Whose life is it anyway?

By Janine Gebert

Thirteen years ago I had to dress my 30 year old daughter for her funeral. She had survived a battle with cancer but not with the subsequent depression. Her trademark porcelain skin looked beautiful. I asked the funeral people not to put makeup on her. The horror I felt when I saw her in the open coffin before the service still haunts me, alongside the guilt and blame of all parents who lose a child to suicide. Her skin was orange brown, and her lips were more orange.

The funeral director explained that people don’t like to see dead people looking dead. So they made my child look nothing like herself.

I have since pondered this lobotomized unwillingness to confront death and the resulting societal evasions that continue to inhibit intelligent dialogue about end of life choices in Australia. In earlier times both sex and death were seen as relatively unencumbered. But Christianity bought the need to exert control over people’s marital beds, and now their death beds. Not just those who accept that life and death belong to a supernatural deity.  Everybody’s.

Why do some people feel righteously entitled to tell other people how to die? Most people in Australia now have a say over how they live and whom they love. Death remains the last threshold of permissible interference, largely on the premise that religion trumps reform, and conservative politicians have the right to romanticize unfathomable pain in the name of suffering.

Unhappiness and depression were considered relatively circumstantial in times past. The Greeks elevated the concept of a good death to a worthy goal, and suicide was preferable to shame or pain. But perpetual happiness is the product that affluent societies have to sell. People choosing to die challenge the advertising that all life is good, and therefore, like everything else, more is better. How dare we affront this lie and take our lives into our own hands!

The voluntary euthanasia ‘debate’ is a graphic procession of people missing the point. No one is trying to legislate for community murder. This is about the fundamental right of a sane adult person to judge for themselves when they have had enough. And if this is unpalatable to some, maybe they need to examine what gives them the right to move uninvited into someone else’s dying and shove their beliefs around.

Because the fact is, that some people are in so much physical or emotional pain, for so long, or their lives so relentlessly bleak, that taking it is both courageous and sensible. But such sentiments are seen as dangerously subversive to the interests of a euphorically optimistic battery of service providers from psychologists to case workers.

I know from shattering personal experience that we need to have a much better holistic approach to mental health. Every young person lost to suicide is a largely preventable tragedy, due in part to meagre health services and abundant ignorance. But just as tragic is the number of men over 80 who hang themselves, the elderly women in nursing homes trying to stockpile drugs, police raiding elderly people late at night to search for the drug Nembutal, or harassing bereaved family members after an elderly person has ‘self-exited’.

My dementia-anguished mother sagely said that there is life lived, life remaining, and finally, time on. The medicalisation and extension of the dying process is for some of us an unwelcome and protracted exercise in forced harm. Depression in the elderly seems to be either under diagnosed or wrongly diagnosed. People who experience ‘tired of life syndrome’ are labelled selfish and told they should have had children or do more volunteer work. People live their lives in different ways and at different rates, and for some, interest in life is shorter than its duration.

It may well be yet another luxury of developed countries to survive life long enough to feel tired of it, but I doubt it. I think it is a sensible preparation for death even if you are not ill; a self-knowledge that you have done your best and now you are done. Your body gets tired, your friends are mostly dead, conversations are agonizingly familiar and the television sucks.

We need to stop letting the fundamentalists hijack this crucial debate and marinate it in fear. To claim that the elderly and the disabled will be bumped off is ludicrous, and demeans them and their families. We get old, not stupid. Most people are not flanked by grasping offspring and malicious careers. Bad people have always done bad things to vulnerable people and it has nothing to do with voluntary euthanasia.

The slippery slope argument is always the last bastion of the far right, whose ideas are so rusted on they couldn’t budge a centimeter let alone glide down anything. Remember when abortion was first decriminalized in some states? The cries of some that women would not only be lining up to have their bodies assaulted and their hearts ripped out, but they would be forced to have abortions against their will. People against abortion strove, and still do, to impose their will on others. The elevation of a personal belief, or unsubstantiated doctrine, to a societal command is the most arrogant sin of all, and has no place in a modern democracy.

Most adversaries change their position on voluntary euthanasia when they see a loved one suffer and are powerless to help. Honest palliative care specialists are upfront about their medical limitations and legal constraints. Suicide is no longer illegal in Australia, but assisting someone is. It is the only case in law I think where assisting someone to do something legal is a crime. Yet sentencing someone to choke to death on their own faeces is somehow legitimized humanity.

The fact that gets little oxygen is that access to voluntary euthanasia can also extend life. Many people with the means to a peaceful end never access it. Erasing the fear of pain can help people manage it better. And people with diseases like Motor Neuron sometimes feel compelled to end their lives before they are ready, for to wait until they need help can make a loved one complicit in their death and facing prison.

The Victorian State Government has shown leadership with an Inquiry into end of life choices. This election I ask people to consider whether your Federal member is representing your view on this matter, or their religion. The Voluntary Euthanasia Party is also standing candidates in some seats. For whilst I respect the fact that religious people believe their life is in the hands of their God/s, they need to respect that the safest place for my life is in my own hands.