Posted on 11/10/2014 12:19:09 PM PST by wagglebee
Beware movements that word engineer and deploy gooey euphemisms to further their agenda. It generally means there is something very wrong with the agenda.
In the wake of Brittany Maynard’s death, suicide promoters are now using the word “dignity” as a synonym for suicide, more than implying that dying naturally is not dignity.
That is not only cruel, it is wrong.
Dignity is intrinsic. Sick and dying people seeking to be assured they still have it look at us–our faces–like mirrors. If they see us thinking they are less than they once were, it can be devastating.
In the Guardian, Brian Smith–obviously no relation–says his father should have been able to commit dignity rather than die of old age and the effects of post-polio syndrome. From, “What Do You Tell Your Father When He’s Ready to Die?”
But over time, his body began to break down, and breathing became labored. The polio had come back, this time in the form of post-polio syndrome, which weakens muscles that were affected the first time around. Dad’s ailment would slowly strip him of his independence, his ability to move and, eventually, his ability to breathe. If this was death’s door, he was rapping it with what knuckles he could. His decline would last nearly a decade before his doctors gave up on treatments and assigned visits from hospice nurses.
For my father’s disease, there is no cure.
But there is always care–and love–which Smith family apparently gave dad in bounteous quantities. Good.
But Mr. Smith continued to decline:
As his days devolved into a drudgery of pills, bad daytime TV, and constant reliance on a breathing machine, Dad told us he was ready to die. “I’m done,” my father said. But choosing to die, or even assisting someone who wants to die, is a felony in California. Our options to humanely end the suffering were limited.
Self-starvation and dehydration remain the only legal ways to help someone choose when they die in the state. But few of us can muster the strength to starve to death, and caretakers – including Medicare-supported hospice nurses – are not in the business of starving people.
Saying, “I’m done,” isn’t the same thing as saying, “I want to commit suicide!.” Yet, that is what Smith wished for his father. Indeed, Smith never writes that his father asked to be killed.
I have been there. When my dad was dying of colon cancer, a moment came when he was sitting on his bed and we were talking. He suddenly looked up at me and sighed deeply with an expression that said, “I’m done,” more loudly than if he had uttered the words.
That wasn’t the same thing as saying, “Kill me.” Dad wasn’t saying, “Get me the poison pills.” He was saying, “I am done fighting.”
We moved to hospice mode, and he died a few months later–with true dignity. He did not commit suicide.
As the column notes, people can make themselves dead if they really want to. Do we really want to make suicide easier?
And note the consequences of accepting the destructive meme that suicide is dignity. One commenter takes Smith’s advocacy to its logical place:
The Oregon law is a good beginning, but it should apply also to those facing incurable pain, paralysis or imprisonment that could go on for years.
Exactly right. When it comes to assisted suicide, in for a penny, in for a pound.
The question isn’t terminal illness. Many people suffer more and for longer than the dying
The issue is whether facilitated suicide is a right. If it is, it can’t be limited to the dying. Indeed, perhaps other than to those with only a transitory desire to die, it can’t be limited at all.
So, let’s have an honest debate. A right to facilitated suicide? Yes or no. Just don’t call it “dignity.”
P.S. My good friend, the late poet and disability rights activist, Mark O’Brien, contracted polio at age 6 and lived the rest of his life in an iron lung. Mark was adamantly against assisted suicide. He too died from post-polio syndrome. He died with dignity, not by suicide.
so what u are saying is someone should continue to be miserable everyday so OTHER people are not?
I find that skewed.
In January, my bride’s water broke. Our daughter was not due till July. We were given a 95% chance of losing the baby. And if she was born, she would be in tough shape.
Dani was born four months later, and is doing well. The doctors told us there is no medical reason why she is ok.
Doc’s don’t know everything. Ours where great, but they often admitted they had no idea of why Dani kept improving.
Good question. Do you own your liberty and labor? Can you sell yourself into slavery? How about your descendants?
That's a very torturous connection of thoughts. Why not just deal with the case at hand. End of life decisions should be, and are, a human right. You and/or the government have no business butting in to those decisions.
The left loves death, unless it’s for convicted murderers.
Dignity is the result of self-respect. It cannot be taken away, it can only be set aside deliberately.
Quitting is not self-respect.
As an Orthodox Christian, I share the author’s deep-seated objections to suicide, “assisted” or otherwise. However, I’m not sure that objecting to the “death with dignity” rhetoric is the right place to fight the issue.
Certainly many pagan cultures have seen suicide as a dignified end under certain circumstances — from the losing general falling upon his sword in Roman times to the full ritual sepuku of the Japanese ultranationalist author Yukio Mishima (full ritual sepuku was always a form of assisted suicide) — and while the pagan notion is morally wrong, dignity is an aesthetic, rather than a moral, category and neither Brutus’s death nor Mishima’s strikes me as lacking dignity.
Good call, they are trying to re-define “suicide” as “dignity.”
We have also had the words “gay,” “marriage,” “rainbow,” “family,” “love,” “gender,” and “tolerance” redefined for us. At least they are trying hard.
Yes, Blue Jays, but would you insist that a doctor assist you? That, in my opinion, is the big problem.
Suicide is suicide. I can’t find beauty in this decision. No other way to explain it for me. I have known too many friends who were given a short time to live and lived much longer or are still going strong. I will stay by you in your darkest hours but don’t ask me to unplug a machine or give you a overdose because I would have to carry that action for life’s eternity and beyond.
You read my post wrong.
“While I understand everybody in life at some point gets depressed and thinks about suicide, actually advocating it as a right is really outrageous. Suicide is extremely selfish and the trail of pain that it leaves behind is long.”
That means that a father, who is miserable and feels “worthless”, then offs himself. Leaving behind the trail of pain for his wife, children, and friends. Make sense?
How so? The difference is whether the individual opts to forfeit his life or if someone else makes the decision to murder him. Not condoning assisted suicide but, in the case of those with fatal illness that will make daily existence harder and harder for the person and their loved ones, for a possibly protracted period, I will not judge them or condemn them. Some may consider it a sacrifice for the benefit of their loved ones - someone in the past allowed Himself to be sacrificed when he could have stopped it and opted to allow Himself to be killed.
btt
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