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Until We Are Parted by Death
At National Review Online, Wesley J. Smith has written an essay about the increase in “couples euthanasia” in European countries that have adopted an affirmative right to end your own life. In a story guaranteed to evoke “ahhhs” from sentimental leftists and perhaps a recognizant twinge from anyone who is in love with his or her spouse, he describes an elderly couple who died “holding hands, surrounded by loved ones.”
They were both 91, seriously old even by 21st century standards.
The couple’s daughter told The Gelderlander [translated]. “The geriatrician determined that our mother was still mentally competent. However, if our father were to die, she could become completely disoriented, ending up in a nursing home. “Something which she desperately did not want. Dying together was their deepest wish.
When my first husband died, I had our four young children to think of, so the thought of joining Drew in death could not be entertained for long… but it definitely did occur. So I get the “deepest wish” thing, truly.
Once upon a time, I was a parish minister and one of my elderly (90-ish) parishioners, “Sally,” was dying. I went to visit her in the hospital, finding her semi-comatose in her bed, surrounded by an encampment of family members and with her not-dying but very old and dignified husband beside her.
The husband–I’ll call him Fred– had not left his wife’s side for two days, sitting upright in a chair, holding her hand and refusing all invitations and entreaties to go home to bed, if not for the night then at least for a nap. I suggested that if Fred wouldn’t go to bed, maybe the bed could come to him? The nurse agreed. We found a cot and wedged it in between the wall and Sally’s bed. Upon discovering that the cot wasn’t high enough to allow Fred to be able to comfortably maintain his grip on Sally’s hand, we stacked another mattress on top. Fred clambered aboard this slightly precarious perch, lay down, took hold of Sally’s hand and grinned blissfully.
I was standing at the foot of what was now–sort of–a double bed. I was dressed in clerical garb. Fred was still wearing his customary jacket and tie. Sally looked lovely in a white hospital gown draped in a white blanket. There were bouquets in the vicinity. “Yeesh, this looks like a wedding!” said one of the grandchildren.
Fred and Sally’s daughter’s eyes at once lit up. “That’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to have a wedding!” She ran out into the hall to collect stray grandchildren who had wandered away during the cot-moving exercise, roped in a few nurses’ aids and a doctor or two. One of the grandchildren strummed a guitar.
“In the presence of God and of this beloved congregation,” I performed a renewal of vows and, “by the power vested in me by the State of Maine,” pronounced that Sally and Fred were still married. Fred kissed the bride, who smiled.
Sally died the next morning.
Fred had loved, honored, and been faithful to Sally for sixty years, but they were parted by death.
The sweet old Dutch couple in the story have been parted by death, too. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiographical A Grief Observed: “Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats.”
The notion that we can (let alone should) die together with our loved ones and then spend eternity in a celestial version of earthly reality is as absurd and, in its way, as selfish as the idea that we can take our money with us when we go. That the Dutch wife might become completely disoriented or might end up in a nursing home was not reason for her to die in some sort of refined pharmaceutical suttee. For all her children’s sentimentalizing self-exculpation, the fact remains that a double-euthanasia has freed them from the duty (and, if only they could see it this way, the privilege) of comforting their mother through the grief that is the privilege of love.
“Et voila,” Smith writes. “…Before you know it, the children of elderly parents attend and celebrate their joint euthanasia killings–instead of urging them to remain alive and assuring them that they will be loved and cared for, come what may. Euthanasia corrupts everything it touches, including the perceptions of children’s obligations to aging parents and society’s duties toward their elderly members.” It also extends an already-endemic and self-indulgent DiCaprio/Winslet identification of eros rather than agape with the highest, best manifestation of love.
A good friend and fine warden, Michael, demonstrated true love when his wife died. He was devastated. And yet, within minutes of her death, when a kind nurse at the hospital tried to tell him “she’ll always be with you,” Michael gently corrected her. “She is with God.”
For all my anguished yearning to somehow be with Drew after he died, he was with God. It was a privilege to grieve for him and to carry his memory into the life he did not get to live with me. I I frequently assure my present husband that he is obliged to outlive me, but if he instead predeceases me, then as his (hopefully aged) wife I will yield him into God’s embrace and mourn him fiercely, for whatever time is given me to live. It is living on and loving more, not dying-too that honors love.
Fred, by the way, grieved strongly for his Sally. It hurt to lose her; was–as C.S. Lewis would say–a kind of amputation. And yet, he lived on. Sure, he needed more help as he got even older. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law… and then he started dating again.
Published in Marriage
“was not a reason for her to die in some sort of refined pharmaceutical suttee.” Kate you have a brilliance for a finely turned phrase.
Beat me to it.
This is a big part of this tragedy. It is difficult to watch our parents age, to lose their faculties, even to suffer, because it seems like there is so little we can do. Yet we can love them, reassure them that they are loved, that life is a blessing however it unfolds, and we will walk with them through their journey. Love includes doing what is heartbreaking and awkward; it is not selective or selfish. Very important post, Kate. And I always appreciate how your personal experience contributes to the whole.
I have two issues with euthanasia. The first is with those who claim that the practice is some sort of elevated moral choice. It is not. Self-murder is just murder even if the result is efficient and practical. The state of medical science does blur the lines here as extraordinary measures can be taken to defer imminent death, even in the most egregious circumstances. I agree that a person should be able to preclude these interventions, but that is not self-murder. However, one should not be able to direct a physician to actively cause a death that is not otherwise imminent. In such an instance the physician should be charged with murder.
The second issue lies with the state. Let’s face it, the elderly present a burden for the state. They represent the major costs of our government with medicare and social security. Further, they disproportionately hold the country’s wealth in their pension funds, savings and properties. They can live good lives with these subsidies while leaning on the liquidation of assets, not taxable, to fund their lifestyles. These assets may well be taxed when their estates are finally liquidated. Given these facts, both the State and the families of the elderly are conflicted on the issue of euthanasia, largely an elderly choice. These two factions, the State and the heirs, when facing costly elder care decisions, will promote the practical, but amoral choice, and encourage and promote euthanasia, that is the depreciation and destruction of our most vulnerable.
Those who say I am wrong on the above, consider the arguments of abortion proponents and the government. They justify the destruction of the unborn as a way to defray the societal cost to care for disabled children or the children of poor, unwed mothers otherwise on public assistance.
It is exactly suttee. Dressing it up with drugs instead of flames does not change it.
@katebraestrup – Nothing like a swift kick in the emotional gut. I’m not sure whether I’m more impressed by your excellent writing, or that I’m now sitting here in Starbucks wiping tears from my eyes. Guess I’ll go with being impressed; well done!
As @dougkimball commented so well above in #4, euthanasia simultaneously elevates the individual’s desires for pleasure to ultimate moral superiority while also empowering the State with the authority to kill those deemed no longer capable of having a worthwhile life. The State is further provided with an economic incentive to dispense with people unlikely to contribute net revenue. How this is philosophically different from any totalitarian regime (fascist/communist/statist) known in history is beyond me.
Sometimes I wonder if the euthanasia path is really for those standing at the bedside, it’s all about their suffering and burden.
When my mom passed away there was no way my dad was going to be able to care for himself, he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. He was lucid enough to know he was still in his own home so my brothers, my wife and I decided that I would care for him. There were some good moments and there were terrible moments, but we kept him in his own home until I made the decision to place him in Hospice care just short of a year after mom passed away. I was there to hold his hand as he took his final breath. It was a tough year, but I didn’t want a phone call from a stranger telling me that my dad had passed away.
Exactly, Doug. There is a real gift in being able to look back at what is inarguably a hard and even tragic moment and say “I loved him all the way to the end.”
When training young police recruits in death notification, I teach them to offer the family the chance to see and touch the bodies of their loved ones whenever this is possible precisely because I want to give them the chance to do something heroically loving. I want them to be able to look back at that terrible day and say “yes it was awful, yes the cops were nice,” even “sure, there was a nice chaplain lady there,” but far, far more important “we did right by our beloved. We took good care of him. We were strong. We were brave.”
A good death. I hope I can give my Mom that. I was, actually, holding my Dad’s hand when he died, though this was mostly pure luck. Still, I’m incredibly grateful. It wasn’t pretty, but it was sacred.
Fred’s daughter sent me a photo she’d taken of her parents’ hands, joined, on her mother’s last night. It was beautiful. I wish I could find it to show it to you all!
Life goes on . . .
. . . . even when it seems imponderable.
I can’t imagine this ends well considering the expenses of medical care for the elderly. Suicide encouragement counselors may be a budding profession.
Nice stories Kate.
We live our lives suspended between two poles: fearing and welcoming death. In our desire to comfort the dying and the grieving, we make death out to be a good event. That serves one group of our emotions very well. But there is a danger also. Why suffer and live at all?
The Easter sermons about the joy of the Resurrection are wonderful to hear and to contemplate, but it is only logical to want to hurry to get there.
We are looking at big problems right now in terms of suicide. And I consider heroine use a form of slow suicide.
Abortion, even putting animals “out of their misery,” and all of the other death-hurrying practices of modern life have left young people in a state of confusion about life and death.
Add to that picture the commodification of human life that necessarily follows socialism.
And why help the down and out? They are choosing to live. They could end their lives if they wanted to. There’s no reason I have to help them, right? This is the choice they have made, the choice to be alive.
This will all get out of control, and we will lose our young people. It is not going to end well.
Andrew Klavan made a comment on one of his podcasts that has stuck with me. Not sure if this an exact quote, or even if he is the originator, but he said something to the effect that grief is the price we pay for love. If we love (and I recommend it,) we have to be prepared for grief when the loved one is lost.
Very true.
I’ve known quite a few people who expressed the desire to go with the person they have loved and are losing.
I’ve read a lot of Wesley J. Smith’s essays about euthanasia at NRO, and while I agreed with them that euthanasia is wrong, this essay does much more to convince me that not going the route of euthanasia is right. I realize those might sound like the same thing, that saying doing X is wrong is equivalent to saying not doing X is right, but that’s not always true. There are times where we have to choose between two bad options, and just because one is worse doesn’t make the alternative less bad. This does a wonderful job of pointing out that while choosing life might not always be the most pleasant course of action, it is the right choice for everyone involved.
This has been one of the lessons children can learn from pets, to help our children better deal with the inevitable death of people they love. I vividly remember having that specific conversation (love and grief) with our then 8 year old son when the first of what became a long sequence of pet rats died. He came up with the formulation himself that he’d rather have love and the sadness of death than not have the love in the first place. Hence, off to adopt another pet rat to love.
A few months after Drew died, I stepped on a pitchfork and it went through my foot. It was not a clean pitchfork, lying as it was in a pile of manure, and my foot wasn’t all that clean either. So I went to the hospital where they promptly admitted me and prepared to surgically debride and treat the wound.
A pleasant anesthesiologist came in to ask me about my preferences: would I like an epidural plus a little demerol, or would I like to be knocked out completely?
Hmmnnn.
Was being unconscious sort of like being dead…ish…and might I be able to visit Drew that way? Or even, given the risks of anesthesia, I could possibly, you know, flat-line….just for a sec…. and maybe see him in that famous tunnel of light thing they’re always on about?
Not for the first time nor the last, I recalled with some reluctance that I was a mother of four. I had a duty to survive. So I chose the epidural.
As I say, I totally understand the “deepest wish to die together.” Oh yes.
Rodents are good for this, goldfish too. Iguanas seem to live a long time and they get really big. On the plus side, you can eat them.
For some reason, it makes me think of my brother-in-law, eagerly explaining the “birth plan” he and my sister had created when she was pregnant with her first. He kept using the word “we.” As in “we’re bringing our pillows from home” and “we’re hoping to be able to use the birthing tub.” It was quite sweet and not irrational.
Still, I was pregnant with baby #4 at that point. So I knew that, while Drew could and would be with me and support me, only one of us was actually going to be in labor, and only one of us was going to be pushing a nine pound baby out of her body.
Conservatism can never rest easy, between its efforts to keep people on the straight and narrow with threats that “you’ll be an burden if you don’t do X, Y, and Z” and its assertion that all life is precious. Sometimes, something’s gotta give, and the conscientious, who find that they cannot live with themselves if they burden others excessively, well, I won’t hold it against them if they decided life as a burden was intolerable. We can try to talk ’em out of it, try to help ’em out of it, but part of the conservative spirit is that there are fates worse than death (else why would “Give me liberty or give me death” ever make sense?).
My husband and I took Lamaze classes when I was expecting my first. We both arrived one evening from our separate offices, dressed for work, of course. This was the night they showed the movie of an actual birth. When the movie was over but before the lights came on, my husband, dressed in his three-piece suit and sitting in a comfy chair, said, loudly, “That doesn’t look too hard.” Then the lights came on and he was being glared at by every woman in the room. Too funny. We still laugh about it.
As a full size tabby, I applaud your commitment to diversity by accepting rats as pets. You are indeed a model of virtue! ;-)
I am going from memory, but I think Ricochetti wiser than I can perhaps correct my recollection?
I think this may have been a reference to something C. S. Lewis wrote about loss, to the effect that when two people love, it is inevitable (or at least highly probable) that one will end up grieving the loss of the other, as we are all mortal; accepting the potential for pain and loss is the price of love, even friendship.
No, it’s inevitable. Grief is the price of love. Full stop. So your choices are:
1.) Don’t love anybody
2.) Die young—maybe really young, especially if your parent is in a dangerous profession
3.) Love anyway.
I tell the young folk who ask me to officiate at their weddings that while I am flexible on many points, the words”until we are parted by death” or “for as long as we both shall live” need to be included in the vows. “Because,” I say, “Being parted by death is the best case scenario. That’s what happens when a marriage works. Whatever the percentage is of marriages that end in divorce, 100% of marriages end. And no matter how it ends, it’s going to hurt like hell.”
Yes, I officiate at a lot of weddings. Why do you ask?
Sure sounds right, and Klavan is a big CS Lewis fan.
Beautiful. Thank you, Kate.
We assumed that if my grandfather went first, my grandmother would continue on for several years. Missing him, but bearing up. We didn’t know what would happen to my grandfather if my grandmother went first. Which she did. He lasted only one more year, and I believe he missed her terribly the whole time. I remember at her funeral he tearfully asked if he would ever see her again.
I hope they were reunited in some fashion.
Both were in their mid-90s, and though needing some home care, lived in their own home until their parting.
Me, too, Doug…Especially as people’s notion of the moral center – other or self – begins to change.
Who would fardels bear
when he himself might his quietus make
with a bare bodkin?