As words that one might anticipate coming out of a veteran BBC reporter's mouth, Ray Gosling's on air confession that he had willingly killed an unnamed, AIDS-stricken lover twenty years ago perhaps ranks as a tad more unexpected then "And last night, Crystal Palace held Wigan to a 1-all draw in the FA Cup". Up until that moment, Monday night viewers of the BBC East Midlands channel had been treated to a reasonably straightforward documentary about death and dying. And then, with minutes to go, and while looking over the grave of his long-term and naturally dead boyfriend, Bryn Allsop, Gosling... Well, you can see for yourself:
I can only imagine that the pause which followed this revelation was... Loaded. You can almost envisage the people of the East Midlands frozen in place - Hollywood style - with mouths agape, dessert-laden spoons hanging in mid-air, pudding dripping to the carpet as they tried to process the fact that a beloved septuagenerian had just admitted to killing another human. On TV. "Screw the football, Dierdre, here’s a gent what said he killed a man. Wigan and Crystal can wait!”
But of course this was no simple, run-of-the-mill murder. There was no money, or infidelities or substance abuse to be blamed. Instead, this killing was a pre-meditated decision to end a dying man's life, performed at the request of the man who was dying. "Assisted suicide" seems to be the term of choice. “Mercy killing” is the other.
As you might expect, the affair (I’d call it Gosling-gate, but I have more self-respect than that) has produced no small amount of hand-wringing in the UK. The police arrested Gosling shortly after the broadcast and held him for 30 hours, before releasing him pending further investigation. While Gosling is adamant about the fact the killing happened, he’s refusing to disclose names, dates or locations for the protection of all involved. Particularly him. Meanwhile, it’s hard to believe that the police really enjoy the spectacle of arresting an otherwise genteel 70 year old man for what was, in all likelihood, an act of at least partial kindness committed two decades ago. But, hey, that’s the law.
Beyond the mere unexpectedness of it all, the incident has also accrued a certain topical weight, coming - as it does - at a time of renewed debate over the right to die, which appears to be happening in both the UK and Australia. A British Social Attitudes survey recently found that 82% of people supported physician-assisted euthanasia in cases of terminal illness, while a survey taken on behalf of the BBC found 73% thought that friends or relatives should be able to assist a terminally ill person to die. Sir Terry Pratchett, the British author and wit - whose line "She was more highly bred than a hilltop bakery" still rates as one of my single favourite sentences of comic writing - has also become a fierce advocate of the right to die, as he himself wrestles with the creeping decline of early onset Alzheimer's. Pratchett recently delivered (with the help of his friend, Tony Robinson) the Richard Dimbleby Lecture on UK TV, where he argued for the creation of specialist tribunals to adjudicate the provision of euthanasia. It’s pretty moving stuff.
And then, here in Australia, Dr. Phillip Nitschke’s Exit International organisation claimed last week to have assisted over 300 people to illegally obtain the notorious euthanasia drug, Nembutal, while the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine released a report showing that some 50 Australians have used the drug to commit suicide over the last decade, some of whom were in their 20s and 30s, and some perhaps suffering only from depression. Prompted by all of this, Kevin Rudd has claimed that there’s no momentum for a new vote on euthanasia, an understandably contentious topic that the country last visited in 1997 when the Howard government overruled a Northern Territory law permitting physician assisted suicide. Even as I glance at the front page of today’s West Australian, trumpeting the fact that 80% of people surveyed support the idea of voluntary euthanasia, it nonetheless appears to remain a politically anathema topic, plagued by a moral haziness that resists so squarely the upbeat jingoism of mainstream political rhetoric. It’s hard to weld an optimistic election campaign around the idea of letting people die.
We’ll call the situation vexed, then.
To me though, the question at the base of the debate over euthanasia is not so much one as to whether life is an unmitigated good, but rather as to whether death is an unmitigated ill. And I think the larger problem in all of this is that somewhere over the last half a century or so, we’ve become very, very bad at dying; almost paradoxically, the better we've become at keeping people alive, the worse we've become at letting them die. I say “almost”, because you can see how the two might grow together: we understand modern medicine as a field concerned primarily with the erasure of death, not its embrace. Euthanasia, in all its unarguable finality, feels far too much like an acceptance of defeat.
Given the general tenor of this piece, it’s probably unsurprising that my own sympathies fall in favour of the legalisation of euthanasia. And while a framework for when and how it might be permissible for someone to take their own life is, at its heart, a policy matter – and one that has been much discussed elsewhere - there’s still no avoiding the fact that questions of death are, at their heart, deeply emotional. I guess the problem is that there’s only so far one can take these sorts of discussions before it becomes enduringly personal.
For myself, I think of my grandmother Marg, a strong-willed, fiercely independent woman who spent the last five years of her life frozen in a retirement home, friendless, and agitated, reciting the mantra "it's hard to die" to anyone who’d listen. It always made for cheery visits. When she finally did die, the relieved, weary giddiness that reigned at her funeral was perhaps testament to how long ago she'd departed our minds. There’s of course no guarantee Marg would have taken the option had it been presented to her – she was a deeply committed and lifelong Catholic – but as an exemplar of the sometime needlessness of prolonged life, her memory will always have a certain potency.
I’m haunted, too, by the story of Angelique, a 31 year old Australian woman who died of colon cancer in August 2008. The last months of her life revolved around a desperate and solitary quest to try and procure a dose of Nembutal so that she could flee the immense pain of her illness and avoid the grim reality that is dying from colon cancer. All she wanted was to die peacefully, surrounded by those she loved. Instead though, unsuccessful in her search, her final moments were spent in torrential pain, vomiting up faecal matter as the tumour formed a total obstruction in her bowel. That’s a... Hard image for me to get past.
But I can also see that this is, for me, above all else a selfish concern. You see, every three to four months I undergo a PET scan to see whether there has been any renewed activity in the inoperable tumour that has been lodged in my right, upper chest cavity since 2007. A tumour which is itself a late and incredibly unlikely recurrence of the bone cancer I had in 1997, at the age of 11. While this tumour is currently dormant - thanks to an uncommonly positive response to both chemotherapy and radiotherapy - each scan still evokes within me an awareness of the possibility of dying that has a tendency to settle over everything like silt. Thrumming with the fear that one day I might end up like Angelique.
I have, it's probably fair to say, considered the conditions of my own mortality more than most 24 year olds. Somewhat inevitably, I find myself spending more time thinking about my own funeral than I do my own wedding. And that isn’t a statement with any intrinsic value, and I don’t intend to use it to claim wisdom in these matters. It simply is what it is: a platform for my convictions.
None of which is to suggest that I am in any way comfortable with the concept of dying, and I am incredibly glad that my engagement with the idea remains largely hypothetical. My life is a place of aspiration and contentment, furnished with humans who seem to make the world dance around me: I am in no rush to leave. But these considerations of mine have nonetheless left me with the certitude that were things to get to a point where the only way left was out - either now or 60 years from now - I would do everything in my power to ensure that I was able to die calmly and peacefully, at a time of my choosing, looking upon the faces of those I loved, able to say goodbye in the manner that they deserved. Taking control in a moment where it feels like you have none. And perhaps this is an idealised vision of euthanasia that occludes the actualities of a person’s dying, but to me it feels true and necessary. To me it’s the only way I can possibly face up to the lingering presence of death in my life.
And that’s some pretty heavy shit to be delving into on a youth entertainment website, so to take the edge off here’s a 20-second video of a four year old boy being chased by PUPPIES! WHEE! THERE’S SO MANY OF THEM!
“If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.” – Terry Pratchett