Society's greatest taboo demands real debate
OUR national Parliament last had a decent debate about whether consenting terminally ill adults should have the right to end their lives when the federal government overturned the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia laws in 1996.
Back then I was fascinated; I spoke to many federal politicians about how they had arrived at their positions. For most there was a personal back story – an incident involving a loved one that had irrevocably shaped their political stance on what remains, perhaps, the most vexed issue in our lives.
Then in my early 30s, with one healthy child and two robust, engaged and active parents in their early 70s, I came down narrowly on the side of those who opposed voluntary euthanasia.
I remember that my mother, always equally absorbed in politics as she was in her Catholicism, saying something like: "Politicians should get out of this debate – only God has the right to decide how and when we go."
"And let's," I said to her disapproval, "keep the church out of it, too."
My dad (a lifelong Catholic, although curiously less devotedly so with age) kind of harrumphed noncommittally and wandered back to the garden.
Now the issue may be about to be publicly dealt with again. Dr Philip Nitschke, the chief proponent of voluntary euthanasia in Australia, has reignited debate with plans for a series of television and billboard advertisements that have been blocked on the purported grounds that they may promote suicide.
Regardless of whether the billboards go up or the ads make it to TV, we should have the debate. I welcome it because I have become more open-minded about the question.
I recently lost both parents.
Dad, proud and stubborn though deeply unassuming, hid his Parkinson's disease for close to a decade until to do so was no longer tenable. It is a humiliating disease, eventually reducing its sufferers to a twilight zone of weariness, frustration and immobility where basic human functions – speech and clarity of thought, capacity to swallow and to control one's bowels – desert the afflicted. With attentive nursing care, the body can, however, live on like this for years.
Dad lingered in such a terrible state for six months or so. His emaciated body succumbed to other cruelties – a recurrent bowel blockage, a broken hip and the ever-present threat of pneumonia. And so there was surgery, countless rounds of antibiotics – and many false alarms as my sister and I rushed to his bedside, along with the priest who had come, yet again, to deliver the last rites.
When the end really was imminent I arrived in time – and in a rare moment of lucidity for him – to say thanks for the holidays and the dogs, and for being patient with me when I was an unruly, ungrateful adolescent. Then unable to eat or swallow, he lost consciousness and the pneumonia took hold.
We had to make a decision: should we save him with hydration and more antibiotics?
"Pneumonia is the old man's best friend," one doctor told us. "Let him go."
As far as I am concerned, my father's life ended there. Yet he lived on, needlessly, for six more days – immobile and fighting for every breath, his parched mouth encrusted with sores, his papery skin sagging into the bedclothes. Had I had his consent – notwithstanding the criminal statutes – I would have helped him stop it all then.
Increasing doses of morphine completed what was, by any reckoning, a type of passive euthanasia that happens in our hospitals and nursing homes every day. I live with profound guilt that it took so long for us to find him this relief.
All the while my mother – unable to cope with the fact that she could no longer care for him – had been in hospital for months before his death. For years she had covered up his illness, too, making sure he was always seated in his favourite chair, dressed neatly in collar and tie, to protect us, their middle-aged children, when we visited.
She fought for his – for their – dignity. It was unfairly denied him in death.
Dad shed a single tear as he died. It was out of sadness, I suspect, that the life he loved was ending – but also, I'd wager, that those he loved and spent a lifetime protecting had not been spared his hideous final days.
Mum never recovered from his decline or from her irrational guilt that she could no longer care for him. Always before an optimist, she suddenly lost all capacity for joy. She stopped reading newspapers and books, she ceased sleeping and she stopped eating, deliberately it often seemed, abandoning her once almost obsessive pursuit of healthy diet and exercise. And she lost interest in two of her life's great propellants – politics and religion.
We suspected the end was near when she told my sister at the start of the election campaign that we shouldn't bother getting her a postal vote form.
When mum turned 85 seven weeks ago, one of her grandsons dropped by to say: "Happy birthday, nanna."
"I just want them to end," she said. "I've had enough." She was talking about birthdays.
She died a week later of natural causes.
Those who knew mum well believe that not only did she lose the will to live – she actively willed herself to die. Confronted with unpalatable choices about her longer-term medical care, she effectively took an option to move on.
While we are very sad, there was, I believe, considerable dignity attached to her choice.
If death is our society's great taboo, voluntary euthanasia is the greatest. I remain perplexed by the issues surrounding informed consent and euthanasia, and by the precedents that may be set when states start sanctioning the ending of human life, albeit for the most humane reasons.
But what happened to my dad is far from unique; so many adults are scarred by their parents' deaths. So let us not leave their stories in the nursing homes and hospitals where they die with passive assistance.
We'll never really get politics out of the euthanasia debate, as mum suggested.
But let's be open and honest about what's happening now.