The suicide of Seneca - by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez
Here in Australia,
there isn't actually a law prohibiting the reporting of suicides, but
there is an accepted convention of censorship in the main news
outlets. By scratching the surface and looking at the available
statistics, it seems that suicide deaths account for three times the
number of deaths by murder. According to rumour, the highest rates
of suicide are among returned soldiers, dentists, vets and farmers,
with men committing suicide 3 to 1, when compared with women.
In my
culture there is no pride to be found in stories of suicide, only
silence and shame. There is so much shame and repression of suicidal
thinking and discussion, that even dying is shrouded in a mysterious
fog, and requesting assistance in choosing to die, even when one is
old and suffering from the agonies of illness, is a criminal act.
Euthanasia, from the Greek Eu meaning
'well', and Thanatos,
meaning 'death', thus means choosing to die a good death.
However, on Tuesday 10 December 2019
the Western Australian Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2019 cleared its
final parliamentary hurdle making Western Australia the second state
after Victoria to legalise voluntary assisted dying for the
terminally ill. To me this seems like progress, however in the other
states of Australia, here is how things generally stand.
What is legal in Australia now?
Both suicide and attempted suicide.
Refusing unwanted, painful and futile
medical treatment leading to death from the illness.
Refusing food and drink leading to
death from starvation and dehydration.
Being administered large doses of
pain-relieving drugs, even though this may hasten death. This
is not against the law if the primary intention of the doctor is to
relieve pain.
Being put into a permanent state of
unconsciousness leading to death – this is often called
‘continuous palliative sedation’.
What is illegal in Australia
now?
Voluntary assisted dying.
Voluntary euthanasia.
I have heard
numerous stories of nurses choosing to follow their first vow, to
do no harm, and who administer lethal doses of morphine to
patients whose lives have passed the threshold of tolerable pain. I
have heard it said that nurses do this more often than they could
ever admit, that they place their gentle hands upon their patients,
and with a kind whisper, help them onto a better kind of rest. A kind
of rest that is better than a drug induced coma, better than a
prolonged state of agonised zombification. It makes me proud to know
that nurses are willing to do what is right, rather than to follow
the letter of the law. I have heard stories of the the families,
standing in the room and granting their whispered permission to ease
the pain of their dying kin. It seems a blurry line between
continuous palliative sedation and Voluntary assisted
dying.
In reading your
book Tacitus, and finding myself shocked at the culture of suicide
you describe, I wonder what the popular methods of my own country
are. How do people choose to end their own lives, here in the 21st
Century in Australia? So, to follow your method of writing, I will
start with the rumours, and end with the facts, as much as can be
gleaned from government statistics.
I have heard that
single occupancy, single car crashes are often considered suicides by
the police, even though they are reported as accidents. Charles
Bukowski, the 20th Century American poet once wrote that
smoking and drinking are the only forms of honourable suicide left to
modern man. With open reporting on the subject quietly suppressed in
the media, it is hard to know what the truth is. I have three
friends who ended their own lives. One chose to end her own life
because the pain in her body became greater than her will to live.
Another, it is uncertain, as they left no note, died of a Nitrous
Oxide overdose. They were going through the long and difficult
process of gender reassignment. The third took his life by the
method described by Bukowski.
We humans are
peculiar, born with the defect in our natures that grants us the will
to self destruction that seems absent in other animals.
Is it a defect? Or
is it a proud strength, that when faced with impossible options we
humans may summon the courage to end our own suffering? Cato, the
legendary stoic who committed suicide rather than live under the rule
of Julius Caesar, is to history a hero for his act of self
deliverance. Anthony Trollope, in his biography of Cicero,
(published in 1880) puts it rather well.
...Cato must be allowed the praise
of acting up to his own principles. He would die rather than behold
the face of a tyrant... Men, indeed, have refused to see that he
fled from a danger which he felt to be too much for him, and that in
doing so he lacked something of the courage of a man. Many other
Romans of the time did the same thing, but to none has been given all
the honour which has been allowed to Cato.
Alternatively,
Plutarch describes the suicide of the Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, as
one of happiness and noble self sacrifice in service to the
commonwealth. Having set down his laws and ordered the society of
Sparta in the way he saw best, Lycurgus travelled to the Oracle to
ask if his laws were good. He ordered his people to not make any
changes to his laws until he should return.
The oracle answered that the laws
were excellent, and that the people, while it observed them, should
live in the height of renown. Lycurgus took the oracle in writing,
and sent it over to Sparta; and, having sacrificed the second time to
Apollo, and taken leave of his friends and his son, he resolved that
the Spartans should not be released from the oath they had taken, and
that he would, of his own act, close his life where he was. He was
now about that age in which life was still tolerable, and yet might
be quitted without regret. Every thing, moreover, about him was in a
sufficiently prosperous condition. He, therefore, made an end of
himself by a total abstinence from food; thinking it a statesman’s
duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the
state, and even in the end of his life to give some example of virtue
and effect some useful purpose. He would, on the one hand, crown and
consummate his own happiness by a death suitable to so honorable a
life, and, on the other, would secure to his countrymen the enjoyment
of the advantages he had spent his life in obtaining for them, since
they had solemnly sworn the maintenance of his institutions until his
return.
Is a chosen death,
a happy death?
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