Modern society has made death a taboo
DEAR EDITOR:
The Trudeau government has introduced legislation aimed at making it easier for intolerably ill Canadians to get medical help to end their lives.
The bill would scrap a provision in the law that allows only those already near death to receive medical assistance in dying — as ordered by a Quebec court last fall (National Post).
All this in the interests of compassion: a word which essentially means to suffer with a person in a process of healing rather than in favour of pushing them into non-existence.
Whereas once the great philosophical and religious traditions aided the sick and the dying in making sense of their pain and preparing them for a holy death, modern governments, up to now relying solely on painkillers and anti-depressants, are now moving on to the final solution.
Death has become a practical matter rather than an existential challenge demanding all the resources of a religious and human culture. I cannot penetrate the modern psychology of this understanding of compassion.
The problem of death today, suggests A.A. Gill, is that we are not looking. Few people see their loved ones die. End of life care and funerals are now taken over by professionals. In our society death has become a taboo; something excessively repulsive, based on a recent cultural development.
Those of us who believe that there is life after death have a different view of death, which implies that we should not torture the elderly or wounded people unnecessarily with proposals of medically assisted suicide.
The Irish government in promoting their abortion bill, never once, in my hearing, suggested that it was best to give birth to the child. Will government leaders in Canada pay any attention to our cultural traditions and the traditional family values of millions of people making up the core of our population?
Flannery O’Connor, writes that “sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think that those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” She also writes: “that the central Christian mystery, has for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for” (The Habit of Being).
Fr. Harry Clarke
Penticton