The Death With Dignity ballot measure narrowly defeated statewide in 2012 actually passed on Cape Cod, with our aging population, suggesting that if the question were left up to those to whom it seems most relevant, the aging themselves, it would pass easily.
The debate seems to come down to the interests of the living versus those of the dying (or to be more accurate, of the living who are approaching that key part of life, the end of it).
Nothing is purely personal, not even something as intimate as how you do your dying. Society—that is, other persons—naturally has an interest in it. And it seems a healthy thing for society to value life highly, to take its side, as it were, against death.
What amounts to a taboo against suicide seems based in biological instinct for survival of the species. We worry, perhaps with reason, that, as a failure of the will to live, any individual’s suicide undermines the whole society’s will to live. We worry that if suicide even under dire circumstances were given legal standing it would create a slippery slope leading to a weakening of our grasp on life.
But this protectiveness of life is a problem when it makes us insensitive to the essential contradiction: yes, death is in an understandable sense the enemy of life. But dying is a big part of every life.
Suicide of the young and that of the elderly usually have completely different meanings. One seems tragically a failure to achieve or grasp the meaning or logic of life. For those who have lived long, meaningful lives it can be the most creative response to the decline in meaning. One seems a huge defeat, an insult to life; the other affirms life by being discriminating about what it is.
Laws in states that have legalized assisted suicide (Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont) are quite restrictive, effectively allowing the terminally sick to put themselves out of their misery, as you would a suffering pet. These laws seem just the start to legal and societal wisdom on this subject. A Death With Dignity law should arguably extend to include old people not in especial pain whose lives have become intolerable to them for any one of a number of reasons having to do with quality and meaning of life: Having lived well as an adult, I don’t want to return to a state of infantile dependency. Having created a meaningful life of competency and usefulness, I’m not interested in living on into a period of life drained of that meaning.
I don’t want the costs, financial and otherwise, of prolonging my diminished life to conflict with the welfare of those whose thriving gives meaning to my life. (Even if I know they would willingly make those sacrifices.)
An enlightened Death with Dignity would confer on the elderly the right to choose not to live on into a stage of life, that for whatever reasons, one would be just as happy to skip, and the right to know that stage when you see it. (Not that it’s all that easy, when it comes down to it, to make that determination.)
In other words, you should get to shape your dying as you have been allowed to shape your life.
Most of us, naturally enough, are too busy living to spend a lot of time thinking about the final stage of life until we feel our life tilting in that direction. In deciding on Death with Dignity we owe it to the elderly—including of course ourselves down the road– to enlarge our sense of life to include the ending of it and to use a little imagination about what it will be like when the time comes for each of us.
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