Life kills us. Smoking kills. Cancer also. Alcohol; yup. Drugs; uh-huh. Heart Disease; absolutely. Injury; eventually. Stroke; often. Pneumonia; frequently. Murder; 100%. Everything we do will eventually kill us. The act of living is the ballet of dying.
How we live is the only real control we may have on our final passing. Even then there’s no guarantee. A perfectly healthy soy-sucking vegetarian may be killed stepping off the sidewalk just as easily as the weight-challenged leaving McDonalds.
Is there a good way to die? Soldiers will tell you that buddies dying for each other is tops. So does the bible “no man hath greater love for another than he who lays his life down…” It’s been a while since I perused the good book so I may be paraphrasing – you get the point.
I am one of a number of death experts. Not because I am myself a killer, I have been a witness to death and dying. After the hideous death of my friend’s son from cancer, I became a front line care-center volunteer for a very busy hospice. 3,500 people a year were well taken care of in the facility. I, in my time there, was with 2,500 people who died or were dying during my watch. The number is guess only - I didn’t count, but I do still see many of their faces.
What did I learn from the experience? A number things. First no-one should die alone. By that I mean no-one should die without the company of another physically by them. Whether that’s a person dying in their bed of a disease or an accident victim at the side of the road. We arrive into the world into the arms of a loved one, that’s how we should we leave.
Second, there is no dignity in death. It is a process, sometimes quick, many times slow. It drags us to our most vulnerable state and leaves us completely at the mercy of others. On death we become – our remains at least - a dependent object. Jews show as much care and devotion to the corpse as they do the living out of respect for the person. When cleaning a body they pray and ask forgiveness for any indignity they have shown to the person during their tending. Unfortunately the rest of the world, most of it in fact, is not so kind.
Third. I am a believer in assisted suicide; in the hastening of the inevitable; in the alleviation of suffering even if it causes death. By doing we are not acting as G-d, we are using tools that G-d has given us. There no cure for cancer around the corner. No one is going to call to say that a dying person’s prognosis will change because of a just-discovered drug. It doesn’t happen and if it did, it would be used for someone in an early stages of a fatal decline. To think so is a cop-out and does nothing to help the dying. It merely abdicates responsibility, for moral or religious reasons, from those who can help, from those who should help, for the quality of the dying person’s passage. G-d, in whatever form you believe in, has helped us in every other aspect of life, why not death?
Without grossing the reader out I can tell you that I have seen many different types of deathly suffering. Some are downright “shoot me right now” horrible. Even with the best medical care available what I have seen would shock you. It could - should - have been avoided.
Dying is an area that continues to be taboo; we leave it in the “hands of G-d” to take care of the dying, unwilling - perhaps unable - to realize that hastening inevitable death for the right reason is in itself a G-d-given gift.
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