Life, Reconsidered
Dying men need reasons to live.
The dog lies strapped to the veterinarian’s table, in the room they call “the Comfort Room.” It’s decorated to look the way it sounds. On the wall at her back, there’s a large painting of green trees. The counter at her head is filled with cheerful small things—a little wooden sculpture of pet and master, a framed picture of someone else’s dog, a plant. Her leash also lies there, set apart to be taken home when it’s all over. Her blanket hangs down off the bed. She doesn’t need it now.
This dog’s name is—was—Annie. Her master’s name is Les Landry. On Twitter, he goes by the handle @LandryLes. His adjustable username currently reads, “Les Landry is ready for #MAID.” The hashtag stands for “Medical Assistance in Dying.”
Landry is part of a whole “MAiD-curious” community in Canada, highlighted in a devastating recent report by Rupa Subramanya at Common Sense. Subramanya boldly exposes the program’s subtle predation on society’s most vulnerable, who see death as a tempting escape from a slow-grinding struggle with poverty, disability, and trauma. Landry, 65, calls it “the new safety net.” Wheelchair-bound, scarred by child abuse, and suffering from epilepsy, Landry believes that there’s “a tipping point where you can’t afford to live,” and he’s reached that tipping point. This sentiment is echoed by 40-year-old Mitchell Tremblay, an ex-prostitute and addict who believes MAiD will give him “dignity.” His Twitter bio reads, “Loser, failure and worthless disabled guy who gave up long ago.” Subramanya also highlights a disabled mother-daughter pair who have decided they can’t go on indefinitely eking out their disability support.
But her centerpiece case may be her most chilling: a 23-year-old young man named Kiano, who suffered from depression, diabetes, and partial blindness, and had made his own appointment with death without his mother knowing. He wasn’t in chronic pain, and he wasn’t facing poverty. He just decided he would prefer not to live. Through a chance log-in to his e-mail, his mother discovered the plan and staged a vigorous intervention. The ensuing publicity made the would-be death doctor so nervous that he dropped the appointment. Now the true battle begins for her: Convincing her own son that his life is worth living.
She will be far from the only mother fighting such a battle, as the expansion of the program to “mature minors” looms horrifyingly on the horizon. How is “mature” to be defined, exactly? Who knows? And what does it matter?
It’s worth looking at how Subramanya hangs the frame for her report. She begins with the well-worn argument peddled by many an “old-style” euthanasia advocate: People for whom death is imminent and life brings unbearable pain shouldn’t be forced to suffer. They must be allowed to choose the time and manner of their death. We might picture someone elderly in the late stages of cancer, or advanced ALS. The “reasonable, moderate” view, quietly put into practice by many doctors for many years, is that helping such people to die is a mercy. But reasonable moderates might reasonably recoil from the horrors unleashed by MAiD in Canada. They didn’t mean it to be like that. All they wanted was…
But of course, if assisted suicide isn’t inherently immoral, then what exactly is their argument for why a depressed young man with no future shouldn’t have just as much freedom to kill himself? Or even a depressed boy with no future? Their only out is to punt to some utilitarian calculus about how it’s not as clear that such situations might not change for the better in the future, about how children are immature and indecisive, and so on and so forth. If at any point they break down and say, “Oh hell. It’s just wrong to kill innocent people,” they’ve cut off the moderate, reasonable branch they were attempting to perch on all along. Such is the old liberal’s eternal dilemma.
For the rest of us, the task that lies before us is two-fold: Such laws must be fought, but so must the forces which are delivering people over to them. MAiD is first and foremost a business calculation, based on the laws of supply and demand. The powers that be have rightly—if ruthlessly—perceived the sheer amount of resources they will save, on the sheer number of people who would rather die than live.
Some might frame this as a crisis of economic social justice, declaring that the answer is yet more expanded government welfare. There may be many well-meaning voices in this chorus, sincerely horrified and eager to ease the burden of life for people in need. I remember once seeing a GoFundMe circulate for a Canadian woman who said if she couldn’t afford a particular living situation she was aiming for, she’d go through with MAiD. I felt some mixed feelings about this at the time. On the one hand, it was natural that people should want to help her. On the other hand, I hoped someone was also attempting to get through to this woman that whether or not she met her GoFundMe goal, nobody had the right to murder her, including herself.
And meanwhile, what of Kiano, with his depression and diabetic blindness? It wasn’t poverty that was driving him to make that appointment. It wasn’t lack of a GoFundMe. It was aimlessness. It was hopelessness. It was despair. The kind of despair a thousand disability checks will never cure.
In reflecting on this, I’ve been moved to revisit two essays from two different young writers I know, both in their 20s, who both struggle with severely debilitating chronic illness. One of them, Sam Kronen, might be known to a couple of you through his sharp social criticism in outlets like Quillette and City Journal. Besides writing incisively about issues like American race relations, Sam has also written with profound honesty about his experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—one of those “invisible diseases” which is barely understood, let alone curable. My other friend, Nolan Watson, is unlike Sam not a professional writer and is even more limited by his muscular dystrophy. He is confined to a wheelchair, struggles to breathe without machine assistance, and can barely be understood when he speaks, because his voice is so ruined. Yet he still manages to craft spare, precise bits of prose and poetry. In their very different ways, both Sam and Nolan have eloquently grappled with the mystery of their suffering, and the mystery of what still gives their lives enduring purpose.
Whenever Sam tries to convey what his condition means, he feels like he fails. “It’s like bearing witness to the fallout of your own death,” he writes, “and being forced to live amid the ruins.” His decline began just as he was coming of age, a fit young man like any other fit young man eager to make his mark, find love, and find success. Instead, he found himself trapped in a slow-motion nightmare, as one body system after another began malfunctioning. Sometimes his problems traced back to whatever had kicked off his decline, while others were catalyzed by prescription drugs that only made everything worse. Today, he is pushing thirty, with no relief in the present and no clear hope for the future: “There is just no guarantee what will happen to you, and many sufferers opt for suicide rather than finding out. You are on your own with this. Nobody is coming to save you.”
The worst of it is how his illness “reverses the flow of incentives that otherwise propel human beings toward their own potential.” Because he’s so physically fragile, all the things he might try to build up his own strength or be useful to others hold the risk of making him sicker. He wants more than anything to say “yes” to life. But it’s hard to do this “when life is saying ‘nope’ back at you.” Occasionally, with great effort, he manages to write something, but it must be cobbled together over those very short windows of time in which his mind is able to focus on anything. Meanwhile, he has to subject himself to the repeated indignity of selling his victim status to every new doctor, every new social worker with whom he must negotiate for his disability allowance. All the while, his body is at once begging for and denying itself relief. “Imagine being tired and yet unable to rest, hungry and yet unable to eat.”
And yet, Sam hasn’t put himself out of his misery. In spite of everything, he has an unquenchable will to live. He has drawn inspiration from Viktor Frankl’s revelation that man can withstand any test, provided he can give it meaning—specifically, an outward-focused meaning, meaning that flows from what he can give to his fellow man. “It doesn’t make sense to ask what the meaning of life is; the key realization is that it is we who are asked—it is life that poses the question only we as individuals can answer.” This is his own personal hero’s journey: a hero’s journey of suffering, in continual hot pursuit of the highest good he can conceive. And somehow, through that suffering, he’s discovered a paradox: that “the more pain we experience while remaining conscious and without coarsening emotionally, the deeper our capacity to experience joy becomes.”
Is this faith? Sam supposes it’s a kind of faith—in his own life in particular, in human life in general. But faith in the conventional religious sense still eludes him. For now, “God is anything that keeps me from committing suicide.”
This could be described as a kind of noble paganism. Yet it is not the paganism of those self-described “death doulas” who stand ready to make people’s experience with MAiD as comfortable as possible. “What are your ultimate comforts?” one of them asks, in an aggressively pink-fonted Q&A. “What clothing and physical comforts feel supportive? Is there a particular blanket, heating pad, pillow, crystal, or photograph that helps you to feel grounded?” The “supporting” relatives or family are similarly encouraged to pamper themselves, perhaps even “create an altar” to the beloved’s memory, including items like photographs, a candle, a rose quartz, and/or “an offering for spirit” (unspecified). In this paganism, the greatest evil is suffering, and the greatest good is comfort. This is the ultimate curvatus in se—the curving in on self that finally destroys self.
For now, Sam’s fiercely concentrated outward focus, his intense curiosity to know what might still be quarried out of his pain for the good of others, is saving him from that fate. And for a while, this also sustained my friend Nolan—that is, until Nolan realized he needed more.
I first met Nolan through a small online community of people who were drawn to the lectures of Jordan Peterson. Nolan had grown up in a charismatic Christian church, but nothing had stuck. He writes that he “needed a Christianity that could stand up to the dark,” and the Christianity he’d grown up with “wasn’t going to cut it.” As his muscles slowly wasted, the problem of evil was eating away at him—literally. He was taught that good things happened to good people. But that didn’t seem to be what the Bible said. In the Bible, “not only do bad things happen to godly people, they also happen to God.”
After quitting what looked like a dead-end path through university, in the third year of an engineering degree he would never be able to use anyway, Nolan spent his days listening to podcasts. This was where he first discovered Peterson. Peterson offered him essentially the same revelation Frankl offered my friend Sam—that suffering is overcome through the search for meaning. The work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn further deepened and strengthened this insight for him. It was sustaining. It was useful. And yet, for reasons he couldn’t fully articulate, it was somehow not quite enough.
Nolan’s road back to Christianity, as he recalls it, wasn’t a conventional path from premise to premise to conclusion. He became more intuitively than logically convinced that Christianity had instantiated itself in the world through intelligible patterns. And at the heart of them all, manifesting all in their fulness, was this singular man, Jesus. Once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it.
And this, in the end, must be where all of this tends, for all of us, in all of our suffering. We may begin to find our way there by something like the path Sam maps out. But our courage, our curiosity, our resilience, all have their eventual breaking point. As Nolan writes, in a poem inspired by Dante’s Inferno:
The dark storm of death loomed Fear struck like lightning My hope like hail fell Wings not my own Rescued me from hell
“I can’t unsee Christ,” Nolan concludes. “I can’t unsee that things fit together, that the world is made of intelligible patterns, and that Christ is the cornerstone holding them together. The rejected cornerstone, because that too is part of the pattern.”
It is also part of the pattern for a third friend of mine, a Christian friend who spotted me when I was still a young writer and read this newsletter regularly until he fell desperately ill this summer. I’ve mentioned him in writing about suicide and depression before, because he talked very openly about his struggles in these areas. Through punishing self-doubt, he constantly had to remind himself that his life was valuable, that it had purpose, and that all of this was grounded in a Creator who delighted over him. It was one thing to say this, but it was another thing for him to keep believing it, day in and day out. Still, he persevered. He adopted two children, which gave him great joy. Then tragedy struck, in the form of a virus that sent him into a coma and nearly killed him. Today, he’s alive and awake, but paralyzed. His family says he is still very much himself. He is surrounded by family and friends committed to his care. But the horrible thought won’t leave me: What if he wasn’t? What if the people responsible to assist him in living were encouraged to assist him in dying? After all, it’s what he’d sometimes thought he wanted himself, many times—was it not?
Dying men need a reason to live. And we are all of us dying, always. And so the question has been asked of us, and must be answered: What does it mean?
God help those without an answer. God help those without a reason.