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Notes -
A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
I'm not @urquan, but my mom died at 58 under similar circumstances, having to choose between starving to death or dying of bowel obstruction. People have come to understand dying with dignity as meaning dying on your own terms, or dying without a lot of suffering or something, but there is something to be said for equating dignity with triumph, in the sense that you can whip slaves all you like, but they can still stand tall and ask for more, thereby denying you the victory of degrading them. As painful as it is to see someone suffer, it also painful to see someone reduced to bemoaning their state and begging to be put out of their misery, not because it fills one with pity, but because it fills one with scorn. By the end of someone's life, it is perhaps too late to inculcate stoicism, but in my mom's case I basically told her to man up and quit being a pussy, that she would soon be dead, but everyone but her would have to live with the memory of her final days, so she should consider pulling whatever victory she could out of the situation. And she did. She did it out of maternal love for me, rather than out of any attachment to airy principles, but even still, in dying she left the gift of an example of courage and forbearance in the face of certain defeat. It doesn't get much more dignified than that.
Thank you, this is very thoughtful.
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