A friend emailed me last week. I had asked after his mother and he replied: “Mother is now aged 91 and in a nursing home [near where he lives]. She is swiftly sinking into Alzheimer’s late stage. Yet she prays the Rosary without words and becomes deeply recollected whenever I bless her. The heart and soul are alive, though the mental faculties are minimal.”
I mention this reply because I think it is central to the whole debate about euthanasia. Euthanasia rarely, if ever, talks about the heart and the soul. What matters are the mental faculties: the workings of the brain. The implication is that when brain function dwindles and we become more helpless, we become “less human”; and being encouraged to view ourselves as less human is only a short step to encouraging us to give up and die. What is the point in carrying on, living as “vegetables”?
At this point all secular neurologists will interrupt me to say that the heart, the soul and the mind don’t exist outside the brain; brain impairment means total impairment; cogito ergo sum and all that. Yet we all know in our hearts that personhood is so much wider and deeper than brain function. Countless newspaper articles by those who care for elderly parents or experience a death bed testify (often without any religious belief) that communicating with people who are dying or who have severe dementia can be rich and rewarding, even when there is no verbal language left. When you have religious faith, as my friend who emailed me, you are not making up a state of deep recollection; you know it and sense it intuitively – even if it can’t be measured to the satisfaction of neurologists.
I mention this as I have been reading Only Love Remains: Lessons from the Dying on the Meaning of Life by Attilio Stajano. Subtitled “Euthanasia or Palliative Care”, the author, a volunteer worker at the palliative care ward of a Brussels hospital, relates poignant and beautiful stories of people in the last stages of a terminal illness who – sometimes asking for euthanasia when they arrive on the ward – are helped to die peacefully and naturally.
Some of this has to do with carefully monitoring the pain-killing drugs they are given. But most importantly, it is about accompanying the patients on a spiritual journey, as they seek forgiveness and reconciliation from family members, share significant memories from their past and discover, at the very end of life, that love is all that matters. St John of the Cross tells us that that “At the end of our lives we shall be examined in Love”. But even before we meet Christ after death, we come to reflect on and examine ourselves when everything else has been taken from us. All the wounded relationships, wrongs we have done and wrongs done to us, surface in the mind and heart as physical life ebbs away. This precious time is the opportunity to sort out the unfinished, sometimes heartbreaking, emotional business of life; it is the true meaning of dying “in peace.”
People might interject here to point out that all this can be done, efficiently and appropriately, when you choose euthanasia. You can make your Will and your goodbyes just the same; the only difference is that you are in control of the time of your death. I would respond that organising all one’s energy to choose when and how to die actually prevents another kind of journey from taking place: the journey of humility, helplessness, self-surrender, when one becomes open and attentive to others in a profound and often non-verbal way.
“Giving up on life ahead of time”, as the author puts it, describes a life still dominated by the clock. But in old age and in dying we need to put aside chronological time and enter that timeless moment, which the mystics know so well but which the rest of us only experience fleetingly in our lives or not at all. St Francis of Assisi spoke of “Sister Death” as a loving and welcome companion; euthanasia implies the Grim Reaper with his scythe and grinning skull. When we argue with parliamentarians and others, keen to give us all the “right to die”, we must do so not just with figures and statistics (such as on the alarming growth of the culture of death in once-Catholic countries such as Belgium) but using the resources of mind and soul in art, drama, poetry and music – and in the meaningful, personal and affecting stories such as those in the book I have mentioned above.
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