M.A. Quest is an author, performer, and humanist activist. This essay is adapted from his book Deathrights: In Defense of Suicide (PublishAmerica, 2007).
Monumental energies, skills, and resources are devoted to keeping people alive indefinitely. Very little is put into letting us die by choice and with dignity.
I have a wonderful wife whom I love, along with the “ideal” life we share here in Hawaii. Nonetheless, I intend, at the proper time, to kill myself. Our lives are our own, our most fundamental possession; our most basic right should be to dispose of them however we see fit. We must be allowed to do with our lives what we believe is best. It seems to me that we demonstrate that we value human life most highly when we give people their freedom, when we accept the decisions of those who have the courage to select the time, the place, the circumstances, the means, and the method to end their lives. The current prevailing feeling against suicide may stem in part from a general belief that not only is suicide a terrible mistake but death itself is some kind of failure (“With proper care, we should and can be living much longer lives”)—when in actuality death is a necessary part of the life cycle, the momentous final step.
In a suicide-permissive society, we can envision that ending one’s own life would be a preferred mode of death. It would be honored, sanctified, and beautiful. Rather than people being prevented from dying or being forced to live lives that they feel are undesirable, there would be alternatives to nursing homes: places of understanding and empathy and honoring where all those who wished to end their lives would have a place where they could gather in camaraderie to do so in mutual support or individual isolation—whatever they preferred. Their passing would be duly noted if they so wished, and there would be respect for their choice and courage.
In 1919, the French physician Charles Binet-Sanglé called for just such public thanatoria, or euthanasia parlors, where a person could go and choose among a variety of humane methods to reach an “individually styled” death.*
I can almost hear the dissenting chorus: this would cheapen and devalue life. I think the opposite is true. Rather than giving over total control to some anonymous, gigantic, profit-driven corporate institution such as a hospital, let us take control. Let us choose and tailor our death, and achieve that sacred, final goal with dignity, humaneness, even joy. Let there be places where we can calmly choose our time and means of dying.
The problems now associated with suicide are due mainly to negative societal attitudes and the consequent need to be surreptitious—to use crude, unsophisticated methods, in unsavory circumstances, without discussion or any sympathetic support, and then leaving behind a gruesome mess for others to clean up.
Once suicide is generally approved of, sanctioned, candidly discussed, and arranged with reverence in advance, then perhaps a much deeper understanding of each person’s motives, fears and joys will be the rule. This transformation of social attitudes and resources will take decades, of course. But it should in the end become an open and liberating situation, not one of devious calculation to avoid social disapproval and scandal. It would be a different, freer world.
*Charles Binet-Sanglé’s L’Art de mourir: Défense et technique du suicide secondé (The Art of Dying: Defense and Technique of the Assisted Suicide) was reissued in French by the publisher l’Harmattan in March 2007. No English edition is known. — Eds.
Don Wentzel (left) of Lockville, Maryland, and Fran Porter of Bethesda, Maryland, gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, October 5, 2005, supporting physician-assisted suicide on the day of the Gonzales v. Oregon case. The Supreme Court revisited the emotionally charged issue of physician-assisted suicide in a test of the federal government's power to block doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives. REUTERS/Staff [Photo via Newscom]
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