Flowers Die, People Suffer

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Wilted Flowers

Wilted flowers

“Did you ever have a flower you wouldn't let die?” Catherine asked, staring out the window into winter's cold sleep.

“How do you mean?” I wondered.

“Like a corsage or a boutonnière, something beautiful and full of happy memories. When I was in high school, I took the corsage from my senior prom and wrapped it in plastic, hoping it would keep. Twenty years later I ran across it in the attic . . .” she trailed off wistfully.

I waited for her to unwrap her metaphor.

“It's like that now with my mother,” she looked at me with the deepest of sorrows. “She's all but dead, but it's like she's wrapped in plastic, in doctors and medicines and nursing homes, and nobody will let her die. Like my old corsage, she's faded and dry and brittle, but we just keep her.”

Dead but Breathing?

Catherine's mother suffers advanced Alzheimer's disease, a neurologic catastrophe that progressively destroys the mind and personality while leaving the body to persist. Like her, those similarly victimized by disease or injury sometimes inhabit the twilight zone of life, one in which a person remains alive but not living, in some ways dead but still breathing.

And we keep them. They are our captives, prisoners of a “civilized” society that hides from the certainty of death, that often is ashamed to let people die, let alone help them do it. 

“About a year ago, my mother had a remarkedly good day. She knew me and seemed to know what was happening to her. And before she slipped away again, she said 'Cathy, I want to die'.”

“And how did you reply?” I asked.

“I told her I wished I could help her die, but I couldn’t. It would ruin my life. We cried together and soon she was gone again. She hasn't been back since.”

The question of euthanasia remains a moral and legal quagmire full of opinions and proselytizing that obscure what is at stake. Compassion. Across most of the globe, not only is it against the law to "kill out of compassion," as Catherine put it, or to assist a dying person in killing themselves, but even discussing the matter invites the wrath of tight-assed legal eagles, holier-than-thou religious zealots and political hacks looking to score points.

I've listened to too many folks who've never stood in Catherine's shoes haggle over euthanasia and assisted suicide like members of a college debate team. They're more concerned with being right than understanding the long, agonizing emotional suffering of watching someone you love suspended in the realm of the undead.

When it comes to death and dying, we're long on telling people what is right and wrong and way short on listening and empathy. What’s more, the arguments against euthanasia can sound quite rational or morally sound. Most go like this:

• If we legalize euthanasia, soon we'll be disposing of the old, sick and severely handicapped in the name of mercy but only for our convenience.
• Who decides who will live and who will die? The beneficiary of the intended victim's life insurance? A government full of people who, if gathered in a tunnel with a light at one end, couldn’t agree on how to get out? Who?
• The Bible says “Thou shalt not kill.” It doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not kill healthy people.”
• Assisting someone’s suicide while they are in the throes of a mental health crisis instead of getting them professional treatment is depraved indifference.

Many reasonable people can understand and even endorse these arguments, but those in Catherine’s predicament recognize an inconvenient hole in these lines of reasoning. It’s called reality. In their world, too often, prolonging life means prolonging suffering. We assert that everyone has the right to live, but we don’t afford everyone the right to die.

“What did you do with that old corsage?” I asked her.

I put it on my mother’s bedstand,” she replied.

“And?” I invited her to finish.

“She threw it away.”

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