Category Archives: Suicide

When Darkness Falls

Standard

Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

In his book, The Choice of Hercules, A. C. Grayling includes a very necessary chapter entitled “When Darkness Falls” (Chapter 3), in which he discusses, as he must, times when we are sick or dying or grieving, for life is not always summer afternoon. Indeed, as Grayling says,

[t]o live is to contract for loss. Only if you die before the deaths of people you care about, and never separate from any of them because of a quarrel or because they move away or abroad — in short: only if every one of the thousands of exit doors that take people out of each other’s lives stay shut until our own opens out of all of theirs, will you not know loss of this kind. [53-54]

Or, as Richard Robinson said in his book, An Atheist’s Values, the

chief argument for the legitimacy of suicide is that life is a trap. We have not asked for it, and it can be terrible. [57]

When I saw the sun, this morning, shining on the trees in Maplewood cemetery where Elizabeth’s ashes are buried, it brought to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, the chapter from Grayling’s book and Robinson’s rather trenchant remark.

And this reminded me of Jerry Coyne’s comment on the Paul Wallace’s piece in HuffPo: “The Real Problem with Atheism.” And what is the real problem? That atheism is too optimistic. As he says:

Contemporary atheism is optimistic. Given its wall-to-wall phalanx of writers hell-bent on mocking everything that smells of religion, it may seem that this label is ill-applied. Yet under its bluster and iconoclasm atheism is full of good cheer and high spirits. Anyone who knows an actual atheist knows this.

And what, one would like to ask, is wrong with being full of good cheer and high spirits? But the claim is ridiculous: Where do the religious come up with their zany ideas?! Atheism is a lot of things, but it is definitely not full of good cheer and high spirits. For atheism, after all, is an “ism,” a word, the name for a point of view, a Weltanschauung, if you like, sometimes accepted by people who find that they never could or no longer can believe in a god or gods. Not all atheists are comfortable with this word, because it is simply a negative term, which makes it seem as though nonbelief in gods is dependent upon belief in gods, or, further, as though atheists have nothing besides the negation of religious belief in common, as though it is all about negation. And it isn’t.

Continue reading →

About these ads

Required Reading

Standard

Update, 16:37, Atlantic Daylight Time, Monday, 20th August 2012: “Required Reading” is now available in Polish translation at Racjonalista. Thanks again to Malgorzata for taking an interest in my occasional thoughts.

Update, 10:40 Atlantic Daylight Time, Friday, 17th August 2012: The Tony Nicklinson judgement is now in, and is downloadable as a pdf file here. I have not read it yet, but the judgement does not rule in his favour. According to the Telegraph:

Tony Nicklinson, the “locked-in syndrome” sufferer, broke down in tears on live television as it was confirmed that he had lost his legal battle to be allowed to die.

The judgement says that it is not up to the courts to decide the issue, but is a matter for Parliament to decide. However, it is clear that, in cases where Parliament fails to act to uphold people’s rights, the courts should make it clear that Parliamentary failure will not be upheld by the courts. While it is true that a judgement in favour of Tony Nicklinson might have had implications far beyond his case, the judgement could have made those implications conditional only upon Parliament’s failure to act. There is not a necessary or logical connexion between a favourable judgement in the Nicklinson case, and an immediate extension of that judgement to other similar cases. The cruelty of the judgement is the direct outcome of years of campaigning by religious entities which will continue to oppose assistance in dying no matter what the outcome. This case however shows how wrong Tallis is in the article linked below, to confine assisted dying to the terminally ill alone. Being trapped in your body, as Nicklinson is, and may be for many years, provides a lack of quality of life which may, in individual cases, be seen to be a great harm.

——————————————————

The following two articles are, for those who are concerned about assisted dying, required reading. The first is an article, published in the British Medical Journal, of the misery in dying of Ann McPherson, founder of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. Tess McPherson, Ann’s daughter, is also a physician, a specialist in dermatology, practicing in Oxford, and she writes a hair-raising account of her mother’s death which should put an end to the absurd spectacle of palliative care physicians like José Pereira claiming that palliative medicine can control all the pain, distress and indignity of dying. You can access Tess McPherson’s account as a pdf here.

Continue reading →

The Indignity of Dignity Therapy

Standard

Harvey Max Chochinov, Professor of Psychiatry, Community Health Sciences, and Family Medicine (Division of Palliative Care), University of Manitoba, and Director of the Manitoba Palliative Care Research Unit, CancerCare Manitoba, has just published a new book: Dignity Therapy: Final Words for Final Days. He had already published papers about Dignity Therapy, a form of psychotherapy for dying patients, but now we have a book, not only describing the rationale behind it, but practical instructions as to how to do it, from the point of introducing it to patients and their families, to using the therapy to make the final days of dying patients more fulfilled, so that they can, as Dame Cecily Saunders (whom Chochinov quotes) says, “matter because you are you, and … matter to the end of your life.” (Preface, v) Margaret Somerville jumped on Chochinov’s bandwagon early, suggesting that Chochinov’s Dignity Therapy has dispensed with the need to provide access to assisted dying, since now it is possible to live life fully until the end. We can now, she explained, shortly after Chochinov’s paper appeared, have mini-hopes which will help people to endure the miseries of their last days. As she writes in a short article on Mercatornet — a Roman Catholic “pro-life” site:

Hope, for instance, is very important in reducing suffering. It requires having a sense of connection to the future. We can give people “mini-hopes” – things to look forward to – even when a long-term future is not possible.

This, of course, is straight out of the Chochinov playbook. “The challenge,” she says, “is to find meaning in dying – to make dying the last great act of living. A lethal injection is a simplistic, cheap, quick technological fix.” But that is simply a cheap rhetorical trick. No one who suggests assisted dying as an option for the end of life thinks of it as a cheap, quick technological fix. What they are proposing is that this option be on the table from the beginning, so that someone can choose it if it seems right to her. (Or him, of course; gendered pronouns are such a problem!) And there is no reason why dying it that way, with assistance, cannot be the last great act of living, an act of courage and resolution, one with intense meaning for the person who is suffering, and an act of great compassion and humanity by those who provide the assistance. That is, assisted dying would not be a quick fix, but an acceptable and humane option that could be combined with all the other things that caregivers can provide, one other possibility for the suffering person, and one that many people want to have available when their turn comes to die.

Continue reading →

The Blind leading the Sighted. The Deaf listening for a Sign.

Standard

The blind leading the blind. Won’t they all fall into the ditch? A good lesson to learn from Jesus, but they’re still doing it. But what if they’re deaf too and those they lead can both hear and see? That’s an even bigger problem, that Jesus didn’t even consider. And Catholic leaders are like that. They can neither hear nor see. They simply won’t listen to people sometimes — especially if you’re suffering or dying; it’s as though the suffering and the dying are mute and invisible. The last pope actually said that when people ask for help to die, they are not really asking for help to die! He wasn’t listening. He could not hear. And what he said was a lie. He knew, just as you and I know, that people do choose to die, and that sometimes that decision can be rational and consistent with the life of the person who makes that decision. Which brings to mind the terrible story in the Daily Mail the other day. A woman suffering from MS asked her sister to help her get to Dignitas in Switzerland. According to the report:

When her sister refused to pay for her flight to the Zurich clinic, Carol Hutchins rode in her wheelchair for two miles to throw herself in a canal.

The paper is likely to have got this part wrong — journalists almost always do. The issue is complicated, and fraught with nuances and qualifications that newspapers are unlikely to reflect. Nevertheless, Carol was desperate. According to her father, who testified at the coroner’s inquest:

Carol was a very courageous woman but at the end of the day she has demonstrated a need for euthanasia in this country.

People say life is precious but there comes a point when life is not precious and it becomes torture for those that are living.

Carol had thought about going to Dignitas in Switzerland but it is very expensive and it puts other people in a difficult position.

It showed tremendous courage for her to do what she did all alone and I believe that she had planned it after having enough of being a prisoner in her own home.

She knew one more setback could leave her totally immobilised and she wouldn’t be able to do anything for herself and she would just be washed, dressed and stuck in front of the television. [my italics]

Continue reading →

Nursing Home Death and Catholic Bishops: a message from an inmate

Standard

There is no help that I know of for nursing home patients. A request to the doctor would only ensure that you were added to the “suicide watch”. I have Primary Progressive MS and have seen many of my friends and acquaintances die either of or with the disease.

I am in constant severe pain and in a wheelchair all the time. I need help going to the toilet and getting into and out of bed. I have some very good carers, but I cannot get them to help me as they would be fired.

Even if I could afford the trip to Switzerland there is no one to go with me, my two sons are against Euthanasia. Now Social Services are threatening to evict me from my current lovely room, as I have run out of money to pay my portion of the Care Costs.

My husband and I had a pact, but he died three years ago from Oesophageal cancer, and yes, he was helped, I was still reasonably active at that time and we had a very good and helpful Doctor. Unfortunately he is now dead himself.

This looks like a long list of woes which is what, I suppose, it is. I have to plan my own death and therefore have to go earlier than I probably would have if everything else was equal. I would like to put one or all of the Catholic Bishops in this situation and see if they are quite as stoic as they purport to be.

– Anne Veasey

from World right-to-die news list, Saturday, 18th June 2011

A Surrogate God

Standard

In the current edition of Free Inquiry (April-May 2011, vol. 31, no. 3), Jennifer Michael Hecht, well-known author of Doubt: A History, has an article entitled “You’ve Got No Right.” The theme of the issue is “Facing Misery: Confronting Illness, Even Death, without a Prayer,” and there several articles on the topic of death, mourning, suicide, and assisted dying from a humanist perspective that are no doubt worth reading. I happened to have begun with Hecht’s, and what I read alarms and angers me. She begins by saying that she had taken it for granted that the religious arguments against suicide were specious, that she had never heard a good secular argument against suicide, and that she had enjoyed “the rebelliousness implied in defending suicide.” But now, she says, she has changed her mind:

But I have changed my mind about the right to suicide. I’m mostly talking about what I call “despair suicide,” not end-of-life pain-mangement suicide, so it is not exactly the condition being addressed in this special section. [23]

And then she proposes to offer an argument about “despair suicide.” This simply will not do.

Continue reading →

From Conception until Natural Death

Standard

In the New York Times this morning (27th January 2011) Nicholas Kristoff, in an article entitled “Tussling over Jesus,” addresses himself to the conflict between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and Roman Catholic health care. We have all become familiar with the case of the woman at St. Joseph’s hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, and of the dispute with the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmstead, over the hospital’s decision to save the life of a woman even though that meant terminating the woman’s pregnancy. The nun who made that decision, Sister Margaret McBride, was excommunicated for her part in the life-and-death drama that unfolded in the hospital, and the hospital has refused to give assurances that it would not do the same thing again, should the situation arise. Bishop Olmstead accordingly stripped the hospital of its Catholic credentials because of what he considers its contumacy, since he is the only one entitled to interpret Catholic moral doctrine in his diocese, and all Catholic institutions must be subject to his Apostolic authority.

Other Catholic hospitals have refused to stop providing tubal ligations for women who ask for them, and in consequence have been stripped of their Roman Catholic credentials by a church increasingly presided over by conservative bishops — a shift which began in the pontificate of John Paul II. In some cases, where women have given birth in a Catholic hospital, they are required to go elsewhere for tubal ligation, if they wish it, since Catholic hospitals often refuse to provide such services, since it is, according to Catholic doctrine, strictly against the moral law to sterilise either the man or the woman, thus interfering with the primary purpose of the sexual act, which is, according to the church, the procreation of children.

Continue reading →

Assisted Dying and Suicide

Standard

For some time I have been of the opinion that the reason that most religions — and especially Christianity — are opposed to assisted dying is because assisted dying is always a form of suicide. Assisted dying, in my own understanding of it, is simply the outcome of the choice of the person who dies, and thus, effectively, that person’s act, whatever help is provided to the person. Other types of mercifully ending life may be called euthanasia, which is, strictly, a form of merciful killing, but assisted dying, which takes place according to the choice and with the consent of the suffering or dying person, is suicide.

However, I had never seen the point made quite straightforwardly. It merely seemed to me, on the merits, that what Christianity (to go no further) must find so objectionable about assisted dying is that it is equivalent to suicide, even when the assisting act is carried out by someone else. Imagine my suprise when yesterday I came across the following statement by the Vatican Secretary of State in 1970 to Catholic Medical Associations:

Continue reading →