I was quite interested in this story about a 91 year old woman who’s being prosecuted over selling “suicide kits” over the web, something she was moved to do after watching her husband die a slow and horrible death from a terminal disease. She’s making bags that you can put over your head and fill with helium to have a painless death that leaves a pristine corpse (unlike, say, a shotgun). Perhaps off-topic, the part of the story that shocked me was that she’s selling the kits for $60, and last year she did nearly $100,000 in sales! Wow! Given that it’s not easy to find her webstore, those sales figures are quite remarkable. I don’t know if I should be disturbed about that, although I suspect that the “true” market, were the stigma to be removed, would be massive. No one wants to die slowly or painfully or stripped of dignity, nor should they have to.
While I do hope that her clients get appropriate counseling from their doctors and therapists — there’s no good that comes from someone committing suicide over depression or treatable disorders let alone a stressful life of unemployment — I am 100% in support of her actions (her cause?), and in the long-term hope that the government allows doctors to provide “doctor assisted suicide” and society removes the stigma from folks who are forced to do this, because it’s not “suicide”. The death is the direct result of the disease that brought the action on. All they did was chose to reduce their pre-death suffering’s duration. If someone has an incurable degenerative and/or terminal disease, they have a death sentence. Checking out early doesn’t somehow change that.
We don’t allow our legal system to punish people with the “cruel and unusual”. We don’t let tax-cheats be whipped, we don’t chop off a thief’s hands, we don’t lobotomize blasphemers, and we don’t castrate perverts, yet we expect those with medical afflictions to bravely tolerate far, far worse for much longer… until they die from it in fact. We also accept that it’s unacceptable to torture people even if “good” might come of it (let’s skip the debate on its efficacy) like stopping a terrorist attack or finding a kidnapped kid. Yet somehow not only do we force those with certain illnesses to spend the rest of their lives being tortured, we ensure that this torture be as effective as possible by putting up legal blockades to ensure they can’t get proper treatment for the pain under the false and irrelevant premise that narcotics might fall into the hands of addicts. Things that everyday parlance calls “a fate worse than death” is not deserved by those we brand as “evil” yet no one blinks at the idea that those who the dice-throw of life handed the right disease be gifted with said unacceptable fate. It’s perverse and sickening and inhumane… Inhuman. And I’m only scraping the surface of the argument. There are a nearly infinite number of reasons and cases where it’s rational and justifiable.
If someone is going to spend every day of the rest of their lives being tortured, where in every moment the dominant experience that they have is pain, how can we expect someone to face that? Or what if they are slowly losing their bodies, becoming paralyzed and having taken away almost all the things in life that give them joy? Not everyone wants to be Steven Hawking. Not everyone wants to be a noble cripple nor should they have to be. Worse yet, what if they are slowly losing their minds, being pushed bit by bit into a nightmare? What if all of these together are their fate? Choosing to go through hell for who knows how long, with the only reward for your endurance being death, is not something that everyone is going to see value in. Yes, it’s true that death is hard on the people that love (and are loved by) the ill individual, but there comes a time where the relationship decays to the point where its value is only symbolic, and it certainly doesn’t do anyone any good to have the people they care about burst into tears (or just barely hold them back) whenever they see them. It just makes the situation all the more hellish by heaping on emotional guilt and pain. Slow death doesn’t do anyone any good, and I don’t think this woman should be attacked for giving people the tools to empower themselves to escape such a horrible fate.
And finally, and as best as I can do to stay on topic with my usually light-hearted sculptures, here’s a head on a pole that I carved (rather than sculpting it like most of what I make) out of a random blob of hardened discarded clay. There are more photos after the break if you want.
(Continued)
