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Feasibility aside, what are the arguments against a culture of widespread euthanasia in the old? I find it an attractive option provided there’s the right cultural infrastructure. I’m thinking something like, “once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems. The way in which this occurs is also important. I find euthanasia by injection in a hospital disgusting and barbaric and aesthetically displeasing, whereas something like a speedy decapitation in a beautiful natural environment is preferable, and in fact how Samuraii died and similar to how animals are killed in kosher law.
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions. I’m unpersuaded that this reduces the dignity of man. This increases the dignity of man, by giving him power over when he dies, and by serving as a reminder that life is about wellbeing and benefit rather than selfish clinging to the flesh and absurd quantitative metrics (“how long you live in days” is a silly metric). There is, with that said, an economic incentive to do this: the money that is spent keeping the old alive is transferred to the young, the living root of life, which has a compound benefit, increasing quality of life and education.
Scott’s fantastic who by very slow decay, and a recent experience involving a distant relative, is what truly motivated my thinking that our culture of death needs reform. Dying is a horrible experience for everyone who witnesses it. Dying itself is not the pain, watching the death slowly is the pain. The amount of psychological stress and pain and burden that my relatives experienced as a relative slowly died was significant and impossible to ignore. Were the death to have occurred one night in sleep, a huge amount of pain would have been avoided. But we can’t will ourselves to die peacefully in sleep. The best we can do is pick when we die, so that we die before we increase the sum total pain in ourselves and others.
I am considering this from the standpoint of “how I would like to die”, not “boo old people”, to be clear. Death is inevitable and mundane. Our hospital culture hyperfixates on continuing life for its own sake and on clinging to life, and this reifies the mistaken impression that personal death is a catastrophe. Were we to truly care about life, we would forget the old (who start to decay well before expiration) and instead focus on the young, the living root of life, and we would focus on increasing their health so that human life flourishes. That’s where life resides. Why take care of an old flower when you could nurture young seedlings? It’s the same life, it is just found in the young and not the old. So, when I imagine the most enjoyable way to die myself, it’s that it occurs right before the worst of age-decay sets in. I have an enjoyable weekend with loved ones, we celebrate living, and then they give me the Marie Antoinette treatment and everything is quite peaceful. It actually doesn’t appear to be stressful or anxious or sad at all, though (we should all hope) there are some loved ones present who will miss my presence.
I used to pick up dead people. Of all the corpses I've dealt with, the one death that sticks in my mind as the most desirable for myself or my loved ones was a very old lady who passed away in her own bed with a well-read new testament on the bedside table next to her. Her 80 year old daughter and 60 year old granddaughter were there with her. I don't know if there's such a thing as a good death, but that one was the closest I've found.
I think we should be willing to accept earlier, natural deaths rather than dragging things out. Many if not most old people would prefer to die in their own beds with family around rather than in a nursing home or a hospital. Realistically you can't provide the same level of medical care in a home setting, but so be it.
However I very much dislike the idea of making deliberate choices to end a life. It's good for the human soul to accept the inevitable, but it is bad for the human soul to cull lives that are inconvenient. There is a difference between letting go and throwing away, and once you cross that line it is all too easy to start killing other people too. Why not the healthy-but-depressed person? Why not the person disabled by accident rather than age? Slippery slopes are indeed slippery.
Of course you start by saying it's voluntary. And it is, kinda, but the people who go know that they're an inconvenience and that it would be easier for everyone around them if they just sat in the nitrogen capsule. And more and more people respond to that pressure and increasingly society becomes built around the assumption that of course you'll off yourself when the time is right and then if you don't it becomes a really awkward imposition on everybody. And the choice ceases to really be a choice, it's an expectation.
Our elders deserve to die with dignity with their lives neither artificially prolonged nor not artificially truncated. When I go I want it to be in my home with my children and grandchildren around me. And when someone sees that I'm having a stroke or I'm struggling to breathe, they don't panic and they don't call the ambulance, they just hold my hand and stay with me till the end. That's as much as I can ask for.
Please ignore this if you're worried about doxxing yourself, but I thought you were an Australian political lobbyist? That and corpse disposal seem like very disjointed careers and I'd be interested to hear more. You were volunteering?
I did funeral work while I was getting my degree. Mostly it was overnight stuff - I'd just be at home chilling until I got a phone call that there had been a car crash or a suicide or something and then I'd suit up and go to the scene and take the body to the coroner once the cops' forensics people were done getting what they needed. I also got a second job doing cremations for a while.
I highly recommend the death industry - you accumulate no end of great stories.
I see, thank you! I was under the impression that undertaking and funeral work were almost entirely hereditary jobs, at least in the UK. 'Mucky' but lucrative jobs like undertaking and sewage work often seem to be that way - they accumulate close-knit communities who don't stigmatize their work and because the work itself is lucrative, fathers don't try to get their sons out of it in the way they do for mining or farming.
Yeah, there's a lot of family connection in the funeral industry. Even among the ones that aren't directly family-owned, a lot of the workers tend to be related. There was a while where myself, my two sisters, my wife, my brother, my brother-in-law, and my mum were all working for the same funeral business.
Fascinating. And would you say that working with dead bodies for a few years had any effect on you? All the philosophical stuff about getting closer to death, corpse meditation, etc?
Or does it mostly get siloed into the mental filing cabinet for 'that job I did during my degree' and doesn't really relate to your feelings about life in general?
I grew up on a farm so I always had a pretty grounded attitude to life and death. It didn't affect me a huge amount. That said, no matter how jaded you are something will get to you eventually.
There's two events that still make me cry whenever I remember them. Both of them involved dead babies. The first one was a large Catholic family. They had seven boys and then finally had a little girl with their eighth child. She had health problems and survived for a while after birth but ultimately didn't make it. At the funeral her older brothers each went up and talked a bit about how much they loved their little sister and would miss her, etc. All very sad, all of them young men trying manfully to hold themselves together.
It got down to the fourth brother in line who was around 13 I think. And he gets up there and he tries to offer some words for his baby sister and he just can't. He can't speak at all, he's trying so hard not to cry but every time he tries to say something he just breaks down. And I've been in all sorts of awful tragic situations and it didn't bother me, but somehow just watching that kid trying to speak and failing cut right into me and I've never really been able to recover from it.
The other time that really got to me was the day I burned ten babies.
The first 9, I was ok. It's confronting the first time you see one of those little shoebox sized coffins, but you get used to it like you get used to anything. And so I put them in the oven one after the other, box after box, and just didn't really think about the enormous tragedy that each one represented.
Then number ten comes down. It's the last funeral of the day, the last cremation to be done before I go home to my own baby (yes I was married with a kid at this stage). But before I took him to the oven the funeral director came to me with a little toy car. He tells me the parents asked if I could put it in the coffin with him. Of course I can.
So I remove the lid. And I see him. And he's such a cute little boy. He's a stillbirth - I'm not exactly sure how far along, but he's pretty much fully developed except his ears aren't separated from his head yet. And of course he's tiny, would have fit in my hand. And for some reason the unfairness of it all just hits me in that moment. This little kid lying in front of me who's died before he even had a chance to live. He deserved so much better than that.
But there's nothing I can do. I tuck the little car in next to him, I close the lid, I apologize to him through my tears, and I put him in the fire. I hope there's some justice for him in the next life because there's sure as hell none here.
I go home to my family. I get over it. I sleep fine. And then the next day I go back in to work and the first thing I have to do is rake his ashes out of the furnace. And I'm doing that and putting them into a little porcelain urn to give to his parents, and I find something in the ashes. It's a little button from his little onesie. And it just sets me off again.
So there's those events that still affect me on an emotional level. In terms of my outlook on the world though I would say that it's given a more visceral understanding of things that I already knew but didn't really feel. I knew suicide was awful and tragically common. But now I know in my gut how terrible and how frequent it is. I've seen the kids whose dad hung himself in front of them. How is a family supposed to go on after something like that?
Same with car accidents. They happen all the time and they barely make news. But I know exactly what it looks like and what those statistics mean. The woman with the destroyed legs who bled out on the side of the road. The dad who picked up his two girls for the weekend and got T-boned. The grandfather with his chest caved in on Christmas day. Self driving cars can't come fast enough.
Thank you for the stories, and I apologise for dredging up painful memories. I've mostly been fortunate enough that the funerals I've been to have almost all been for the elderly. The one exception is for a schoolmate who developed a condition that killed him in university. In general the funeral wasn't so bad; almost a school reunion with everyone gathered for the first time since graduation. The thing that really got to me was the obituary, because of course there was nothing to put in it. He'd been a good boy, worked hard, did well at exams, and then he died. Bravely and stoically, by all accounts. We sang the old school hymns and then we went back out into the world.
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