In addition to the many individuals who contributed to this project, I would like to thank Robert Oliphant, the co-chair of the parliamentary committee that studied this issue and presented their report, which was used in the establishing of the legislation, Bill C-14. Rob’s intellectual leadership, his theological and ethical insights, have been invaluable. I am especially grateful for his work with groups of religious leaders . . . both in listening to their alternate points of view and in presenting his own.
It was through the Louisville Institute of Louisville, Kentucky, that this research received its primary support. Their sympathy to a uniquely Canadian reality and their very professional and sympathetic response to my ideas have been invaluable. Through their financial generosity and moral support, I was given the time and resources to research and write. I am so thankful.
When I explained my work to a colleague in Cuba, his response was to comment on how giving my local congregation had been. “They let you do all this study?” he asked. “They are certainly generous!” And so they are!—grace-filled and encouraging. I owe a great deal to College Street United Church in Toronto for their healing and forgiveness . . . both of which have brought me home to my primary vocation, which is to write.
I am writing this section of the book at the country inn of my closest friends, Ann Vickers and Ray Drennan. If I turn to the left, I can look out to the bay at Bouchtouche, New Brunswick. For the peace of their home and their constant encouragement . . . not to mention the whiskey . . . I am always so thankful. Likewise, I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Bronwyn Best who edits and improves my words and thoughts.
Finally, to my wife, Ellen. Thank you so much. I am so grateful to you, because you taught me to laugh at myself and yet to take every minute of living with a deep seriousness. In our short time together, we’ve walked down some pretty crazy and beautiful pathways. There is no other life we are given, and when we come to our last day, surely it should have as much meaning as those days which preceded it. Sometimes, we think safety is found in guarding ourselves and our hearts, but Ellen has taught me the joyous, wild truth of the aria she sings from Carmen: “Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi.”
Bouchtouche, May 2017
1. The “Carter” case refers to the constitutional challenge put forward by the family of Lee Carter et al., of British Columbia, which resulted in the Supreme Court decision that mandated a change to the Criminal Code, essentially decriminalizing medical assistance in dying.
Introduction
Death is not the Enemy
Most of our simple wisdom can be found on a T-shirt, if we look hard enough. Last week, as I was preparing to write the first pages of this book, on a clearance rack in the local general store, I found this: “Death: The #1 Killer in the World.” Perhaps that slogan captures the basic premise of my research: everyone dies.
When I taught undergraduates, I would begin a series of lectures on religious and philosophical attitudes to death and dying with two simple affirmations: “First, there is one thing every human being will accomplish. We will all manage to die. We can take great comfort in the fact that even if we are lazy, inept, devious or delusional, every one of us will complete the dying task perfectly. It’s a sure bet. Second, dying is the only thing you can count on doing on your own. No one joins you on this journey. People may stand by your side, even hold your hand, but unlike any other human act, including birth, you will walk through that door, naked, vulnerable and absolutely alone.”1
Perhaps death is the single fact which unites us as a species. Forget love or faith, family ties or collective memory. Our chief, unifying characteristic is our dying. Among the creatures on earth, we are perhaps one of the few species that knows we will end. Am I presuming too much? Who knows what a dog might think, for instance?2 But there is no doubt that as living beings we are shaped by our dying, and our high level of consciousness as creatures is a result of our keen awareness of our undeniable ending. From a very young age, we are led into that dark reality by fairy tales and the stories told in our sacred books. A quick read of such divergent stories as Hansel and Gretel and John’s gospel shows just how central are the themes of death and dying—our anxiety over the darkness and our search for freedom from the abyss. As we move from childhood into adolescence, we continue to test the edges of our fear about dying, through graphic novels and horror flicks—even experimenting with real life, role-play video games and battles. And all the Disney movies notwithstanding, at an early age, we realize that life does not continue “happily ever after.” It just ends. At some point in my life, my friends and I will journey out into the cemetery, and they will leave me there alone and go back to what is left of their lives. I will simply not be!
The T-shirt is right—death is the #1 killer in the world. It will catch us all, from presidents to paupers. No one will avoid it. And that finality causes unending anxiety and conflict. Who wants to think of their end, of not being? When we are young, we imagine we are immortal, but as we walk through year after year, we come to a rising awareness that the grim reaper waits for no one. And as the quantity of days diminishes, the quality of each passing moment rises—making our ending all the more poignant.
The vast fear and trembling we experience as beings fuels a whole industry of youth-crazed, anti-aging products and activities.3 Everything from skin cream to skydiving is sold to us as a cure for death. How strange, to expend such tremendous amounts of energy avoiding what we all know is inevitable! Much of our despair as teenagers or our depression as elders can be traced back to this great limit to human life. It was existential philosophy that reminded us how we are finite creatures. We either despair that we are never going to find meaning within the circumscribed time we have been given—which is perhaps the chief anxiety of the postmodern age—or we sense, as many millennials do, that this life is not worth the energy, given the finality of death that hangs over us.
And if we dissect our fear more carefully, we realize that it is not the actual event of dying that haunts us—though that can be disconcerting. The black hole of nonbeing waiting on the other side of death is a mystery that nags at us. Yes. However, most humans are more disturbed by the process of dying. As Woody Allen puts it, “I am not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”4 It’s the way we must enter our dying that can cause nightmares. Will it be gentle and calm or pain wracked and unrelenting? Can I remain me, preserve some dignity at the end, or will I be stripped of my humanity, left helpless and groveling?5 As a pastor, I have seen far too many folk drool away their final days, sucking on an oxygen tube, wetting the bed and totally lost to themselves and others. How do I protect my heart and soul against such an ending? As my mind and body deteriorate, my chief concern is my dignity. And my dignity is knotted up with my personal agency and emotional integrity. Why can’t I just order up a mid-sleep, subdural aneurism?6 That way, I go to sleep whole and hardy and simply never awaken. The uncertainty of how we will die is the source of our anxiety.
And that is the dominant motivator for so many I have interviewed with respect to medical assistance in dying. We have watched our parents pass. Weeks, even years, of visits to the nursing home haunt us with images of lost souls who quite literally waste away their final months, sitting alone in a windowless hallway, mouths gapping, eyes vacant. “Not me,” we say firmly. How often in the past year of research has someone told me that they don’t want to be a forgotten vegetable in a lonely room? “Stand on the air tube” will be written above my bed.
We could describe this aspect of our fear as the decline of control. And while death is the ultimate act of relinquishing our personal agency, our dying is also intertwined with our human dignity and the loss of identity. No one wants to be reduced to a disease: to be nothing more than a cancer-ridden body. And we all fear being robbed of the most essential part of living: our sense of self; our ability to love and be loved. Alzheimer’s is the ultimate insult, because it robs us of who we are and yet does not kill