Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday August 2, 2009

When life is no longer worth living

By Jim Taylor

Putting an end to misery
        Recently, I have watched several friends stumble down what Shakespeare called “the way to dusty death.” Two died of cancer. If, in their final stages, they’d had an opportunity to exit quietly, peacefully, with dignity, I believe they would have taken it.
        A third, currently debilitated by Alzheimer’s, is no longer capable of making such a decision. But her closest associates think that she too might have chosen suicide, if she had foreseen her future.
        A surprising number of respected people have committed suicide. John Robarts, a former premier of the province of Ontario, took his own life in 1982 after a series of strokes. Henry van Dusen, once president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, committed suicide with his wife Elizabeth, in 1975.
        Suicide is not illegal in Canada; however, it is illegal to assist someone to commit suicide.
        Last December, a Quebec jury acquitted Stéphan Dufour of assisting his uncle commit suicide by installing equipment that the uncle used to hang himself. Dufour was the first Canadian to stand trial by jury for assisted suicide.
        A pastor’s son asked his parents to help him commit suicide before an untreatable brain tumour killed him. It was an agonizing decision. Both the pastor’s theology and his church rejected suicide. But they also loved their son.
        “We will not help you take your own life,” they eventually told him. “But we will not try to stop you.”
        In the end, the son waited too long, until he was no longer capable of carrying out his intentions. His parents nursed him through another year before his body finally gave up.

Assisted suicide
        Sue Rodriguez took her wish to commit suicide to the Supreme Court of Canada, twice. She lost the constitutional argument that her disability – terminal ALS – deprived her of the right granted able-bodied Canadians to commit suicide.
        "Whose body is this? Who owns my life?" she demanded.
        Against our natural sympathy for victims of unbearable suffering and terminal illness, there’s the fear that unscrupulous persons could exploit their victims’ vulnerability for personal gain.
        At present, assisted suicide is legal in only two U.S. states – Oregon and Washington – and in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.
        Dignitas, the Swiss clinic that Sir “Ted” and Joan Downes went to, charges about $7,000 per patient.
        Many also fear that making assisted suicide legal – no matter how restrictive the conditions – could put pressure on aging parents or chronically ill persons to choose a painless exit, thus relieving children and/or society of an expensive inconvenience.

Losing hope, finding hope
        Alison Davis admits that at certain times in her life, she would gladly have ended her life, if she could.
        Davis has spina bifida, hydrocephalus, emphysema, osteoporosis, arthritis, and scoliosis. She lives with constant pain that even morphine cannot control.
        “Twenty years ago,” she wrote in an article opposing assisted suicide, “I needed no persuasion to think that I would be better off dead.”
        She tried many times to commit suicide. On one occasion, “I was taken to hospital and treated against my will. I remember thinking how stupid it was for the doctor to ask for my consent, ‘otherwise you will die,’ when that had been my intention anyway.”
        Since then, though, she visited a project for disabled children in India: “Some can barely manage to crawl in the dust, some have learning disabilities, others are blind. Most are unwanted and despised by their families and communities.”
        But the children responded warmly. “I suddenly loved them all, overwhelmingly and fiercely, as if they were mine.”
        As she left, she told a friend, “I want to live.”
        She has since established a charity that supports 550 disabled children. She calls herself a “proud mother” to them all.
        The difference between her, and Sue Rodriguez or Sir Edward Downes, seems to be hope. They had no hope; she found hope and felt life was worth living.
        But is hopelessness sufficient rationale for terminating a life? If so, who decides what’s hopeless?
        If I had no hope, would I choose to hang on? Or to opt out?
        I don’t know. But someday, I may have to face that decision.
=====================================
Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
        Please tell your friends about these columns. To send comments, to subscribe or to unsubscribe, or to request permission to reprint, write jimt@quixotic.ca Be sure to include Soft Edges or Sharp Edges in the subject line, so my spam filter doesn’t delete your message.
=====================================

About My Paraphrases

Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
        At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
        My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
        About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
        I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
        I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.

=====================================

*****************************************