Today, the United Kingdom House of Commons legalized assisted dying, also known as assisted suicide in the United States. Assisted suicide is legal in other countries and in ten US states, according to Dignity in Dying. Needless to say, controversial: pre-vote discussions heated and the official record shows Labour ministers voting both for and against. Further legal challenges would not surprise me.
Where legal, the protocol varies, but most (all?) require the person requesting to end their life be judged to be mentally competent. Most appear to only allow assistance when the requestor has a terminal disease and less than six months to live; some provide accommodations when the person physically cannot administer drugs themselves.
However, the overarching question is whether the right to die is an actual right. In Germany, laws forbid euthanasia – for obvious reasons – but courts ruled that the constitution supports the right for self-determined death, including suicide. Similar discussions and decisions have been made elsewhere.
My paternal grandparents read (or claimed to have read) Jack Kevorkian and were proponents of assisted suicide. I never believed my grandfather would do so, but didn’t doubt my grandmother: she didn’t want to be a burden, reliant on others for her daily needs. I learned after her death that she had stashed drugs to in fact commit suicide – it helps that she was a nurse – and a family friend agreed to fetch them when requested.
Unfortunately, the decision was taken out of her hands: after breaking her hip a second time while recovering from the first, she mentally went down hill and was obviously no longer mentally competent. She was moved permanently into senior assisted care and the friend prudently disposed of the drugs.
My grandmother lived perhaps four years after her broken hips. Little by little her essence, what made her her, evaporated. Visit over visit you could see the diminished quality of life, until she wasn’t even aware of who you were and where she was. This was definitely not what she wanted in her end of life. And now I understood.
Her death was sad but not upsetting, perhaps even a little happy for her. My grandfather died the next year (I believe). I will always miss them.
