wonder how many other families suffer similar or worse situations.
Most Canadians know of Sue Rodriguez, the Victoria woman with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) who, 15 years ago, fought in the Supreme Court to have a legal right to assisted suicide. She lost. Fewer people know of Russell Ogden, the former SFU criminology graduate student who, in the early 1990s, studied assisted suicide in the Vancouver AIDS community. When Ogden published his thesis, he was abandoned by the university and hounded by legal authorities who insisted he reveal his sources. He has never done so. Ogden found that unregulated euthanasia was happening without medical supervision of any kind. Under these conditions, he concludes in a recent interview in Scientific American magazine, “Euthanasia is happening in horrific circumstances, similar to back-alley abortions.” About half of the cases he studied initially failed and resulted in greater suffering.
From a health-care perspective, it is striking that so few instances of euthanasia—fact or fiction—involve those trained in the healing arts. Although physician-assisted suicide is legal in a number of places—Holland, Switzerland, and in Oregon where it’s called the Death with Dignity Act—it is viewed as murder elsewhere. That situation drives assisted suicide underground, making even communicating about it a societal no-no.
Victoria writer Anne Mullens says the lack of open discussion about how best to die benefits no one. Mullens is the author of a thoughtful and informative account of the right-to-die debate called A Timely Death: Considering our Last Rights. The book won the 1997 Edna-Staebler award for Creative Non-Fiction.
“One of the things that was said to me during the research of my book—which I really have hung on to and is one of my major beliefs—is that, when there’s no record keeping, no law, no guidelines, and everything’s done in secrecy, things can be much more problematic,” Mullens says. “That’s where the abuses can happen. That’s where the real slippery slope is.”
Doctors in Holland told Mullens the greatest value of euthanasia is not the act itself but the cultural permission to talk openly about life and death. When someone feels comfortable telling their doctor about their wish to die, explains Mullens, the doctor can ask, ‘Why now? Are you in pain? Maybe we can do something about that’.”
Nobody could pretend the conversation to follow would be easy. But, ironically, talk about dying can sometimes result in extending life a little longer.
