“Can we choose our end of life alone? »

The increase in our technical capabilities has steadily expanded the sphere of what we can choose from. Hence the agonizing weight of unprecedented responsibilities: the children no longer arrive, we make them arrive, and death likewise no longer happens, more and more we decide when we stop care. This is why we would like standards, legal solutions, to protect us from this anxiety. Hence also the split in opinion on these questions, an opinion that is all the more split in that it refuses to internalize the tragedy. What complicates this polarization is that the ways of dying are terribly unequal, each time singular and incomparable!

But what makes the drama even worse is the fact that we live in a society of solitudes: we are driven by the momentum of centuries of emancipation, but no one can take care of themselves from start to finish on their own. the other of life. Our society is thus out of whack, because where we sought autonomy we discover to lack the care of others, and where we sought independence we discover our interdependencies – and this question is somehow aggravated by the aging of the population which increases the proportion of single people.

choose alone

The question that concerns us then sharpens in the form: can we choose alone? And who will choose: the doctor? family ? the patient himself? And when the latter is no longer in a condition to choose, can we apply to him directives that he has written in another state? These are heavy and delicate questions.

Let us first take the patient’s will: if he should not be locked into a previous decision which is always fragile, it should not be obstructed, but on the contrary understood and assisted when it is formulated with awareness and constancy. The rights of conscience can object to the general law. If we must not trivialize euthanasia or assisted suicide, which remain acts experienced as violent even when they are deliverances, we must institute the possibility of it – otherwise the thing risks happening without anyone speak. In this sense, the patient has priority, as long as he can say “I”.

The testimony of relatives

For relatives, it will be said that they should not speak in the place of the silenced patient, and even not imagine themselves too much in his place. The family, the friends, those who accompany and have often carried the patient to the end, as far as possible, can however testify to what the patient’s desires or fears were, his approvals and his refusals, and he is important to make room for it.

And then, finally, there is the solicitude of caregivers, doctors. We say that we must improve palliative care, give it more resources, and that is obvious. But when we talk about refractory suffering, we will look for an alternative in assisted suicide or euthanasia. But it would be better to broaden the meaning of care. We can say that the deep intention of the ban on murder is the requirement to help to live, to take care. But it should be recognized that the underlying ethos of palliative care is precisely to help people die as painlessly as possible.

Upheavals of the desire to live

Yes, therefore, if we open the variables of the rule to the exception desired here, it would have to be applied within the framework of a broad enough conversation to help transgress loneliness, whether it is that of the carer, of the loved one , or of the patient. And the edges of this conversation are not limited to a “for or against” euthanasia. They follow the finer dialectic between the desire to live and the consent to die, which keep exchanging their positions. Let’s not believe too quickly that someone can definitely have consented to die: when we feel pushed out, we want to hang on!

It is good to encourage everything that promotes the perseverance of the desire to live, the desire to tell stories, to come together, to be approved of having existed. Conversely, it is useless to outbid the will to live: someone who is caught up in this exhaustion, this weariness of no longer being able to, cannot be kept alive in some way despite himself, almost by force. , in an absurd and too suffering life. Because life is happy as long as you can be a little careless of yourself! But this carelessness can also occur when one transfers concern for oneself to others. Between the desire to withdraw, to fade away, and the upheavals of the desire to live, it is indeed this subtle oscillation and this very interval that make life, its slightest movements, down to the pressures of the hand, until eyes that open and close.

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🟠📽️#FinDeVie : comment @The cross will deal with the debate, @jchapuis
“We are among those who wonder and even worry about the risks of abuse. But we are above all committed to helping everyone, whatever their convictions, to enter into the complexity of the subject.” pic.twitter.com/vRLTTW8R0u

— The Cross (@LaCroix) December 8, 2022

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