Goodbye Marie, your message was heard
IT SEEMS inevitable that, just as legislation for abortion and divorce were introduced against a backdrop of painfully slow social progress and bitter public debate, a law on assisted suicide will, at some stage, be introduced. Of course, nothing is ever guaranteed but if anyone has pushed the prospect of right-todie legislation closer then it is Marie Fleming, who died this weekend after more than 20 years battling MS.
Marie’s High Court bid to have partner Tom Curran help her end her life and the couple’s subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court were defeated.
However, Marie won another important prize – the hearts and minds of many people with rigid and preconceived views about the justifiability of euthanasia.
Contemplating end-of-life issues such as mercy killings and euthanasia is deeply upsetting and we would not be human if we found it otherwise. But until Marie Fleming brought her case to court, the subject was almost taboo. Euthanasia was still too far out and liberal for most people and an ethical minefield for traditional Catholics.
But we had to grow up a bit when Marie Fleming presented the heartbreaking facts of her life. When she spoke about how a cruel disease was slowly destroying her, our fears about normalising suicide and our faith in the dignity of suffering suddenly seemed like empty pieties.
AFEW years ago Philip Nitschke, the self-styled Doctor Death, came to Dublin to show his ‘death machine’ – a fairly basic contraption that allows people to chemically kill themselves at the push of a button. He gave his demonstration in a community hall because no hotel would allow him hire a room.
There were no more than 20 people at the meeting – one was Tom Curran – and there was also a middle-aged man who resignedly told me that he had been diagnosed with a debilitating illness and that he was looking to eventually end his life. He was lucid, articulate and calm, yet I almost fainted from the shock of what he had said.
It was the same for many people at Marie Fleming’s court case. How the tears flowed when she spoke about being thumped on the back to stop suffocation, about the massive two-hour ordeal of taking a shower.
She described pain so searing that she was afraid her head would ‘split open’. She said she had seriously considered killing herself three years before, when she could have managed it on her own but Tom had persuaded her to wait. She said that she regretted that decision.
When she testified, the judges sat beside her because her voice was so weak. ‘When you have to be showered, toileted and fed, you start to feel like a nobody,’ she whispered. ‘I want to go peacefully, in my own home, with the people I love around me.’
The High Court said she was one of the most remarkable witnesses it ever encountered.
But all the sympathy and admiration in the world didn’t add up to legal change and the couple went home emptyhanded.
In the end, Marie Fleming had the ‘peaceful death in her own home’ that she had longed and fought for. I’m sure that is a comfort to her husband and her two adult children amid a far greater sorrow – that Marie Fleming was only 59 and would have given anything to stay alive and recover. It was that love of life, palpable in everything from the careful way she dressed to what she said and did, that made Marie Fleming such a powerful pioneer of the right to die.