Who knows how I’ll feel if that moment arrives?
Death, like luck, travels in waves. Death’s waves seem to be peaking around me at the moment. Friends’ parents, a colleague’s close mate, my great aunt whose regular visits to death’s door keep getting interrupted by knocks of unexpectedly good health . . . and my friend with young children who just had to decide on his endof-life care plan.
What I hear when I talk to those at the bedsides of the dead or dying is not the same old stuff about ‘‘good innings’’ and ‘‘no regrets’’.
A new conversation is being whispered in the hospital halls and dementia units or joked about uncomfortably after the funeral.
It has to do with how long and how much suffering we can put up with at the end of our own lives.
Before the End of Life Choice Bill was finally considered in Parliament this year after its long journey to the debating chambers, we didn’t have a compelling reason to talk about what our own choices might be if we had an irreversible and terminal medical condition.
But now, with ascension into law nearly inevitable next year and widespread media coverage of euthanasia issues, it forces us to start sharing with our nearest and dearest our thoughts about what we would do if it were us.
We now hear in hushed tones that, for example, he doesn’t want to last that long or she wouldn’t want to be resuscitated in those circumstances or, since I don’t want to be a burden on anyone, you need to finish me off when I can no longer look after myself.
But after hearing these utterances or verbalising them myself, I wonder – when I am eventually in the cold wave of death, when I’m staring emptily at the ceiling at the hospice – if I would in fact want to stay alive for a little while longer.
Just because I predicted back then that I would want assistance to end my life gracefully doesn’t mean that, when I am truly dying, I will want assistance to end my life gracefully.
It’s not just me who thinks like this. Social scientists tell us that humans are horrible at estimating how we will behave or feel in the future.
Decades of studies on affective forecasting demonstrate how people let a variety of biases stop us from accurately guessing how we will respond to a situation that we haven’t yet experienced.
One reason is our failure to understand how we will adapt to new situations; we don’t tend to imagine changes to our values and how much we adjust our thoughts in order to cope with new environments.
Adaptation – physical and emotional -- is our species’ key survival strategy.
Another bias, focalism, tells us that when making a prediction about the impact a state of being might have on us, such as paralysis or being unable to eat without help, we focus solely on the condition, ignoring other factors in our lives that could influence happiness. These might be having excellent care, being stimulated intellectually, or being surrounded by close family and friends.
And then there’s the mistake of ‘‘personality neglect’’, another social science concept that shows how we fail to consider our own personalities when predicting how we will feel and respond to future events.
It seems that at all stages of life, including the very end, our natural dispositions shape how much happiness or displeasure we experience, which could influence the choices we make about if and when we bring our own lives to an end.
So, while I insist at a funeral wake in 2019 that I would prefer to end my suffering should it come to some future imagined state, the truth is, I won’t really know until I experience it myself.
Maybe on my deathbed (small vial of poison at the ready with my palliative care team), I’d want to eke out a few more days to watch my grandkids grow just a little more.
Or, I’d remain optimistic that some new medical magic could quickly U-turn the trajectory of my disease.
Or, that my feelings of being surrounded by a loving bedside tribe outweighed the suffering I was enduring. I don’t know.
In a rare act of agreement with David Seymour, I’ve supported the End of Life Choice Bill from its beginnings; the life and death of Lecretia Seales was the dealmaker for me. I like the idea of everyone with a terminal medical condition having options at the end of their lives to depart this world as they see fit. But given our apparent shortfalls as humans to predict how we will feel then, I question our ability to do so.
I wonder – when I am eventually in the cold wave of death – if I would in fact want to stay alive for a little while longer.