The Last Day of Your Life Is Like Any Other Day (except shorter)

There has been lots of media noise around the right to self termination and assisted self termination. I'm not really sure why there is a public and legislative debate on this. To me this choice is the single most inalienable human right everyone has. If you are religious in your outlook then it’s an easy question to answer – simply follow the dictates of whatever belief system you embrace. If you are not religious and believe the ultimate purpose of life is that it ends then you engage your rationality and make the one decision that is truly no one else’s business. To me this would seem to end the discussion but thank goodness there are so many people out there willing to complicate my life (or specifically its end) with their particular brand of “we are right and everyone else is wrong’ rhetoric which (sadly) passes for actual thinking in an increasingly dumb world.

Ask anyone with a terminal condition facing an ugly end if they would like to die relatively free of discomfort or die horribly and in pain and I’m pretty sure that unless they really believe that their God wants them to suffer before their reward they will opt for option “A”. For years caring and committed doctors have warned their terminal patients that if they take too many pills it might be fatal thus jumping that ethical chasm as smooth as Burt Reynolds in a black trans am with a screaming chicken on the hood. So, why the debate- none of us have any choice about being born into this world (religious belief systems aside) so really who’s business is it how and when I decide to check out of it? (Assuming we are of sound (ish) mind).

Perhaps it is the rise of social media as collaborative phenomena – the pervasive belief that everyone is interested in everything everyone else is doing. After all if we collectively offer up the minutiae of our lives for validation then why wouldn’t we do the same with our deaths? I read recently of services that offer to continue or terminate your Face Book, MySpace etc pages after you die. Not sure about Twitter but it certainly raises some interesting scenarios (still decomposing, its dark, there are bugs in here).

As with most social issues the various interest groups have engaged in the worst levels of demagogy by raising every nightmare scenario possible (it got so bad I had to sit down and watch my copy of Soylent Green again to get a rational perspective). But to what end? When a cat or dog knows it is going to die it will often leave its home, curl up somewhere warm and wait. Jeez – what do they know that we don’t? It is our perpetual arrogance that we are somehow removed from the natural world and the rules under which it governs our existence, however brief, that drives this debate. Imagine the surprised look on everyone’s faces when the truth, the real truth of existence (namely that it ends) is revealed and the moral, ethical, religious, political and philosophical drivers resolve into a simple choice between death with dignity or the surrender of that inalienable right to those with no stake in your particular game.

"Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.”

Susan Cheever