Nov 08 | Beautiful Broken World, Part 2 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the second in a three-part series about my feelings on medical assistance in dying. For Part 1, click here.

 

PART II: DIGNITY

Over the last two years, I’ve heard dear friends tell precious stories of the relief and peace that permeated the room when a beloved was finally helped across the threshold.

Strong and brave people suffering from the terrible thievery of diseases like MS have spoken out demanding the right to take ownership of their own lives, their own narrative, their own struggle.

 

And yet I am always drawn back to Rose, who is in so many ways utterly dependent on the people around her, and does not wear that as though it is shameful.

I am always drawn back to the terrible history of institutionalization, forced sterilization, and daily struggles of those who are disabled less by their conditions than by society’s reaction to those conditions.

I am always drawn back to the deeply problematic portrayals of the disabled in media, always drawn back to the fetishistic way that many children with disabilities are talked about by society or even their own parents, always drawn back to anti-vaxxers who would rather have a kid dead of measles than a living kid with autism, always drawn back to the horrific sympathy present in society when a parent murders a disabled child to “spare them from suffering.”

We are robbed of that child’s voice, that child’s story. Instead they become an object, a problem, rather than a person.

 

The word that gets thrown around most often (in my experience most often by able-bodied hale and hearty Baby Boomers considering a long decline in a deathphobic and ageist elder-hating culture of capitalistic slavery) is “dignity.”

But what does dignity look like?

 

Is dignity about taking charge of your own life, about making a choice to bypass the horrors of a disease that steals, that burns, that swallows you up until you can’t eat, or breathe, or be remembered as you once were?

Is it about sparing others exhaustion and the endless erosion of anticipatory grief?

Is it about refusing pain as though it were unnatural, about pulling the plug before you are forced to come to terms with your own frailty and dependence, forced to confront a sick society where the old and infirm, having been milked dry during their working years, are now spat out to make way for fresh young things to chew up and spit out in turn?

Is it about ending things before you can’t wipe your own ass? That specific situation comes up so often in these conversations.

 

Rose needs bathroom help, and always has. She can’t walk or feed herself.

Does she not have dignity?