I think there’s a lot of blindess to just how horrible a lot of dying is. Death is very much pushed out of mind but death is not necessarily horrifying. Everyone sort of vaguely hopes for the good death in the medieval art motif sense. Dying peacefully, surrounded by your loved one and possessed of enough wits to wish them well fondly and receive their tender goodbyes.
That is a good death, but it is not common. Our medicine has advanced to the point where deaths are usually either abrupt and unexpected or violent, or bodies are so worn out that people die with multitudes of painful conditions and under a haze of drugs. In Australia, where I live, around 60% of old people are on TCAs (usually amitriptyline) for untreatable pain. That’s not people on deaths door, that’s just aging atm it gets much worse.
By the time people cannot be kept alive anymore faculties are often failing complicating concepts of consent to suicide. People are often heavily sedated, families are often stressed the fuck out by the sheer horror and degradation of watching people suffer for months on end. Elder abuse is rampant in aged care, familial or professional.
And obviously we see a lot of suicide, often reported as accidental poisonings (e.g. sodium nitrite and recent associated bans), refusal of food and withdrawing from the world, more direct methods. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the refusal for people to go under stricter monitoring when at risk was in part motivated by a desire to risk death while maintaining a sense of autonomy.
Societies have often not been strangers to suicide, we all see there are fates worse than death. We are not immortal, we will die, and consequently we need to grow up about it and let people decide for themselves. So that more people can die surrounded by loved ones, comfortable, able to articulate themselves and express their love and acceptance of the end. The alternative is damning large chunks of the population to torture, and nobody has any right to decide what is or is not a tolerable existence or acceptable end for anyone.
I think there’s a lot of blindess to just how horrible a lot of dying is. Death is very much pushed out of mind but death is not necessarily horrifying. Everyone sort of vaguely hopes for the good death in the medieval art motif sense. Dying peacefully, surrounded by your loved one and possessed of enough wits to wish them well fondly and receive their tender goodbyes.
That is a good death, but it is not common. Our medicine has advanced to the point where deaths are usually either abrupt and unexpected or violent, or bodies are so worn out that people die with multitudes of painful conditions and under a haze of drugs. In Australia, where I live, around 60% of old people are on TCAs (usually amitriptyline) for untreatable pain. That’s not people on deaths door, that’s just aging atm it gets much worse.
By the time people cannot be kept alive anymore faculties are often failing complicating concepts of consent to suicide. People are often heavily sedated, families are often stressed the fuck out by the sheer horror and degradation of watching people suffer for months on end. Elder abuse is rampant in aged care, familial or professional.
And obviously we see a lot of suicide, often reported as accidental poisonings (e.g. sodium nitrite and recent associated bans), refusal of food and withdrawing from the world, more direct methods. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the refusal for people to go under stricter monitoring when at risk was in part motivated by a desire to risk death while maintaining a sense of autonomy.
Societies have often not been strangers to suicide, we all see there are fates worse than death. We are not immortal, we will die, and consequently we need to grow up about it and let people decide for themselves. So that more people can die surrounded by loved ones, comfortable, able to articulate themselves and express their love and acceptance of the end. The alternative is damning large chunks of the population to torture, and nobody has any right to decide what is or is not a tolerable existence or acceptable end for anyone.