Right-to-Die

A couple days ago, I stumbled into a conversation with a very close friend about assisted suicide. He expressed very adamantly and deliberately that he believes that if people don’t want to live, they should have the right to choose to die.

This hit me so much by surprise that I didn’t even know how to answer at first. I’ve had a couple friends who have come very close to suicide due to depression, and the idea that it’s okay for people to just end their lives seemed totally alien.

But no, that’s not what B meant. In some places/countries, he explained, there are assisted suicide programs where people can go through counseling and, if they are declared mentally sane/stable and want to die, they are issued a drug cocktail allowing them to do so. It’s wrong to murder and to end someone else’s life, but if you want to die, he says, you should be able to make that choice for yourself. And, he argued, it’s better to kill yourself with the aid of counseling to make sure it’s what you want with your family knowing and understanding your decision-making process, than to shoot yourself in the head.

Still. It feels fundamentally wrong to me on every level that anyone should take their own life. It feels like playing God to just eject yourself from the world because you no longer enjoy your presence there. I wholeheartedly believe in free will and individual rights, but there’s something about an action that extinguishes your very lifeblood… People can try to get pregnant, but they cannot actively control the creation of life, and to me it feels like the opposite bookend of that should be true too.

But I have no reason to believe, that I’d ever want to end my own life (assuming freedom from mental illness). B, on the other hand, has muscular dystrophy. He used to be an excellent piano player, and now has so little control of his fingers that he carries a tool to help him open soda/beer cans. Multiple times he has broken a foot and barely even noticed, because he can’t feel it. The older he gets, the more his body will deteriorate. He’ll likely be confined to a wheelchair before long, and eventually maybe be unable to move at all. He’s had friends die at twelve years old because of more extreme forms of his disease. He’s seen relationships in his family be torn apart from the strain of one spouse being so completely dependent on the other for care.

He’s happy now, enjoying life, still able to do many things that he loves and to lead a relatively normal life. But he never plans to get married, because he doesn’t want to end up in a broken relationship that makes someone suffer the burden of taking care of him every day of their lives. And he can easily imagine a time in his 40s or 50s when he would rather die than continue living a life of constant pain, unable to carry out many jobs (regardless of disability laws), and completely reliant on other people to function.

I can’t imagine wanting to die. But I also can’t imagine a life knowing that that’s my future. And it’s hard to argue with someone who has no other future to consider.

I couldn’t help doing a little research about the whole assisted suicide concept, because I had no idea it was even an option in some places. In the US, there are five states where terminally ill, mentally competent patients with less than six months to live can request a prescription for life-ending medication. Other countries have even looser laws, permitting not just assisted suicide but euthanasia. In Belgium, doctors can help patients end their lives when they “freely express a wish to die because they are suffering intractable and unbearable pain.”

Even where it’s illegal, right-to-die groups still offer ways to carry out assisted suicide. Organizations such as Compassion & Choices and Final Exit Network let people sign up for suicide cocktails by mail. They are sent exactly what they will need, with specific instructions for how to use it – including orders for family members to destroy the instructions after the plan has been carried out.

Even thinking about this makes my breathing uneven and my heart beat out of rhythm. I watched a video clip from a PBS documentary of a family member matter-of-factly explaining the pills her relative was taking – first anti-anxiety and anti-nausea ones in preparation for diving into the lethal dose of 60 pills in fifteen minutes. She was so calm and matter-of-fact about the idea of someone she loved just ending her life.

I could barely breathe.

I’m blessed to be physically and mentally healthy. Maybe being resistant to death is a sign of that, and maybe that makes it sort of a good sign that society as a whole is as afraid of death as most people are. Because the opposite of a fear of death is even more alarming - hearing B talk with complete ease about wanting to die in what we usually consider middle age, “the prime of life,” before his disease gets to be too much to bear. I guess if life means something different to you, death does too.