Euthanasia is not the right to die. The Greek word for death is thanatos, the prefix for good or proper is eu-. Euthanasia is the right to a good death, a right to die properly, well.
There is no glory, no good, in a suffering shrived of hope, in a suffering without an end, in a suffering that simply endures until the end. There is no dignity in being painfully ill without hope of recovery. They that say otherwise cling prudishly to some ideal bereft of compassion, to an imprudent impudence, to a sadistic subservience to rules.
To them that say it is in God’s hands, in God’s prerogative, in God’s will, then in your illness, in your any illness, turn not to doctors, hospitals, treatment or even to God. God gives to us hearts, minds, and spirits to use for the well-being of one another. If dignity and comfort belong to the treatment of illness, then they belong to the treatment of our ultimate illness, death. No one faces the ending of life without emotion, without questions in the soul, and such are task and travail enough.
It is never easy to need to say “yes” to death, but there are times when compassion and love must bend to this life’s fragility and let it go, allow it be gone. Life is worth living only in and with hope. Without hope it is an empty shell and we owe them without hope that wish to find their rest the courtesy, the privacy of their conscience.
I once spent the better part of a year gravely ill and fighting moment by moment, day by day with hope and in hope that I would live. I relied upon the wisdom of my doctors, the prayers and positivity of family and friends, and the mercy of God–in itself and manifest in doctors and supplicants alike. But in the debilitating, exhausting pain of that battle I knew truly and deeply there is no good in forcing life on anyone for whom hope can only refer to an afterlife. Such would only be the most cowardly conceit masquerading as a love of life.
Just as at the dawn of life we intervene with Nature if there is a breech birth in progress or some other difficulty, just as in some cases we find it necessary to abrupt the natural process of birth and perform a Caesarean section, so too at the dusk of life when Nature is frustrated beyond hope may we, must we, intervene to allow life to proceed—here, not to proper birth, but to proper death. This is not a matter of knowing ourselves as right or wrong. It is a matter of realizing we are a part of nature, Nature Cognizant, the facet of nature capable of understanding, and purposefully adjusting, adapting, and amending nature. When one is left in pain without hope of recovery, when one is in hopeless agony and crying out for relief, what charity, says “no, this is God’s will!”, what science says “no, this is nature’s way”. We are commanded to act with God’s mercy and care. We are given to act as Nature Cognizant, and we do so to save lives, to bring life into this world. Yet we shrink from saving life from its ultimate defeat, not death, but the agony of death lived day after day, endless, without end, without hope. Cruelty belongs neither to God nor Nature; we, merely fearing the power of life, a power that includes death as much as birth, we merely call them cruel to excuse ourselves of our own cruelty and cowardliness.
A postscript on the idea “Nature Cognizant”
The idea that nature reaches self-consciousness in man is not a novelty in Western thought. It is found nascent in ancient writers, more deliberately formed in some mediaevals, begins to flourish in renaissance philosophizing, and reaches its current orbit in nineteenth century German idealism. Unfortunately, while it nominally exists in a tensor of transcendent-immanent-dynamic or thesis-antithesis-synthesis, in practice it lives in the tension of a duality, a system of x versus not-x, more specifically for the ideas in consideration above, in a tension of Man versus Nature. This propensity of the human species to see itself as something opposed to nature has given rise to a great deal of progress both practical and theoretical. It is, however, the source of a great deal of impediment to richer progress, for it discounts the forces and processes of Nature, and truncates the relationship between Man and Nature, neither of which truly–as they are–constitute the only variables proper to the equation. The variable missing in such dualistic thinking and acting is the dynamic of the future, the open-endedness of possibility, the teleological and telegonic influences. This reduction of vision to a battle twixt two forces of Man and Nature renders philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific thought myopic, claudicate, and anile. Reality is a ceaselessly twirling and intertwining vitality of past-present-future, transcendent-immanent-dynamic, thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Man left in a vision of x versus not-x is Man impoverished of the full compass of reality. Religions cower under a vision of an oppressive Totally Other, fall into irrelevance under the weight of a total transcendent, or wallow in an uninspiring busy-ness of dealing with a “now”. Progress in philosophy and applied science falls short of efficaciousness, their equations shrived of one, if not two, of the essential aspects of reality. Ethical considerations crash against the sides “right” or “wrong”, blind to the existence of the “proper”. Man as Nature Cognizant is no more “opposed” to Nature than thinking man is opposed to bodily man. Any opposition is a matter of linguistic (or in philosophical parlance, logical) distinctions, not reality. And man as Nature Cognizant is not without the openness to futurity, any more so than concretization in the potencies of the present and past.
As mentioned in a missive earlier published, I will shortly begin a brief review of Western thought in order to in some small degree elucidate the history of our intellectual heritage regarding things transcendent and immanent, and the propensity to reduce the dynamic triangularity arising from their reality to a dualism of one type or another.