"Death has a way of ringing the bell on all procrastination.
... It is because of the presence of death with us on our life's
journey that we do not fail to take the opportunity to say 'I
love you,' to invest ourselves in primary relationships, to do
what needs to be done now, not tomorrow, to build a better world
now. ... We make life precious by embracing the reality of death,
not by repressing it or denying it."
--
Bishop John Shelby Spong,
address
to the national Hemlock Society
Derek Humphry knows what it's like to help a suffering loved one take her own life. In 1975, the man who would go on to launch a worldwide right-to-die movement agreed to help his wife, Jean, carry out her considered decision to end her long and painful struggle with terminal cancer.
"It's a strenuous task helping somebody to die," the founder of the Hemlock Society told Mountain Xpress. "You've got to be in tune with one another. That's why it's usually between spouses -- not always, but usually. You watch the other person suffering and declining, and if and when they ask you to help them to die, you understand why, because you've been at their bedside for months and months. People who are detached, who don't see what goes on day and night, find it harder, because they don't see the suffering that's going on. Close family members can see what's happening, and if the patient asks to be helped to death, they can understand it. That's what I did.
"And I thought it was a duty of love to do this, because we'd been married for 22 years, she'd been a wonderful wife, and I owed it back to her to do whatever she asked. I would have felt awful if I'd refused her and said, 'Go on suffering until you die.' That's the alternative."
The Asheville chapter of the Hemlock Society will host Humphry on Sunday, April 27, when he visits to speak on the right to die and sign copies of the new edition of his best-selling manual on rational, voluntary euthanasia, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying (Dell Publishing, 2003). The book offers practical advice about the many ways of taking one's own life -- everything from placing a plastic bag over one's head (a particular technique used in combination with sleeping pills is recommended) to running a car in a closed garage (a bad idea, says Humphry -- as with a gun, others can too easily be harmed, and new cars' smog equipment may even render the attempt unsuccessful).
Humphry and other advocates of death with dignity are careful to point out, however, that such advice is intended only for those who have rationally decided that their extreme physical suffering -- as from cancer, AIDS or age-related infirmities -- makes death preferable to life. People who want to commit suicide for psychological reasons -- because they're deeply depressed or have lost all their money, for instance -- need to seek treatment, not kill themselves, these advocates say. Nor do they support forced euthanasia, as opponents sometimes claim.
"We recommend careful safeguards," says Asheville Hemlock Society President Ruth Beard. Someone considering suicide "should be terminally ill, with less than six months to live -- and it should be an incurable condition."
These days, the right-to-die movement is weathering a political backlash from fundamentalist right-to-lifers. Attorney General John Ashcroft recently blocked a 5-year-old law allowing voluntary euthanasia in Oregon, where Humphry lives. And in North Carolina, the state Senate is considering S.B. 145, a bill that would ban physician-assisted suicide, Beard reports.
But locally as well as nationally, the Hemlock Society continues to gain new members, notes Beard, as modern medical technology increasingly prolongs the quantity of life well past the point when its quality is lost. The Asheville chapter (there's another one in Hendersonville) has been in existence for more than a decade; at last count, it included more than 145 active members, she says. Most states (including North Carolina) have repealed old laws against suicide.
"My view is, let [opponents] go their way, and let us go our way," Humphry observes. "In a democratic country like America, we should be able to have voluntary euthanasia for those who want it, and those who don't want it can stay away from it."
Derek Humphry will speak on "The Future of the Right to Die" and sign copies of the new edition of Final Exit at the monthly meeting of the Asheville chapter of the Hemlock Society on Sunday, April 27, 2:30 p.m., at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville (corner of Edwin Place and Charlotte Street). Free admission -- donations will be welcomed. For more information, see www.FinalExit.org or www.hemlock.org, or call 253-4596.