Assisted Death and the Art of Living Well

Photo by Ed Aust

“The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life.”
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

“The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.”
— Sherwin B. Nuland

“This is the true Art of living and dying well, if we persevere till death in true and perfect charity.”
— Robert Bellarmine, The Art of Dying Well

You may have noticed that the words MAiD (the Canadian acronym; MAID is more common in the US) or euthanasia appear in relatively few of the titles in this issue. That is intentional. It certainly does not mean that our writers and interviewees lack opinions about the topic—far from it. But as someone increasingly concerned about the direction our culture is moving, I have become convinced that our response cannot consist merely of legislation, horn-blowing, yelling, or anger. Before deciding what ought to be done, we need to understand something about why our culture has moved in this direction in the first place.

Even the words we choose reveal something: medical assistance in dying, medical aid in dying, euthanasia, assisted suicide, state-approved killing—or murder. Each carries assumptions about what is happening and how we ought to understand it. But perhaps the deeper issue is not found simply in the growing legal and cultural acceptance of assisted death. Perhaps it lies in the people—and that means all of us—who constitute a culture in which assisted death can increasingly appear normal, reasonable, or even desirable. Which raises a rather Chestertonian question about that much-celebrated word progress: Progress to where? Toward what? And, perhaps most importantly, why?

The conversations gathered in this issue of Radix approach these questions from different directions: the distinction between anticipated and experienced suffering; the cultural grammar of productivity, independence, and control; our fear of dependency and diminishment; the possibility that dying itself may have something to teach us; the strange clarity death can bring to relationships, gratitude, grief, and reconciliation; the limits of individual autonomy; and, finally, the Christian calling to accompany the dying with presence, compassion, spiritual care, and hope.

These questions matter because—surprise!—we are all going to die. Our lives will end. The question is how we will live through that ending, and how we will accompany others through theirs. Will our chief desire be to retain control over suffering and the manner of our death? Or might dependency, diminishment, reconciliation, receiving care, and even dying itself belong somehow to the mysterious work of being human?

The essays and conversations that follow will not give one tidy answer. I don’t think they should. But together they suggest that the growing acceptance of assisted death may be asking us a considerably larger question than whether it should be legal.

It may be asking us what we believe a human life is—and what gives that life its weight.

Here is a roadmap to this (late) Summer issue:

Interviews

Features

Columns

Fiction

Reviews

Poetry

Death isn’t a happy subject, but just because it is heavy doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about—weighty things often are. I’d like to leave you with one more quote by the Black poet, feminist, and activist Audre Lorde:

“The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living.”
— M

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