Generally speaking, dying is the last thing we want to do.
But what if we decide that we want to do it before Nature, or God, decides that it is techically time for us to move on? In the first of a new series of Don’t Get Me Started (Five), Jenni Murray, the presenter of Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, pitched the case for all of us being allowed to die when we want to.
She didn’t mean it in the sense of being allowed to risk our lives by climbing Everest naked, or being allowed to drive Formula One cars through Monte Carlo while blindfolded, or being free to die laughing from listening to Mel Gibson trying to sound penitent after having made anti-Semitic remarks to the US police officer who caught him drink-driving.
She meant it in the sense of being allowed, if suffering from a painful and incurable condition, to say “I’ve had enough of this pain and pointlessness and I’d like to pop off now.”
Murray’s point is that she is “a mother, a daughter, a partner, a breadwinner, and work is based in London and the North. I’m used to making decisions about my destiny and see no reason why that should cease if I’m ill.” (Obviously Murray says this because she is a woman. Men actually do stop making decisions when they’re ill. Ask even a powerful tycoon who’s in bed with flu whether he wants chicken soup or would rather a cup of tea and he’ll look at you as if you’ve just asked him to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem).
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Murray’s is not just a theoretrical polemic. Her 80-year-old mother has Parkinson’s, and has, Murray says, aged 20 years in the past few months as her condition has deteriorated. Murray’s father, aged 79, is his wife’s sole carer. But, as an only daughter, Jenni Murray feels a natural duty to help. Or, when unable to help, to feel gloomy and helpless. Which may explain her saying that: “I don’t want to be a burden to my children. Rather than endure a long and painful end to my life, I want to choose to die when I want, and how I want.”
Living wills seem a cute idea, but don’t really let a compassionate doctor off the hook if he agrees to hasten your death even by a few hours as a way of stanching needless suffering. You can cart yourself off to some of the European countries that take a more lenient view of euthanasia; but a plane journey is hardly high on your list when you’re feeling wretched (although modern air travel has a way of making even the halest people lose the will to live).
It’s the Catch-22 of euthanasia:
“Doctor, I want to take my own life.”
“Why?”
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“Because my mind has gone.”
“But if you’re alert enough to realise that your mind has gone, then your mind can’t have gone.”
“What about all the pain, doc? I’m in terrible pain from morning till night. And through the night, too. Doesn’t that prove that my body has had it?”
“Quite the contrary. If your body had had it, it wouldn’t be functioning well enough to feel pain. When it can no longer feel pain, then we can help you to slip away, because that will be the signal that your body has stopped functioning properly.”
“And how does the body give you that signal that it’s no longer feeling pain, thereby freeing you to help me slip away?”
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“The easiest way to tell is if you were to die. That’s the clearest signal the medical profession has. Once that happens we doctors can feel confident about helping you to kill yourself.”
Not yet willing to give up as easily as Dorothy Parker did in her poem Résumé (“Razors pain you, Rivers are d Acids stain you, And drugs cause cr Guns aren’t lawful, Nooses give; Gas smells awful, You might as well live”), Murray turns to the internet to seek help on how best to end it all if, and when, the time should come to take matters into her own hands.
Rather startlingly, she discovers that “shooting yourself in the head with a gun only has an 80 per cent success rate”. Really? If you didn’t want to kill yourself already, then facing the world the next day and having to explain to everyone how you shot half your face off, yet still hadn’t quite managed to kill yourself would certainly make you want to curl up and die.
In the end, Murray and two old friends agree, over brunch, that they will help to hasten one another’s death, should they ever find themselves so stricken as to make living unbearable. Between now and then, maybe we might see more of Jenni Murray on television. She’s an old-fashioned presenter: thoughtful, intelligent, experienced; unlike the younger, brasher breed, such as Davina McCall, say. Then again, McCall does know what it is like to die live on primetime.