Living, Will You
by Alan Sondheim
If I am incapacitated and my eyes no longer wander across your body, no longer look into yours, kill me.
If I am in numbing pain, and looking into your eyes, and cannot speak, and you will know, I cannot think, kill me.
If I am to be sent to an old age home, that concentration-camp portal into death, kill me, do not force a waiting.
If I am useless, can no longer work or think, kill me, and if my work is poor or repetitive, and I do not know, and I struggle uselessly, kill me as well.
If I cannot control my body or its functions, if you are disgusted, if you are living in sad memories, kill me, let the memories live.
If you must watch the slow consuming havoc of cancer, the spread of body against body, as we have all watched, kill me, I would not contaminate the living.
If the world turns fascist to a greater degree, if you hear the final knock at the door, kill me; know I will not be able to withstand.
If I beg you, kill me, without that flat dry voice when the world dissolves for one last and silent time, kill me.
And if you tire of me, if the world tires, if I am pest or nuisance, if I am cornered thing, or spectacle, or antiquated and irrelevant, of course kill me, of course kill me.
The voices of opposition predictably issue from the religious, and sadly sometimes even the from disabled themselves. They believe they should determine how and when someone dies. They assume an indecent authority. Their stance is philosophically and illogically contradictory: doesn't Heaven sound like a much better place? Why are they always so reluctant to help someone get there? Except of course, in the case of capital punishment when they are in a hurry to send criminals there. Are they certain they're sending them to Hell? What if the sinner repents? Is it the Aquinian perspective: save their souls by killing them? The opponents of assisted suicide fear an unethical slaughter of society's already unfortunate victims. Like that doesn't happen everyday anyway.
But to die and know there's nothing else takes much more courage than to die and hope for something better. Perhaps the determination to continue in such a condition is admirable, but Sampedro felt otherwise. He trusted his own hunch - nothing before or after life. To return to nothing isn't such a big deal. C'est néant. To base a future decision, euthanasia, on your present thoughts and feelings, is absurd enough. How absurd is it to decide for someone else, for someone who is alive and reasoning with you? Ramón wasn't vegetative: he coveted his death in his present.
He respected the opposite perspective of other disabled persons, but he wanted autonomy to choose his death with dignity. Sampedro said, "Life is a right, not an obligation." Human life is serendipitous; an evolutionary anomaly; a privilege and a joy, but it's also capricious and horrible. To end our own suffering is a responsible and very human privilege. Instead, the evangelists of truth and justice descend like vultures with bibles and good intentions, their nets straining out gnats. They leave compassion to flop about like dead fish.
So give me liberty and give me death. This latter unalienable right is written nowhere except on the heart, especially the kind that loves and suffers. Who can attribute meaning to a life except that person? This right is so fundamentally significant that it defies legal definition as a freedom. It's just true. Is it really a selfish freedom for someone who can never again enjoy their own flesh, let alone anyone else's; for someone who only has a brain to remind them of what they can never be? If I remember my biology correctly, the requirements for a living organism are: eating & drinking, breathing, mobility, and reproduction. If these are assisted by technology do they equate? Ramón didn't think so.
He eschewed chaired wheels, and many wheelchair bound ‘plegics are offended. But imagine that the only meaning of your life remains in dreams and fantasies. Dreams of zero-gravity, flying, a trip to the moon, sky-diving, jets at mach whatever. Dream that you can lust wildly, moving freely in any dance. Then imagine the disappointment of being offered a groovy techno-marvelous wheel-chair that must be orally maneuvered. For some, that's enough. But, "Why should I settle for crumbs?"
Sampedro was no Sisyphus, the absurd hero: he didn't take silent joy in rolling his stone uphill. But Ramón did know that his fate belonged to him and that the rock just wasn't his thing. He was more a mélange of Jean Cocteau's version of Orpheus, floating through time with his seductive Princess of Death, and Cocteau's ghostly angel, Heurtebise, himself a suicide who loved Eurydice. Ramón turned his talking head one last time, took the poison meant only for himself, and spoke his last words. No one would be rolling him around his stage anymore.
Often the disabled are able to work despite pain and exhaustion; because they want to, and because the law guarantees that right. Many SCI's advocate various related causes. We write about it. We lobby Congress. We donate and dedicate our lives to research, as did our courageous Christopher Reeve; but these are personal choices, not absolutes. The only absolute is death, and we have the right to meet it on our own terms.
All your research, clever opinions, and subjective wisdom can't begin to approximate what it feels like to be paralyzed. Even if you have an SCI, you can only know how you experience your body and emotions, not how every other SCI does. We intellectually understand that each injury is amazingly unique, and yet we feel so strongly about the issue of suicide that we risk violating another SCI's freedom to choose.
Take the worst moment of your life; extrapolate its eternity, its infinity of contingencies; then multiply by three decades. Lie in bed unable to move anything but your head. To others, your body appears limp, flaccid, emaciated. To you, it seems disappeared, gone, dead. If you are fortunate enough to have any physical awareness at all, your body feels like a rock. Require someone to administer your catheter; manually evacuate your bowels; bathe you and move you for 11,000 days. That's 15,768,000 very long minutes. Tell me then now how much you want to continue living. The people that love you, or the work that occupies you, might sustain your will to live, but it's still your decision.
In Camus' essay, An Absurd Reasoning (from his The Myth of Sisyphus), he states, "In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead." Unintentionally, Camus has provided a justification for Sampedro's cause. Because when your body feels dead, acts dead, it isn't taking the lead. And even more despairingly, the mind becomes a museum of all the life you once had. It's constantly in conflict with your body, because a good part of your brain thinks you're normal: it remembers how to do everything by habit. Because your brain is conditioned to do those things, your memory sets up a conflict of unimaginable stress that exhausts you until the day you die. The harsh reality of which you're now cognizant can't erase those memories of automatic living. You still want to dance, to make love and parts of your brain are oblivious that you can't. It's a cosmic joke, this absurdity of memory and immobility.
