I recently realized that I had the early symptoms of a fatal degenerative genetic kidney disorder that runs in my family. I found myself facing the possibility of a slow, increasingly painful death, ending in complete kidney failure in about 20 years. In the weeks between realizing I had the symptoms and getting the results of the test, I thought a lot about my belief (or lack thereof) in an afterlife, and my feelings about physician assisted suicide and declining care that will extend your life, but not cure you or relieve your suffering.
I grew up in a very religious family. Throughout my childhood, I was given books about people who had died for the faith, martyrs who had given up their lives in devotion to their God. Every culture, even secular cultures, have their martyrs, from Joan of Arc to Nathan Hale, from the apostle Peter to self-immolated Buddhist monks. Martyrdom for an ideal is considered "the ultimate sacrifice," the ultimate symbol of belief in the cause. It encourages others in the face of their fears and doubts, drives them to emulate your sacrifice and continue their struggle. A martyr becomes an archetype for those who follow after them, their stories retold and embellished by future generations.
When I rejected my parents' faith, I went to live with my elderly grandmother. A year later, my grandmother's kidneys failed and we were told she had just four weeks to live. My uncles decided not to tell my grandmother that she was dying, but to bring her home and let her live out her remaining time in relative comfort. When we reached home and my uncles left content that she was happily situated in front of the TV with no knowledge of her condition, she turned to me and told me, "I'm dying and they don't want me to know. Don't tell them!" My grandmother knew that it was vital to me to see someone boldly face death without a belief in any sort of afterlife, but it was equally vital for my uncles to believe she was unaware of her condition, because they felt knowing would cause her too much distress. So she told each of us exactly what we needed to hear.
My loss of a belief in an afterlife was an evolution of ideas, much like my grandmother's. My grandmother told me how, after her father died, she had gone to the synagogue every day for eleven months to recite kaddish. According to Jewish law, this helps the soul in their purgatory-like hell, but no Jewish soul will stay in hell for more than eleven months, so at that point you can cease your prayers. Kaddish itself is very interesting; unlike in other religions where if you believe in praying for the dead, your prayers are directly regarding the dead, kaddish does not mention illness, death, or mourning. Instead, it is a sanctification of God. It begins: "Glorified and sanctified be God's great name throughout the world He created as He willed." But in the time between the death of her father and the death of her mother several years later, my grandmother seems to have lost a belief in the afterlife; she never mentioned performing any mourning rituals for her mother. She often told me not to pin my hopes on an afterlife, telling me, "This life is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only life we get." The only way, it seems, to achieve true immortality is to die a martyr, so that your name and memory will live as long as the culture you died to defend.
But what of the rest of us? What hope do we have for life after death? If we have children, our genes will live on through them; a type of evolutionary immortality for the genes that gave us our life, our personalities, our brains. Those who knew us will remember us, and may even speak of us to others. Any good we have done in the world will live on; if we have made the world a better place, we leave behind a legacy; some religions advocate planting trees to commemorate important events, a sort of memorial that will live on and provide life and nourishment for others long after the death of the one who planted it. Other people build monuments to preserve a person's memory, from the Washington Monument to the pyramids to the Taj Mahal. Still others find immortality through their words, from self-proclaimed prophets, from Zarathustra to L. Ron Hubbard, to scientists, from Newton to Einstein.
But a supernatural afterlife? Reincarnation, or heaven, hell, or purgatory? No. There is no evidence of any of these; instead, there is sheol--the grave. We decompose, we rot. Our bodies take their place in the cycle of life: in life, we fed off of other, dead organisms to sustain ourselves; in death, other, living organisms feed off of us to sustain themselves. They are in turn eaten, and those who ate them are eaten, and life continues to exist. Even plants leach nutrients from the soil to sustain themselves, nutrients formed by the decay of other things.
So what is the moral route to take when an individual is faced with an illness that will end their life, with no hope of a cure? What should be done when an individual's suffering outweighs their ability to enjoy life? It seems obvious. The only moral answer is to allow the individual to choose when to end their suffering; when their suffering outweighs any potential good. The only decent argument I have ever heard against suicide is that death deprives you of the good things in life. But it also deprives you of the bad, and if your life is more bad than good, why should you not be allowed to end it? The answer to this is invariably that your suffering is the will of God.
Let's deconstruct this for a moment. Think for a moment about a dog. Maybe you have even owned one. When its suffering becomes too great, when there is no hope for it to be cured, we put it out of its misery. Ending its life, we pontificate, is the only moral route; if it could express its will to us, it would choose this. We make a moral judgement, and we are certain that this is what is right and moral. Who are we to do so? We are its gods. We formed it; we guided its evolution from a wild animal to a creature that would obey us, serve us, worship us. It heeds our calls, it obeys our commands, because this is what we created it to do. So we decide morality for it, and we say that ending its suffering is moral. Why would a moral god, from whom our morality is apparently derived, come to the opposite conclusion? What is worse about a god deciding this for us is that while a dog cannot express its will to us, and is likely unable to comprehend the concept of its own mortality, we can understand our own deaths, plan for them, and express our desires to others. In what universe then is it moral for us to be denied the right to end our suffering humanely? Even in the Bible, there is a respect of an individual's choice of how to die, especially choosing to die in a way that would preserve their dignity, from Saul and his armor-bearer intentionally throwing themselves on their own swords to Abimelech ordering a young man to kill him so that it could not be said that a woman had killed him.
We are ultimately the ones who collectively decide what is moral, based on what causes the least harm to the smallest number of people. We can argue morality with each other. We may reach different conclusions. But we are able to ask the questions. I believe that we create our own immortality, our own legacy; and we should be able to decide how and when our lives should end, if our suffering outweighs our ability to enjoy life. We should grant those who seek it the ability to die with dignity. Without drawn-out, unnecessarily prolonged suffering. What one person decides is unbearable is going to be considerably different from what another person decides is unbearable. One person may be able to have Alzheimer's a decade and still enjoy a reasonable quality of life; another may suffer from suicidal depression for six months and find their suffering too great to handle. Neither should be judged for their choices. Both should be treated equally, and their desires concerning their death and the treatment of their body after death should be respected. Both should be remembered well. The good times in their lives should be celebrated, and the bad times should be somberly reflected on, and we must all believe they handled their hardships to the best of their ability. We might very well have handled the same situations differently, but they were not ours to handle.
We could not experience their lives for them. We are not them, we do not have the sum of their memories, their experiences, their minds to work with. We are simply unable to experience the same things as them. Two people with the same illness will interpret their experiences differently, in the same way that two witnesses to the same crime will not have the same memories. We all interpret all our experiences through the lens of our past experiences, our present emotions, and our predictions of the future. No two of us, no matter how similar our experiences may have been, will have the exact same reaction to stimuli.
Be the best person you can be, and leave that as your legacy.
