A friend of mine is a prominent voice against Canada’s unbelievable euthanasia regime (sinisterly titled MAiD – ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’), and she travels the length and breadth of her country speaking out against it. A large part of this advocacy involves simply taking the time to talk to some of the people who’ve been offered euthanasia, or feel pressured by those around them into considering it, and giving those voices a platform.
What’s this got to do with anything? Well, as Gript readers may have noticed, I haven’t produced so much content in recent weeks, and as our podcast listeners will know, that’s because my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby girl a couple of weeks earlier than expected, whose first experience of the world was unfortunately marred by a severe sickness that saw her placed in the newborn ICU, where she’s been the past three weeks.
Suffice to say, it wasn’t how we expected the first weeks of her life to go, and our frequent exposure to that most grotesque of necessary places – a newborn intensive care unit – gave us plenty of opportunity for musing about suffering, injustice and all of those other things that we all understandably spend our waking hours trying to avoid. Very, very thankfully, though, slowly but surely, she appears to be on the mend.
The past couple of weeks haven’t all been high-brow reflection inspired by our difficulties, though. Despite our best efforts, we’re no saints. Getting home in the evenings gave me plenty of opportunity for sitting my exhausted self down to a good, old mind-numbing browse of X, which is where that friend comes back into the story. Closely following her work as I do, I saw that she’s been somewhat more inclined lately to respond to those disagreeing with her work in the comments under her posts.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that some of those comments she was responding to shocked me. So as not to drag these undoubtedly well-intentioned, but disastrously misinformed, people through the mud publicly, I’ll limit myself to quoting them anonymously rather than sharing the posts themselves.
“People should have a choice. I don’t want to live wth dementia, if diagnosed, Maid to the rescue,” one person wrote, to which my friend responded: “By saying that you would rather be dead than live with dementia, you devalue every person living with dementia…No one with a disability should be dehumanized and dismissed like this.”
Another poster, whose mother apparently had dementia, wrote: “If my mom, former nurse, saw herself, she would be so mad we let her live like this.” My friend’s response: “‘Letting someone [live like] this.’…This is the epitome of a eugenic mindset.”
A Canadian specialist in mental health and violence prevention suggested Amanda “should also start taking to the people who are deeply traumatized by their loved ones suffering from a terminal illness? Balance is important”.
Rather than provide said friend’s response here, I’ll provide my own: is it really the case that considering the ‘traumatic’ experience of seeing loved ones wracked by terminal/incurable illness ought to open us up to the possibility of killing, or sanctioning the killing, of those loved ones?
There were many, many more ill-considered comments than I care to list here, but the net effect of both reading those and visiting a sick baby in hospital was that I was reminded that there’s nothing our modern world so misunderstands and – dare I say it – wastes as suffering.
Let me preface the rest of what I’m about to say with this: My wife and I are in agreement, along with the rest of the human race, in the face of their manifold trials, that if we could remove this particular source of suffering for both us and our baby, we would. If we could click our fingers and see our daughter granted good health, we’d do it in an instant. But we can’t, and nor can anyone else in the face of whatever intractable difficulties they’re facing. That’s life. We accommodate ourselves to it, not the other way around.
That being the case, you have to figure out how best to respond to the hand you’ve been dealt, and it’s here that I fear that there’s actually, most of the time, a lot of good that can come of the awful hands that we’re often dealt, and we’re instead, increasingly, opting to ignore that good and throw the hand out altogether. This is a movement that reaches its peak in the popularisation of euthanasia and the dreadfully-euphemistic ‘assisted suicide’.
A philosopher I’m fond of, Eleonore Stump, uses the following analogy to make some sense of suffering: when most of us get onto an airplane, it’s earphones in, book or screen out, bye bye to the world and everyone in it as we make our way from A to B. However, if the plane encounters severe turbulence, you better believe those earphones are going to come out and our faces will be lifted from their distractions, and likely turned in the direction of our fellow travellers.
She says that it’s often such with suffering, which represents the turbulent disruption to our lives. When it rears its head, it’s no longer business as usual. It’s a break from the more-or-less comfortable solitude in which most of us go about our daily lives, forcing us instead into relationship with others.
My wife and I have seen this first-hand in recent weeks. We’d be fairly social people, I think, but like everyone, we fall into our comfortable ruts and habits, and in doing so can become quite insular and inward-looking. That hasn’t been possible in recent weeks. We’ve been in touch with, and dependent upon, the prayers and material support of a dizzying number of people, both to our immense benefit, and that of our daughter.
Leaving our situation aside, though, I struggle to think of an example where this isn’t the case, or at least where suffering precludes the possibility of greater connection and relationship.
Your response might be that this sounds like a load of airy-fairy waffle in the face of what are often cold, hard difficulties that seem to make life questionable in its worth, but I’d ask what that “worth” is made up of, apart from our relationships and, at risk of sounding entirely hippy, love. This is an insight the subject of that popular biographical film, Into the Wild, (which is based on true events) Christopher McCandless, came to after all of his adventuring and freedom, writing in his final days as he was dying alone in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness: “Happiness only real when shared”.
Happiness is only real when shared, yes, but so too is the full spectrum of life. Suffering, as Jordan Peterson has so prominently espoused in recent years, is the one, unavoidable reality in this life, coming in an unfortunately endless variety of forms. It greatly impoverishes us, then, if we decide that when it comes along with sufficient intensity, the game is up and the show is over, because it’s then that we’re most likely to encounter others and just how good they, and life itself, can be.