More on Dying with Dignity – How we live, How we Die

Time: Sunday May 2nd 10 am

All welcomed to the venue: St Michael’s Uniting Church, 120 Collins Street, Melbourne

Dr Macnab last spoke April 11, and some of his comments were hard hitting and encouraged one or two ladies to take stock of their views….

He said we had the right to choose to drink, smoke and take part in risky sports and had huge expense to the public purse – but were unable to choose the right to die!

Should we wait passively for the inevitable? Of course the majority of us, in fact all of us would choose life and live, if it meant we could do that without pain and suffering.

Life itself is part of the dying process and we are all going to participate in that action – however if we are no longer a part of the mainstream of life, there needs to be a core of humanity that promotes the opportunity to exercise care and compassion in what would otherwise being an excruciating long dying process. An hour in great pain can seem a week! what do weeks and months do to the soul of the individual’s sense of wellbeing?

Currently with modern medical intervention we can ‘live’ for perhaps 20 years but the reality is that we are already “dead”.

We can be in a vexatious delusion of fighting immorality! We want relief only for ourselves. If others want to suffer to order to raise their status in Heaven, then that is their decision to make – but not on my behalf!

Suffering degrades compassion – there is no great virtue in keeping people alive when they themselves wish for death as a release – Is there a mistaken belief that it is our “duty” to deny this relief when the need remains so great – given the prognosis of that individual? I don’t require you to exercise your sense of duty on my behalf! I want to do that for myself!

No where in the Bible is the self imposed ‘duty’ to protect us from ourselves mentioned? The fact is that the Bible itself speaks of prescribed genocide…..(Don’t they kill babies at a rate of knots in the Bible and sacrifice children with monotonous regularity to please a vengeful God?)

Violence comes in all shades from domestic to starvation (and child slavery in third world sweathouses). (Not to mention the pressures placed on specific cultures by their own Crime Bosses who imitate the weak and needy and never raise a profile in the mainstream media)

Do we care enough to face the political and religious opposition to voluntary euthanasia?

Do we care enough to deal with the cost of speaking out, being seen, being heard?

None of us want to become ‘a coat on a stick’ congealed dying (with a terminal illness earlier in the life span!) and even less so in my view of shrinkage dying ….Nothing left to live for, large spaces of emptiness. Literally nothing to get up for in the morning, or even to lie in bed day after day – the senselessness of the nothingness!!

Of course we can live fully between the two boundaries of new life and death, with a great degree of joy, happiness and purpose but – regardless of who we are the cover on the book of life will close eventually. It must close!

Do we want a ‘book of life’ well read and be pleased to close on the last page? knowing we have done well for ourselves and ready to finish with a gentle sense of completion that I may sleep the long sleep of a good death medically assisted?

I know I do!