Call me sentimental
I’ve been watching some of Black Doves on Netflix. I don’t watch much telly but this series has caught me. There’s murder, and death, guilt and conscience. And then there’s the wire brush of unease that’s been scraping its quiet, sinister tune since the assisted dying bill was passed.
‘Don’t get sentimental,’ says a seasoned assassin to a novice spy, discouraging her from going ‘back in’ to retrieve a lighter that once belonged to her mother. She goes back anyway. She’s got a hard heart, but not that hard.
It has been clawing away at me, that line - ‘Don't get sentimental’ - because contract killing is in the news, isn’t it. Can we commission some adequately unsentimental people to do some killing? Apparently the answer is yes.
I have read the narratives, the intimate accounts of pain and anguish. I have read the personal tales seeking to persuade us that it is rational, in this day and age, for us to be able to make a choice for ourselves, about when we die. We have been called to be grateful to those ‘big-hearted’ people who have shared their stories about loved ones’ deaths, in the name of campaigning. MPs have been encouraged ‘to give back power to those who feel powerless at end of life’, as Caroline Lucas put it.
In fact, I have my own story. I know what watching a loved one disintegrate, knowingly, into the abyss of dementia, is like. He knew it was coming, my dad. He eye-balled the on-coming cerebral landslide of Alzheimer’s, full on. He was (still is) a medical doctor, and he was absolutely aware of what was on the horizon. On particularly bleak days he’d talk about jumping into Willian Pond. He didn’t.
Nowadays he is cared for by a team of people. He does not know, we don’t think, what is happening around him. But his body is looked after as it settles into the final act. We ask about whether he is comfortable, what fluids he has been able to drink, can we manage his pain better, how often does he sing? The people are gentle, professional, and they wrap a palliative cloak around him, and us. We are losing someone together and I count the team in that. It’s a collective process.
I tell you this, not because I think we need stories to lead the way. In fact, I tell you because I think that is exactly what we should not be doing. I am going through the difficult end of life stage with someone extremely close to me and it is horrible, but this should not make me the expert in end of life care, nor should I wield some heavier influence in these matters just by dint of having a poorly dad. As soon as we start building legislation around individual stories, we start down a very dark and slippery slope that will put at risk the safety and protection of vulnerable, less loud individuals.
You know something’s up when atheists start reaching across the religious divide. Sonia Sodha, on X, said, “One thing I will say as an atheist. Am finding the liberal dismissal of anyone of faith as somehow lesser on assisted dying grim. The fact people of faith have different views shows it's more complex than some wd have us believe. We all derive our moral compass from somewhere.”
I happen to be someone of faith and my moral compass, like everyone’s, is made up of a multiplicity of experiences and tensions. A moral compass is not assembled from duplo. You can’t deconstruct it into neat pieces. I have complicated it further by ending up as a Quaker. As Harvey Gillman said, only last week in The Friend1, we are, ‘the people who doubt credally’, or as I put it, very certain in our uncertainty2.
While we don’t deal in dogma, what Quakers do work very hard at is discernment. It’s really important to us to think deeply, to lend time and spiritual energy, often together, to matters that, well, matter. I have been giving a lot of attention to the end-of-life news train, as you can probably tell, and I have been particularly grateful to read Benjamin Wood’s piece, On Autonomy and Dying3, that is, as he puts it, ‘a Quaker theological response’. You can access it here. From the starting point of autonomy and individualism we explore the mystery of the divine, torture and suffering, the Quaker ethic of interdependence, enforced dependence and disability.
I am glad autonomy is the door by which we enter into the matter. There are many aspects to this debate - suffering, life, freedom, sacredness - but this question about whether we can separate something off, one individual acting with complete selfhood intact, is a key tension. Is it even a sound aim?
If we are to use it as an argument - that autonomy is a good thing and people should have a right to choose, regardless of others - we have to be certain that autonomy is achievable. In the case of assisted dying, there can be no such assurances. We simply cannot say with full certainty that there will be an absence of coercion in someone arriving at their decision.
We seem also to be missing the glaring impossibility of the act happening without involving or affecting other people. If there is to be autonomy, what of those others who are inextricably intertwined into these deaths.
What do we say to the child in our classroom who wonders to us about their grandparent, their next door neighbour, their mother, who has been helped on their way? As a teacher, I’m not trained for that. Where is my autonomy? And while we’re on the topic of children, what about when the legislation creeps its way to minors themselves as has happened in the Netherlands (FAQs, Voice for Justice UK4).
Consider, too, the autonomy of the healthcare professionals. Yes. I know there are ‘conscience clauses’ being concocted5. Doctors, we are told, will be able to ‘opt-in’. How about the nurses and the pharmacists? And the care workers who will find it hard to exert their own preferences in these kinds of situations? What about the temporary staff who come in and get on with whatever they are told to do? Will they be able to extricate themselves from this business of assisted dying? I’m really not convinced. These deaths will not happen in some kind of mythical island of isolation. With apologies to Paul Simon, ‘I touch no one and no one touches me,’ is incompatible with the human condition.
There are more things I could say. I think that overburdensome, lengthy legislation, which this will inevitably be, tells us, with its elongating clauses, that we’ve taken a wrong turn. If legislation needs sub-sections of sub-sections of sub-sections then we’re in a mess. Far better to have simplicity, whereby, for example, the bottom line in the health profession is care and the preservation of life. I won't go on.
There are few blessings that have come with my father’s decline although there have been some. I definitely love harder. And I have become familiar with grief which has, in its own grey and watery way, made me more human. Illness, frailty and loss are part of life and I’m actually more complete for it.
It is a blessing too that my dad, ever the proud and dedicated doctor, will never learn of this rubicon moment. It would break his soul.
Call me sentimental, irrational if you like. I don’t really care. Call me harsh too but this is absolutely about contract killings and I know which side of history I want to be on.
2. The School-Ready Governor, (Bloomsbury, 2024), p.40
3: ‘Autonomy and Dignity: A Quaker Theological Response to Assisted Dying’, in Assisted Dying: A Quaker Exploration, (York: Quacks Books, 2016), pp. 93-105
4: Assisted suicide, are safeguards adequate and acceptable https://vfjuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Factsheet-on-Assisted-Suicide-Summary-of-FAQs.pdf
5: Many NHS staff likely to use ‘conscience clause’ if assisted dying legalised, say doctors:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/14/assisted-dying-nhs-staff-conscience-clause
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