Death and Euthanasia

This is probably my third or forth post titled “Death”. Since I’ve had this blog for about two and a half year that’s nothing. Considering the amount of thought I give the subject I’m rather surprised my blog isn’t already half full of them. Sometimes I think of death with fear and hatered, an other good reason for why I chose Anakin as one of my new names, but most of the time I resignate myself to my constant companion and at times I’m actually looking forward to its final embrace.

To day though I had to laugh aloud. Somehow I’ve managed to miss all the turmoil about some woman, totally lame from the neck down but not unsensitive and resigned to a respirator for life support, who asked for help to end her own life. She’s been living like this since she was six years old and yet managed to have a very happy and fullfilling life until she was about 31 and the pain started to become too much to bear. This is no laughing matter, I know, and it’s not her story that made me laugh- rather the opposit. What made me laugh was some religious guy, swedish, probably catholic though I’m not sure about that, who wrote about her in his blog. She got what she wanted and he says that the devil has now been alowed to murder in our hospitals. It is the devils temptation that makes the terminally ill or the really sick and suffering people to want to end their lives in a fast, humane and controled way instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for God to end their pain. The human life is so damn valuable that if it is possible life should be preserved no matter what the pain and suffering. And all this man could see was a woman killed instead of helped to have a life. He could not see that she’d had a life and now she was done with it, now she was sick of the pain and utterly tired of waiting for her body to decay and her mind with it before the body gave up on its own. Why wait? She thought. Give yourself to Jesus! He said. It was him I was laughing about. I’m not sure why though.

It is true that I believe everyone has the right to freedom of choice when it comes to their own deaths. I want that right for myself. If I can I will take it too. But I do understand the difficulties with euthanasia. Where should you draw the line between active and passive euthanasia? Which ones have the right to claim it for themselves? Who should assist? And so on. There are dangers too. Even as I watched the documentary about this woman she herself said that nobody really wanted to care for her, meaning her medical treatment and personal care, because it was too expencive. This is a very good argument against euthanasia that I agree upon. There might be people who can very well lead happy lives even as they lie motionless and unable to breath on their own and still feel that they should ask for euthanasia because it’s bothersom and expencive to care for them, even though they don’t mind living like that. We can’t have people killing themselves to make it easier for the rest of us. That’s just wrong. But at the same time I don’t think we have any right to keep people alive against their will either. God or no God.

It is a very difficult and hard question this. I sure think the woman had the right of it; the right to choose death, now, on her own terms rather than wait for nature (or God) to have its course. That could’ve taken years with terrible pain and suffering as a result. If we do that to our animals it’s considered cruel and they’d be taken into custody and forcably put down to be spared pain and suffering. But we should live with it 'til our sanity is slipping away and for what? To honor the gift of life? Or to be punished for being such a wreched creature as a human?