Here’s a sign of things to come [link] or, better yet, a
present reality that is becoming more common all the time:
A British woman with no serious
health issues ended her life July 21 at a suicide clinic because, she said, she
didn't want to grow old. Gill Pharaoh, 75, said her work in a nursing home
revealed the "awful" truth of old age and burdens placed on loved
ones and caregivers, the Telegraph reports by way of the Sunday Times.
Gill Pharaoh, in a photo from her blog |
Let me emphasize
at the outset that I don’t wish to ridicule Pharaoh: I pray that she can find
God’s mercy in the hereafter. She
provides us with a concrete example, however, of how today’s conventional
wisdom promotes death as the solution to our problems. The appeal to relieve the “burdens placed on
loved ones and caregivers”, for instance, is one of the primary emotional
appeals that euthanasia advocates use (and both euthanasia and abortion
promoters rely heavily on an appeal to emotion). Pharaoh herself, who wrote
extensively about her decision before she killed herself, dismissed the idea
that she should expect the support of her children in her old age, saying:
"I had children for the personal and selfish reason that I wanted them for
the pleasure and joy they bring. I want them to enjoy their middle years
without having to worry about me."
This is a sad and confused argument.
Again, I don’t doubt Pharaoh’s sincerity, but I can’t believe that she was
as selfish as she claims. Surely she
changed diapers, cleaned up vomit, awakened from much-needed sleep to feed or
comfort crying babies, none of which is very joyful or pleasurable, and that
didn’t deter from giving birth again.
Did she really think of her children as merely a “burden”? Of course not. I’m sure she thought the “joy and pleasure”
well worth the “burden” and, yes, the “worry” of caring for her children from
birth to adulthood. By even the crassest
measure, isn’t it reasonable to expect her children to return the favor when
she needs them to do the same for her?
Needless to say, we shouldn’t
limit ourselves to the crassest measure.
I’m sure Gill Pharaoh endured the discomforts and inconveniences of
child-rearing for the same reason that any of us who are parents do: because we
love our children, not because of some loss/benefit ratio. We see the trouble we endure for their sake
as a way of expressing our love, of making it real; that’s why, despite all the
trouble they cause us, our children bring us joy and pleasure. Ironically, what she has done now is really
much more selfish: she has deprived them of the opportunity to love her in the
same way. Even worse, by citing
their convenience as a primary reason for her premature death, she is placing
responsibility for her decision on them.
And, of course, there is more to the ‘"awful" truth of old age’
than the purported inconvenience to loved ones:
she recounted a life slowly sapped
of former joys like long walks and gardening sessions. "Not to mention the
hundred and one other minor irritations like being unable to stand for long,
carry a heavy shopping bag, run for a bus, remember the names of books I have
read, or am reading, or their authors."
A few decades ago, when we as a society still recoiled at
the thought of intentionally ending any innocent person’s life, euthanasia
advocates relied on searing anecdotes about terminally ill people undergoing
excruciating suffering, or about people such as Karen Ann Quinlan who were kept
alive only by machines, and who seemed to have no hope of ever regaining
consciousness. More recently we have
reached the point where few of us seem to find it remarkable that we commonly
starve to death people who aren’t even dying or unconscious, but are merely
extremely old or disabled. And so now,
apparently, we are expected to accept that simply slowing down, or having to
put up with “minor irritations”, is reason enough for otherwise healthy people
to take their own lives.
There’s no
reason to think that it will end here.
We live in a culture that has increasingly rejected the belief in the
sacredness of anything, including human life.
Public schools (and many private, even religiously affiliated, ones)
reinforce this worldview in a variety ways, and it is communicated by popular
culture in countless messages both subtle and overt. It follows that if all we
really are is protoplasm, or a particularly complex assemblage of molecules,
what could possibly be sacrosanct? If the materialist view is correct, then there
cannot be any sort of “meaning” to anything; human life itself is meaningless
and suffering, which (in this view) is nothing but pointless pain and distress,
is worse than useless: why not just put an end to it all? In such a world suicide clinics can only
multiply. Is it any wonder that St. John Paul the Great spoke of a “Culture of
Death”?
The aged St. John Paul II |
In response to this Gospel
of Despair we Christians can point to the Mystery of the Cross. Christ showed us in his own agonizing,
distressing death that suffering even to the end can be not just meaningful,
but redemptive: through our suffering we, too, can accomplish great good. We have seen the lesson of Christ’s
redemptive suffering reflected in the lives of countless of his followers, from
the first martyrs to St. John Paul himself, who taught a worldwide audience
that “death with dignity” does not mean cutting off the concluding chapters of
our lives.
Many of us know family
and friends who have likewise embraced the Way of the Cross. In my case I’m
thinking in particular of an aunt whose faith-filled serenity during a slow and
difficult death from cancer had a profound impact on everyone who saw her in
her final days. I couldn’t help but think of this aunt when I read that Gill
Pharaoh had said: "I do not want people to remember me as a sort of old
lady hobbling up the road with a trolley".
My aunt’s loved ones don’t picture her infirmity when they remember her:
they talk about how she exuded love and joy, despite her suffering, an image of
beauty in the midst of the ugliness of her fatal illness.
They don’t remember her depleted body, they remember her.
Again, my purpose
isn’t to criticize Gill Pharaoh. She, along with the 611 of her fellow British citizens
who ended their lives in Swiss suicide “clinics” between 2008-2012, and an ever
lengthening list of others throughout the Western World, is a victim of a
Godless, and therefore anti-human, worldview, a philosophy that tells us our
“dignity” somehow lies in escape from what we are. The Truth is very different. St. Irenaeus said that “The Glory of God is
Man fully alive.” Suffering is a part of
every human life: we can’t escape from it without denying our humanity.
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