Suicide tourism and Sir Edward Downes

Shorter "Suicide tourism" post:

Here's a question that engages really deep and difficult philosophical issues, but because a few people are handling it in ways I disagree with or are taking things too far, I need to pound this podium here and remind everyone that the whole culture is in "terminal decline."

Right, got it, thanks for the heads-up.

Their life. Their choice. You're trying to tell me that a legal and free adult can not, and SHOULD NOT, have the ability to run their life as they choose and as they see fit? Who set you up as judge and jury?

I would suggest that you need to walk a mile in a person's shoes before you start complaining about, or condemning thier actions. Peace

Can't help thinking that neither Beethoven or Toscanini, had blindness and deafness come to him, would have chosen suicide.

Downes also belonged to his audiences and the music he served. In a way, it is selfish to ignore the upset you cause by your premature and orchestrated exit.

I so wish the Swiss would stop 'assisting' other nations in obliterating themselves. Last time they 'helped', it was a very infamous period in the history of mankind. Is there no limit to what the Swiss will do for money?

But just as I wrote all this, seething, I must say I sympathise with someone wanting to 'go' with the person they love. The problem is, it was not the time yet. All this was was a paid-for, expedient solution.

"We recoil in horror from Islamic suicide bombers, as we certainly ought, but at least those malicious ghouls are killing themselves, and, in the case of their Islamist death-cult societies, honoring self-murder, in the service of some higher ideal"

I keep re-reading this passage and telling myself that no, Rod couldn't possibly be trying to fudge the actions of a murderous terrorist with those af an elderly couple opting to end their lives together in a manner, and at a time, of their choosing. He just couldn't be.

Could he?

Your posts really are getting snarkier and snarkier

Your name was me.

P.S.: This combox software is possibly the worst I have ever dealt with - and I post in some pretty obscure, shady corners of the intenet. Isn't beliefnet part of a major multi-national media corporation? It's funny how a two-bit punk band website works with about 100% less hassle.

The right to die will lead to a duty to die . . . yeah, just like the right to own guns has lead to a duty to own guns. Or the right to free exercise of religion has lead to a duty to be religious.

Dunno Rod, if you truly cannot see the difference between, "he's tired of his life" and "he is 85 years old and doesn't want to live without his wife," there's not much I can say to you.

And as others have pointed out, you are making a jump from autonomous individuals ending their lives to State and social pressure for individuals to end their lives that just doesn't necessarily follow.

We begin by murdering God...

What does that even mean, anyway?

Your article shows a callousness one wouldn't expect to read from a "Christian" article. It's also evident that you aren't too concerned about telling the whole truth. Downes was deaf and losing his sight. His wife was terminally ill. While as a Christian I believe that doesn't give them the right to disregard God's gift of life, I can at least understand how they might have come to their decision. Thanks to your article, I now also understand how many people come to believe that all Christians are jerks.

Some of the comments on this post are an example of just how far we have moved toward culturally accepted suicide and supports the main idea of Rod's post. It does not surprise me that some are defending this English couple because she had terminal cancer and he was old, loosing his vision and couldn't go on living without her. There is a gathering storm on the horizon.

Three comments:

1) This couple's double suicide is certainly not being treated as a commonplace event. (Among other things, the story is on the front page of the NYT web site as I write this.)

2) I would suspect that this sort of thing happened from time to time a hundred years ago (or even five hundred years ago), even if it didn't appear on the front page of the New York Times.

3) There is a structural imbalance in reporting on this kind of event in that as a practical matter, the only people who are available for quotation are those who were who approved of it and were permitted to know the details in advance. If this couple were my friends, I expect that I would give them and their children the benefit of the doubt at least until I was sure what had happened, rather than rush to tell a reporter, based on a secondhand story, that I was horrified and that I thought their children had behaved monstrously.

I'm 100% with Wesley, this is not a religious issue, again, its a humanities issue. I used the "music" angle to parse the deafening silence under Erin's addendum post:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/07/when-assisted-suicide-is-just.html
which begs the question, equality, liberty, fraternity?
What can be expected from our brothers when families condone this?

Having watched a few loved ones shrivel up and die slowly like Christians say they're supposed to, I can tell you that when it comes my turn to start shriveling, my strong inclination is that I'll take matters into my own hands (could change, you never know). There's nothing noble or beautiful about the gruesome process of dying. If I can spare friends and family that ordeal for my sake and make a nice, clean snip, so much the better.

Why anyone, religious or otherwise, would judge people who've made such a harrowing decision is beyond my understanding. Having an assisted, sterile option (allowed by the state) is preferable to messing all over some train tracks for some sad sack to have to clean up.

As some have said, suicide is a permanent solution to what may only be a temporary problem. Even the terminally ill may go into remission, and may decide they are getting something out of life when a few months earlier they just wanted to die.

I also believe in the slippery slope arguments, and believe that the more socially acceptable assisted suicide becomes, the more likely it is that people will be manipulated or coerced into killing themselves "to spare their family pain" or save society money. We may not be that far from "encouraging" the elderly to off themselves.

There is an excellent episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" which depicts a society in which 60 or 65 year olds are required to kill themselves. When one scientist tries to buck the social pressure and refuse, his daughter lays an intense guilt trip on him, and he ends up going along with the suicide.

The fact that someone like Jack Kevorkian saw himself as a martyr for the assisted suicide movement doesn't mean he was a martyr. He could simply be self-deluded.

I'm with Observer on this. Medically assisted suicide has been around as long as medicine, but it was always done in a quiet suggestive sort of way. From my experience with terminally ills family members and my years in health care, I can tell you exactly how I saw it handled.

Terminally ill patients usually have access to large amounts of narcotic painkillers. The doctor would say something like this:

"You need to be very careful taking this medication. It is very potent. If you take a dose above X, especially if you mix it with too much of drug Y that you also take, then you will go to sleep and never wake up. Take care of your dosages."

I have directly heard some version of this conversation at least a half-dozen times over the years, and heard second-hand dozens more. Everyone on both sides of the discussion instantly knew that this was less of a warning being given than an option, and the patients and families, including my own, were grateful and understood. It placed the choice and responsibility directly on the patient. If that patient chose that option, then the medical examiners office usually reported the death as an accidental overdose rather than a suicide. It is pretty common for terminally ill and elderly patients to accidentally double or triple dose a medication just out of forgetfulness.

The whole thing had it's own dignity which I don't see in these new legal setups. It placed the decision squarely on the patient, instead of requring doctors to play the part of executioner. Unfortunately we now can't stand to have any part of life that is not covered by some explicit legal mechanism.

Like it or not, there will be more of this in the future. There will even be varieties of voluntary or semi-planned end of life, along the lines of the Do Not Resuscitate orders that we have now.

I've had two or three relatives in their nineties take 15 years or so fade away with senility/Alzheimer's. They spent that time doing some mix of haranguing and terrorizing their nurses and caretaking relatives, falling into increasingly vegetative, dismal, states. Their dying was ultimately a blessing for all involved. What it cost in suffering for their caretakers and in money I'd rather not even contemplate. Like for Terry Schiavo, the fetishizing of physical life and discounting of the loss of the psychological kind led to mere misery, waste, and morally awful situations.

Their generation generally was unwilling to sign any order permitting death, an end to care, when they were mentally no longer coherent and beyond recovery. And yet, suicide of the elderly began with them and has risen markedly since- they and Silent Generationers don't trust others and don't want to deal with the disapproval of their children and peers. So they do it themselves.

I think Silent Generationers feel their life tasks incomplete and are distrusting enough as cohorts that few of them will sign such things. Boomers, probably a substantial minority. GenX/Y...hard to say, but I wouldn't be surprised if a majority proves willing.

The popular 'religious' reasoning seems to me incoherent and are social status and bad relationship reasons. The deeper argument against suicide (and murder) seem to be that it's wrong to deprive people of life as long as there is potential of some inner development, of any progress on the presumed religious life journey.

That thinking has as its conclusion that those who truly can get no further, or who have taken the inner journey to its end, are permitted to die. At the far extreme, one point of mystic union, it is said, is that to the mystic there is no longer a true or deep distinction between physical life and death for him/her. (Other than still being able to serve the good by staying in the world.) I doubt many people attain that condition, but the wisest old people seem generally to accept its view.

Which leaves the mentally unstable, and those in bad relationships, who think that it's all either opportunity or a way in which society intends to get rid of them.

I can't believe the author prefers suicide bombers to this couple who clearly loved each other (at least bombers do it out of a higher principle. Are you kidding?!!?) Suicide bombers takes hundreds of innocents with them, a fact that seems lost on the author. I was looking for intelligent points of view on this topic. I guess I'll have to keep searching.