Why You Shouldn't Kill Yourself

Five Tricks of the Heart about Assisted Suicide

Windley-Daoust

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781498291446
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Suicide, for years, has been a public health crisis in the Western world. Yet more and more states and countries are allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. Have you wondered whether it is actually wrong to end your life if you are mortally ill? Susan Windley-Daoust engages in an extended discussion with a game dialogue partner who thinks that there are five good reasons to employ physician-assisted suicide--and proves those common reasons (or "tricks of the heart") may be well-intended, but make no moral or spiritual sense. She argues that PAS is based in medical ignorance, a utilitarian understanding of the human, and a spiritual vacuum--and the Christian Church needs to engage these realities quickly and directly by recovering the art of dying well.This book is written to all those considering the issue, from those considering PAS as an option in their own lives, to those called upon to vote on the legality of PAS in their states, to those who minister to the dying.

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The First Trick of the Heart

“I never wanted to live this way, in this state”

How often have we heard this? We look at a person suffering, perhaps bound to a hospital bed, perhaps on a morphine drip, and in frustrated helplessness we mention to another, “I would never want to live that way.” Sometimes members of the family, discussing the last days of a loved one, mention that the person dying has uttered that very line, after watching a similar situation unfold on a TV show, or in reference to a friend’s troubles, or some such. Even if we thought saying it aloud was unseemly, or impolitic . . . have you thought it yourself? Have you thought “There, but for the grace of God, go I”?

And yet, what happens when you do find yourself in that challenging state? Because we all will indeed die. Could “I never wanted to live this way” become “I choose not to live this way”? If someone suggests that you could end your own life, would your words or your thoughts come back to haunt you—or even to tempt you?

I am not going to say that you (or anyone else) should enjoy suffering or confinement. Given many options, no one would choose to live that way as an ideal. But to say that you would not want to live in a compromised manner—one that you in fact have seen but not experienced—does not mean that you do not want to live. What you fear is disintegration, and that is natural, and understandable. I want to talk about what you are losing—and what you are not losing—when you face a terminal diagnosis.

And I am here to push you a bit, and ask hard questions. I’m open to listening to you, but I’m not so certain these “tricks of the heart” are tricks. They could just be the truth. And this is too important to not be challenged.

Indeed it is. I hope I am open to all honest questions, and that I take you seriously.

The Integrity of Body and Soul, and the Grief of Disintegration

Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has written a fascinating book titled How the Body Knows Its Mind,1 a summary of recent work in neuropsychology that implies that the mind does not control the body like a computer controls a mechanical limb: rather, the impact of body on mind and mind on body is integrated and more mutual than we thought. Who knew? Did you know that

* the ability to control individual finger movements and fine motor skills significantly improves math scores—to the point where if people are injured in ways that harm fingers, math abilities take a dive? (And this may be why pianists tend to have excellent math skills?)

* psychiatrists are increasingly using Botox injections around “frown lines” as a way of breaking a person of persistent depression? (The theory is that severely depressed people cannot short-circuit the feed loop of facial muscles “telling” the mind to be depressed—and the Botox temporarily freezes those muscles, preventing the frown signals.)

* walking, even pacing, demonstrably enhances creative thinking? That walking in nature (as opposed to the city) demonstrably enhances concentration?

* practicing an associated hand motion while memorizing (such as holding a glass of wine while practicing a toast) helps your brain remember the script—because picking up the glass becomes a trigger?

The ongoing research in embodied cognition is uncovering a vast integrated reality of body and mind that we call the human being.

That’s pretty amazing stuff.

It is. But to Christians, this integration should not be surprising. We have always held that there is an essential integration between the body and the soul.

For example, in the book of Genesis, the human, Adam, becomes a nephesh (Hebrew for a living being, sometimes understood as soul) when God blows the breath (or Spirit) of life into his created muddy form. The Hebrew understanding of the human being is consistently one where life indicates a wholeness of body and spirit. To live is to be an embodied spirit, and the totality of the nephesh is named as unequivocally good.

In the New Testament, the human being is still understood as a unity of body and soul: the body good, and the soul, good. It is in the New Testament that it becomes more clear that the death of the body, while not destroying the soul (nothing destroys the spiritual aspect—we may mar it, but we cannot destroy it), is grievously tragic. It is tragic because it is unnatural: as creatures with a physical and spiritual aspect, the body and the soul are not meant to be separated. They exist properly with and for each other. When death is introduced and shaped by Adam and Eve’s original sin, what it introduced was the tragedy of disintegration.

Excuse me: death is “the tragedy of disintegration”? That seems—understated. And abstract.

This may sound rather abstract and theoretical, but it is not. We feel “dis-integrated” every time we get the common cold—never mind major illnesses. The body is not working like it was meant to: your nose is clogged and it is hard to breathe, you don’t enjoy eating much beyond broth and toast, you may be a twenty-year-old marathoner when in good health but now you feel exhausted just getting out of bed. The wholeness of the body is not felt; it feels like parts of your body are working against each other. And your spiritual life? Well, it is certain that you can pray through a cold. But there is no question that illness has a discernible short-term impact on most people’s spiritual lives: harder to focus, harder to pray in known ways. The malfunction of the body requires a recalibration of the spirit in a way you wouldn’t expect—unless you knew, deep down, that body and soul are integrated.2

This is why death is seen as a tragedy in the Christian worldview—even though it is the door to life with God, the truest good there is, our original sin made that door different than what it would have been. We can die well, loved by God and in friendship with Christ. But the experience of dying involves disintegration, and it is jarring, unnerving, unwanted, and tragic. And this is why the Christian church teaches that at the end of time—the parousia—the final judgment unites the souls of those in friendship with Christ with their transformed (or resurrection) bodies. We were not created for disintegration. But that is what we face in dying: the sorrowful reality of disintegration of body and soul . . . at least for a time.

When we say, “I never wanted to live this way, in this state”—well, God did not originally want that for us either. Yet because of human history, we all face it. And we can face it because God has shaped that dying in way that is not complete disintegration, an unraveling, permanent end, but simply the beginning of the rest of time. The process of dying is naturally upsetting. But rightly approached, it can draw us closer to God’s own self.

So. God did not intend this disintegration, but our original sin brought it forth. After the fall, God shapes dying as a door to himself.

Right.

But—and I mean no offense—if I were facing death and my impending decline looked really difficult, I still wouldn’t want to live that way. I would lose too much—in fact, it would feel like I would lose everything. And if I initiated a physician-assisted suicide, then I wouldn’t have to lose so much.

I understand what you are saying. But I want to challenge you a bit here.

What Is “This Way”?

There is a natural reaction of aversion when “things fall apart”—especially when it is your own body. But it is also right to push back on the statement “I never wanted to live this way, in this state.” What exactly is “this way”? Without being able to walk? With limited memory? With limited abilities to talk?

Sure, let’s use those as examples.

While the loss of any of those human functions would naturally cause real grieving and challenges, there is the reality that we don’t define what it means to be human—and our right to a natural death—by our functionalities. It is no accident that fifteen disability rights groups have come out swinging against physician-assisted suicide.3 The most prominent of the groups, Not Dead Yet4 (deliciously named after a scene in a macabre but slapstick Monty Python movie, where a medieval cart man tries to “hurry along” those dying of a plague through argument, and finally a hammer to the head), began in Britain and has quickly spread throughout the Western world, advocating in local and national legislatures, writing articles and op-eds, filing legal briefs, and protesting at “right to die” conventions and press conferences. Why? Because they—all these people living with disabilities—rightly perceive that able-bodied people believe living with a disability is literally “a fate worse than death.” In fact, they are worried that...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to Theologians and Pastors
• Preface to the Reader
• Chapter 1: The First Trick of the Heart
• Chapter 2: The Second Trick of the Heart
• Chapter 3: The Third Trick of the Heart
• Chapter 4: The Fourth Trick of the Heart
• Chapter 5: The Fifth Trick of the Heart
• Chapter 6: The Medicinal Value of Dying
• Appendix I: Letter to Ministers
• Appendix II: Letter to Family and Friends
• Bibliography