Would YOU pull the plug on Nelson?

Nelson Mandela is on life support.  In related news, Saturday was spent discussing, erm…

End of Life.

AKA Passing Away

AKA Becoming Deceased.

AKA Going to Another Place.

In other words, Death.

This was a conference about Advance Care Planning – ie, do you want your corpse reanimated and fed lime jelly through a tube, or not?  In short, a whole roomful of people talking about what they’d like to be done to them, and not done to them, as they approach their final hour.  One craggy-browed participant, over coffee, stares around belligerently and declares,

I believe in personal freedom over my own body!

Well that’s interesting.  How about personal freedom to take hard drugs, not wear a motorbike helmet, that kind of thing?

Yes, absolutely, it’s outrageous that anyone can tell me I’m not allowed to smoke dope.

Everyone nods (me too).  Teenagers in the sixties, I guess.

And another thing, why should anyone be punished for looking at pictures! If I wanted to look at pictures of nude children..not that I do of course…anyway I suppose they’re nude, I wouldn’t know…..who would I be hurting? No one. Those pictures’d be there on the internet if I wanted to look at them or not!

Short pause for reflection.

Where there’s a buyer there’s a seller.  There are some markets you don’t want to enter.

Yes, well, getting back to death……Because it’s certainly more comfortable to talk about death than it is about kiddie porn!

I’m very worried about all this advance planning, says a Vietnamese woman. If I have a Plan, maybe the doctors will think they can get away with not doing EVERYTHING they possibly can to keep me alive.

You can put anything you like in your Plan, someone points out.  You can put ‘Don’t pull the plug on me until my head falls off’, if you want.

Anyway, put what you like, if your son the stockbroker who lives in New York but has flown back just in time to ask you where you put the will, says he wants you on that breathing machine, then on it you will be.  Dead men don’t sue.  Much.

That’s Love, says the Vietnamese woman. If it’s Love, then it’s ok.

Sigh.  I bet Nelson wishes he had a little less love and a little more consideration.  And here is a scary ad that ran in Australia a long time ago.  Wrong, luckily.