Thinking about Death

It was early on February 15 that I started writing this article, for it turned out that my wife June and I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about death on Valentine’s Day.

Our Sunday School class discussion that morning as well as the movie we watched that evening were both about death. We also were sad to hear that two people in our circle of acquaintances had died that day.  

Death in “Fidelity”

On the morning of Valentine’s Day, the Sunday School class had a long and fruitful discussion of “Fidelity,” Wendell Berry’s short story first published in 1992. It centers around the death of an 82-year-old man—the very age I am now.

In that intriguing story, Burley is seriously ill, so his family and neighbors, wanting to do something for him, take him, without him being able to give his assent, to a hospital in Louisville where he is hooked up to all sorts of life-lengthening devices. But he was deprived of his right to die with dignity.

Death in Blackbird

That evening we happened upon Blackbird, a 2019 Prime Video movie that we had never heard of—and which was panned by the movie reviewers we read after we watched it. But we thought it dealt with the planned death of Lily, the central character, in a thought-provoking way.

Lily has a serious degenerative disease. It seems that soon she will lose all ability to function as a normal human being, likely even to lose the ability to swallow. Before that happens, she wants to have an enjoyable weekend with her family and then drink the lethal potion procured by her doctor husband.

Choosing death with dignity rather than having to suffer and/or to exist in a prolonged vegetative state is the issue in this movie, similar to that of “Fidelity.”

Death Control as Well as Birth Control?

Contraception, commonly called birth control, has long and consistently been opposed by the Roman Catholic Church—and in recent decades by an increasing number of conservative evangelicals. But birth control is legal and widely practiced in the U.S. and Europe.

Has the time now come for wider acceptance of, and more legal provision for, what might be called death control? Note that whereas birth control is taking means to prevent pregnancy/birth, death control as I am using the term here is taking means to hasten death.

Death control is not a widely used term—and sometimes it is employed to refer to efforts to prevent death just as birth control is a term used to prevent pregnancy/birth. But I am using the term to refer to suffering, terminally ill people taking the initiative to end their lives.

Of course, there are strong religious and ethical arguments against all forms of death control. Again, the Roman Catholic Church and conservative evangelicals are at the forefront of that opposition. Birth and death should be completely left to God, they say, and humans should yield to God’s will.

Similarly, there was a time when it was widely thought that vaccines interfered with the natural order, or the divine order, of things and should be spurned. For that reason, in the 18^th century U.S., some religious people saw vaccines as “the devil’s work.”

In much the same way, birth control opponents through the years have also seen using “artificial means” to prevent pregnancy to be attempts to usurp God’s work in creating new human life.

The Roman Catholic Church, for example, teaches that using contraception is "intrinsically evil," for it gives human beings the power to decide when a new life should begin whereas that power really belongs to God.

Death control is staunchly opposed for the same reason: the power to decide when life should end, they declare, also belongs only to God.

But for those who see no ethical problem with birth control, or vaccines, shouldn’t the prudent use of death control also be considered ethically permissible?

(I am planning to post more about this controversial topic on March 5.)