All is Not Beauty

But it is good anyway.

Housekeeping: I have had an influx of new subscribers recently, so welcome all! This is a teaser/preview for a post you can read in full if you become a paid-tier subscriber for $5 a month or $50 a year. As you can see if you browse the site, I prioritize consistently providing paid content for my subscribers. I intend to keep up my pace of at least 3-5 exclusive pieces per month, along with any free content. Readers like you are providing a considerable percentage of my income as a writer/teacher right now. As we come up on the end of year, please consider treating yourself or a friend to some takes that I like to think you won’t find anywhere else. Thanks!

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She was only 37, but she looks at least 45 in the video. The 3-minute ad, presented by fashion brand La Maison Simons, has now introduced over a million people to Jennyfer Hatch: a woman who wanted to die, but also wanted to say that life was beautiful. In her memory, it is titled, “All Is Beauty.”

YouTube allows you to see which part of a video is the “most played.” In this case, it’s the very first few seconds, in what appears to be a small hospital room. Hatch’s wearily soothing voiceover reflects, “Dying in a hospital is not what’s natural, that’s not what’s soft. In these kind of moments, you need softness.” Suddenly, the camera pulls out, and the “hospital” turns out to be a fake set carried away on the ocean. It’s a masterly sequence. The people who did this know what they’re doing.

The rest of the ad charts a mesmeric, dream-like course through the last days of Jennyfer Hatch’s life, when the fashion company arranged for her and her friends to make a variety of high-budget final memories for the camera. Jennyfer, who suffered from Ehlers Danlos syndrome, welcomed the chance to collaborate on a project that would make an artistic statement out of her choice to commit assisted suicide through Canada’s MAiD program.

She looks fragile yet luminous, beautiful in the natural way of women who don’t think about their beauty. She seems to love life intensely, even as she is preparing to ask for death. “Last breaths are fragile,” her voiceover says, as she blows and pops a giant bubble in the blinding sun. In another scene, we see her sitting in a makeshift tattoo parlor in the woods, getting what looks like an infinity sign burned into her skinny bicep. We see other flashes of her handing out cheesecake, listening to cello music, throwing her head back and laughing in slow motion. It’s all so precise. So crafted. The final shot is an aerial view of a beach where she has painstakingly traced out elaborate spirals in the sand with a fat stick. And so they meet at the edge, the water and the spiral-sand, the natural and the unnatural.

I’ve been pleased to see that the ad has generated a fair amount of backlash. A quick scroll through the YouTube comments section reveals that a good number of ordinary people found it creepy. On Twitter, among others, Jordan Peterson’s daughter strongly condemned it as “unacceptable.” This is good. It’s good to see that there’s still enough common sense in the air for something like this to shock people.

I wrote about Canada and MAiD last month, in a long piece about suicide and the struggle to infuse a painful life with meaning and purpose. I discussed the sad case of Kiano, a young man going blind with diabetes whose alert mother narrowly rescued him from his appointment with death. At the time, I didn’t know that my friend Meg Basham at the Daily Wire was interviewing Kiano for a broadcast on the law. It was just released, and I commend it to everyone—a short program, only about 20 minutes long, but a chilling listen.

Kiano sounds articulate and matter-of-fact, though his voice wavers with anger when he recalls how his pursuit of death was slowed down and eventually thwarted—at first by the hospital’s own mundane incompetence, at last by the love of his mother. She has threatened to take him to court and take guardianship over him if he attempts to keep pursuing his plan.

Here Kiano describes what it’s been like to go blind:

If you’re looking for something in a room, if you’re missing something, the first sense to acquire that item, that person, whatever, it’s always first eyes and vision. And after losing the vision, I felt like if there’s no prosthetic for this condition, if there’s no alleviating this condition, then why would I continue with such a terrible disease already, with diabetes? I have to deal with diabetes and now all these accommodations I have to make for the blindness? It doesn’t make sense to work on your life when you’re not being paid with life’s joys, with life’s gifts, you know?

Kiano’s image of trying to find something or someone lost haunts me, as someone who frequently loses things and suffers from an over-anxious attachment to things I especially don’t want to lose. I can’t imagine what sort of panic I would be going through if I were in his place.

But one could, of course, legitimately point out that his reasoning is supremely self-centered, focused entirely on whether he is being “paid” enough by life for his efforts. Never mind his mother, who has proven she cares deeply enough to summon a whole social media storm on his behalf, a storm fit to spook the most mercenary death doctor. Now his last dream has been shattered—the dream of dying on his own terms, serenaded by a playlist full of Kanye West and Drake.

He goes on:

In my mind, it’s playing like this. It’s going, I’m gonna go to sleep tonight, or I’m gonna go to sleep now, and I’m not gonna have to test my blood sugar tomorrow. I’m not gonna have to give myself the needle when I wake up. I’m not gonna have to use my walking stick to walk around to go to the bathroom because I don’t know this place. I’m not gonna have to do any of that. I’m gonna go to sleep so happy, not even hesitating to close my eyes. And that’s what I was looking forward to.

This dovetails with comments at the end from California hospice physician Leslee Cochrane (whose religious liberty lawsuit I somehow missed early this year—protesting legislation that would force him to give patient referrals for assisted suicide). Cochrane notes that statistically, most people who seek suicide are not seeking it as a relief from intense chronic pain. Rather, they are facing some loss of autonomy, something that will make their lives a burden on others, something that deprives them of control over their deaths. This is where Kiano sits now—feeling less than autonomous, feeling like a burden, and besides everything else, feeling bored. And who wouldn’t?

But of course, it works better for propaganda purposes to lead with the extreme cases. In his best-selling memoirs, the great British actor/writer Dirk Bogarde eloquently conjured up terribly vivid scenes from his World War II experience as part of his public advocacy for euthanasia. One man’s death in particular would always haunt him. The poor devil was blown apart but still alive and begging the very young Bogarde to kill him. Bogarde’s hands shook so much he couldn’t load his revolver, and someone else beat him to it. He would recall how many doctors in the field had quietly hastened the end for their suffering patients. He framed this as the only sensible human thing to do, when a man is suffering so much.

Yet ironically, when Bogarde was old and demanding euthanasia for himself, he was not in agony, physically or mentally. He had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left side, but he wasn’t in intense pain, and he had even been enjoying his little hospital stay—there were books to read and nurses to charm, after all. But he assumed this state of affairs would only be temporary. When his nephew, Brock, wheeled him in to receive the bad news from his medical team, he proceeded to throw a small fit. “If I’m going to be paralysed and in a wheelchair for the rest of my life,” he announced, “I’d much rather be given something and put to sleep. I want euthanasia.” Here everyone turned very red. There was some awkward murmuring. Bogarde’s nephew tactfully whisked him away, and once they were alone, the younger man put the proud, vain old man in his place. “Look,” he said, “This is your situation.” So it wasn’t the situation Bogarde had fantasized about. So what? That wasn’t the fault of all the doctors and nurses he had just selfishly insulted. “A fine way of thanking them for all their kindness and help in trying to get you better, to ask for euthanasia when you’re not even in pain!” And a fine way of thanking Brock for all he had done, though Brock didn’t add this. It was understood. Chastened, Bogarde meekly asked, “What do I do?” “Go and have physio,” Brock advised, “and work really hard. See what they can do for you, and what you can do for them.”

Brock’s advice is something to remember for all of us who are relatively able-bodied and young, but who have thought quietly, “Oh no. That could be me some day.” Where that is helplessness. That is dependency. That, as C. S. Lewis’s character Jill shudders to picture in The Last Battle, is growing “old and stupid at home” and perhaps going about “in a bath-chair,” and then dying, in some extremely mundane unromantic way.

At the end of his life, Bogarde would recall his last walk on his way to have the operation where he would suffer his post-operative stroke. Though stubbornly areligious, he could only “thank God” in hindsight for his ignorance that he would never again be able to do anything for himself. Who knows what he would have done? It didn’t matter now. He was still alive, and getting used to it.

It is now one month and six days since Jennyfer Hatch has been dead. It is two months and one day since Kiano should have been dead. When Meg left off with him, he was feeling a little happy for the first time in a while: He had talked for hours on the phone with a girl from Tinder. They seemed to hit it off. They liked the same things. She was curious and asking questions about his blindness, but she wasn’t treating it as a deal-breaker. So he asked her if she’d like to go on a date. She said yes.

“There is still so much beauty,” Jennyfer says in the ad. “You just have to be brave enough to see it.” Words that could mean many things. Words that could mean something Jennyfer did not choose for them to mean. Words that could mean something for Kiano now, if only he is brave enough to see.