Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to Fail Honourably

For the medical profession, death is failure. Doctors, it seems, are willing to supervise any degree of physical, emotional, and even spiritual torture to avoid it as long as there is money available to finance it. And if there isn’t, then according to the socially-minded, society has failed on its responsibilities.

I think such sentiments are quite correct when it comes to accidents and acute conditions that are subject to healing and mitigation. But chronic degenerative illness like cancer and dementia are another matter entirely. In so many cases death is not failure but the best conceivable outcome, especially when it is the clear desire of the one who suffers from the condition.

Criminal law tends to keep medics towing the party line in most countries. But the arguably greater power of family emotion is what justifies the pain imposed on chronic sufferers either directly by various invasive therapies or indirectly by the warehousing of human beings in care homes. Families are the one’s who insist upon such ‘care’ regardless of the consequences for the one who suffers. They want life, often at any cost.

That this may be selfishness disguised as love is not a civilised topic of discussion. Before a crisis, it is morbid to bring up such things; during a crisis, emotions of impending loss dominate everyone’s mind, including the mind of the victim of such emotions. Many pray for continued life, even the most impaired, when it is obvious to any outsider that death is a far superior state.

Cory Taylor suggests that talking about death, particularly self-inflicted death, is more effective than prayer. For her, life is not best described as a gift but as a loan, perhaps like a library book. It can be returned before the due date as it were. Just the thought of this possibility provides comfort and may even prolong life by mitigating what can seem like endless pain. For those whose lives medical technology has allowed to become overdue, assisted dying is a way to pay off the fines painlessly.

Most conversations we do have about dying avoid the main issues: pain and sadness. What else is there to talk about really? But what good would it do to ‘dwell’ on such horrible topics? Well possibly quite a lot. Much of grief involves things left unsaid, including the unsaid fear of the one dying as well as the fear of loss by others. It seems to me that grieving together about impending death is therapeutic for everyone. Setting a date for one’s demise could just be the catalyst necessary as a ‘conversation starter.’ If that sounds to crass, perhaps that’s a symptom of the problem.

The substance of Taylor’s book is reminiscence - the tensions, misapprehensions, mistakes, and regrets of her life. For her, writing is therapy. “I still write so as not to feel alone in the world,” she says. So of course she creates a story of her life, a story which is typical in its inevitable sadness - family breakup, sibling estrangement, and imagining what could have been. What gives her the courage to write through her increasingly enfeebling condition is the knowledge that her stash of Chinese suicide poison is secure and within reach. As she says: “Even if I never use the drug, it will still have served to banish the feeling of utter helplessness that threatens so often to overwhelm me.”

I don’t know if Taylor used that stash. But it would make sense if she did. Upon finishing the book, I thought of the exhortation of St. Thomas More, quoted from his Utopia in Dignitas’s brochure on assisted dying:

“I have already told you with what care they look after their sick, so that nothing is left undone that can contribute either to their ease or health: and for those who are taken with fixed and incurable diseases, they use all possible ways to cherish them, and to make their lives as comfortable as possible. They vi­sit them often, and take great pains to make their time pass off easily: but when any is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, are become a burden  to  themselves  and  to all about them, and they have really outlived themselves, they should no longer nourish such a rooted distemper, but choose rather to die, since they cannot live but in much misery: being assured, that if they thus deliver themselves from torture, or are willing that others should do it, they shall be happy after death. Since by their acting thus, they lose none of the pleasures but only the troubles of life, they think they behave not only reasonably, but in a manner consistent with religion and piety; because they follow the ad­vice given them by their priests, who are the expounders of the will of God. Such as are wrought on by these persuasions, ei­ther starve themselves of their own accord, or take opium, and by that means die without pain. But no man is forced on this way of ending his life; and if they cannot be persuaded to it, this does not induce them to fail in their attendance and care of them; but as they believe that a vo­luntary death, when it is chosen upon such an authority, is very honourable.”

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