Euthanasia
I’ve just been talking to some young relatives, visiting from Australia, whom I’m very fond of, on the subject of euthanasia. They are strongly on the anti-side of the debate and, while I’m still of two-minds on the subject, I applaud their zeal.
In my youth, death seemed so far off that I hardly thought about it. I was rather horrified by science fiction stories I read, or saw at the movies, about future societies where, by social convention, all people faced euthanasia when they were still young but had reached a certain arbitrary age.
I found, with natural old age, that one develops a different relationship with death. Primarily, one faces the fact that it’s not far in the future – it could be today or tomorrow, or one might live another ten years or so. (It’s the first time I’ve put that in writing and it’s even more sobering than just thinking about it.)
One has moments when the idea of dying doesn’t seem so bad, when the burdens of ill-health and responsibilities are so great that one just wants to curl up, go to sleep, and not wake again. I contrast that with the gratitude I feel, day by day, that I woke up and didn’t die in my sleep.
We “put down” pets out of mercy or because they’re unwanted or become too much trouble. Society today, in the Western World, isn’t too far from wanting to do the same to the elderly. Allow it out of mercy and it’s not too big a step to allow it to happen for other reasons, with selfishness and greed – masked as economic reasons – as a prime motivator.
On two or three occasions in my lifetime I would have died without modern medicine. We have created an unprecedented situation of human longevity. I occupy a body that is past its use-by date. Despite that, I cling to life as something precious. Only a person not in their right mind or in merciless pain could fail to value life that much.
In my youth, death seemed so far off that I hardly thought about it. I was rather horrified by science fiction stories I read, or saw at the movies, about future societies where, by social convention, all people faced euthanasia when they were still young but had reached a certain arbitrary age.
I found, with natural old age, that one develops a different relationship with death. Primarily, one faces the fact that it’s not far in the future – it could be today or tomorrow, or one might live another ten years or so. (It’s the first time I’ve put that in writing and it’s even more sobering than just thinking about it.)
One has moments when the idea of dying doesn’t seem so bad, when the burdens of ill-health and responsibilities are so great that one just wants to curl up, go to sleep, and not wake again. I contrast that with the gratitude I feel, day by day, that I woke up and didn’t die in my sleep.
We “put down” pets out of mercy or because they’re unwanted or become too much trouble. Society today, in the Western World, isn’t too far from wanting to do the same to the elderly. Allow it out of mercy and it’s not too big a step to allow it to happen for other reasons, with selfishness and greed – masked as economic reasons – as a prime motivator.
On two or three occasions in my lifetime I would have died without modern medicine. We have created an unprecedented situation of human longevity. I occupy a body that is past its use-by date. Despite that, I cling to life as something precious. Only a person not in their right mind or in merciless pain could fail to value life that much.
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