Chapter XYZ

 

AN EASY DEATH

 

Mikhail Epstein

 

Never could America, in any way, be included among the nations that are captivated by the secret of death. Rather, death is understood here as an annoying circumstance of life - the only one which has still not been completely corrected by some sort of technological means. According to local etiquette people do not discuss unpleasant things - and death is the first among these.

     

In Russia people love to note down the circumstances of agony and death, up to the tiniest, most hysterically funny details. I remember a former prisoner of Stalin’s camps laughing while he told about a cave-in at the camp quarry that covered his friend, how his eyes strained and strained as they burst from their sockets... I was surprised at this cheerfulness at the suffering of someone close to him until the former prisoner started laughing just as hard about how someone pulled him off the top bunk by the foot with his own noose so that, although sick, he would not miss work. Laughing, it is true, is not sinful in a country where dying is funny. Where death is not a special guest, but the host at the feast of history, it smiles at everyone, exchanges kisses, pats people on the cheek - such unceremonious manners.

 

In the nineteenth century, from the time of Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Dead House, necrorealism became all but the predominant method of Russian literature and a living corpse its most typical character. So why be surprised that in the twentieth century a

 

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corpse (in the Lenin mausoleum) appeared more alive than the living and sent out directives from Central Square to a constantly dying country. It appears that of all the revolutionary promises, just one would prophetically come to pass: “we shall die as one.” Death became so commonplace and quotidian that the government placed a superstitious ban on it and removed it from philosophy and literature. The government, with its delicate, frayed nerves simply cannot stand talk of rope in a hanged man’s house.

 

In everyday conversation, who died and how, or who finished off whom, is the most heated and animated of topics. Great literature as well, from Platonov’s Foundation Pit to Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago, paints with unchangeing artistic taste the various means for the cessation of life.

 

In America, on the other hand, in no way does the government forbid talk of death and is even glad to recall it in a business-like fashion. On the reverse side of a driver’s license is printed a standardized statement in the name of the possessor (without a signature it is invalid): “Upon my death I hereby donate the following: (1) any organ or tissue, (2) with the exception of the following (list.)” In the Soviet Union such a document would be taken as black humor; in America, however, the government does not joke and does not scare but simply approaches the problem in a reasonable way: If you are allowed to drive a car to your death, then why would you not allow your organs to be put to good use when you no longer need them?

 

To make up for this, private citizens prefer either to have nothing to do with this dark topic, or find the lighter side of it. Our neighbor, whose mother had died, described everything that happened to her as a stroke of good luck: She

 

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did not suffer long, she died easily, simply falling asleep, never to regain consciousness. At times it appears that Americans follow the precept of Voltaire’s simple-minded hero: “All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” But Candide, by the will of his spiteful, European author, goes through a multitude of misfortunes that refute his false optimism, while Americans, who deeply believe in this sweet lie, suceeded in creating something akin to the best of all worlds.

 

And nonetheless, the problem of death, the voluntary exit from life, has not left the pages of the American papers for about twenty years now and attention to it has recently become even more acute. As the Soviet papers would say, this is connected with the growth of American society’s technological capabilities and human potential.

 

Naturally, in America this problem has nothing in common with the theomachist metaphisics that flowered in Dostoevsky’s Russia or in Camus’ France, which says: why would I not kill myself in the throws of a senseless life if I have the right and the wish to assert a final freedom? Another’s will brought me to into this world, but I will leave it by my own will, I do not answer to God so far as I myself am god...

 

No, this strain of the tragic absurd has not even slighty touched the American heart on which is squarely imprinted: “In God we trust.” This same slogan is depicted on every dollar bill, easily uniting a symbol of wealth and a symbol of belief. Such is this robust faith that is attached to the divine joys of this world. I believe in order to live.

 

But what to do with the hopelessly ill, those who suffer

 

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horribly, those to whom medical science itself has delivered a death sentence? And moreover, what if they beg their doctors to ease their exit from life? Should they really prolong their useseless torments? Or should they take pity on them and write out a lethal prescription - make their end easier?

 

In Russia life easily sets man free. At any age. Whether you have put your affairs in order or not, it does not matter, go boldly, wherever you will, be it to hell, be it to heaven. This is a strange worry for Russia: “how to make death easier?” - is it really that difficult?

 

But it is one thing to make death’s approach to man easier - this is Russia. It is quite another to make man’s approach to death easier - this is America. How can we make death cozier, more comfortable for the patient, hand it to him on a platter, nicely wrapped up like a fine imported product? So that he dies right on time, not too early while he can still enjoy life, not too late so he is not tormented. Yesterday there was still hope that he would survive. Tomorrow he will suffer needlessly. This means death should come today. In Russia only great revolutions are planned with such strategic exactitude.

 

But on the other hand, what kind of doctor plans the death of a sick man? And helps him die on time? Would it not be more accurate to qualify a doctor as a murderer if, in response to a tormented patient’s request, he prescribed a lethal dose of pills?

 

Euthanasia, an easy death - this is what they call what is all but the most difficult problem of contemporary medical ethics. As far as that medical technology enables the artificial

 

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extension of man’s life, it poses an ethical question about the expediency of such survival in name only which the patient resists due to his illness, his despair and his awareness of being doomed. Is it worth living with an IV, with electric equipment inserted into the heart and brain, to endure artificial torments for the sake of a few extra months of an almost vegetative existence?

 

For thirty-something years now, in a certain Washington clinic, has lived/not lived a woman in a state of catalepsy, who long ago forgot who she is, and is deprived of the chance of ever remembering it. And there are thousands like her in America, unwittingly doomed, living by the will of doctors. Isn’t this technologically perfected medicine simply refined torture in the name of abstract humanism?

 

An unresolvable paradox. The same ethics that required medicine to prolong a pointless human life by all possible means now rises to the defense of the human right to die according to one’s own will.

 

Incidently, this same problem also splits American society around the arguments regarding abortion. To whom does the life of a foetus belong? Himself? then nobody has the right to take it away. Or the mother? then she is free to deal with the internal life of her own body. Once again the two parties do battle: for freedom of choice and the right to life. Life and freedom - two of the great values which, it turns out, are not so easily reconciled.

 

America has split into two camps along the questions of life and death. On the one hand are the defenders of abortion and euthanasia. They practically never act together, addressing different social sectors and opposite extremes of

 

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existence: birth and death. But their philosophical position is in essence identical: man is as free in birth as he is in death. He is free to give birth to, or not give birth to a conceived being. He is free to continue or to cut off a lingering existence.

 

On the other hand are the defenders of life as such. From the moment when life arises, and until the moment when it fails, nobody has power over it. Life is sacred in and of itself - given by God, it returns to God. And who knows to what torments the artificially aborted foetus is condemned - wandering in blind, unincarnated, unconscious worlds? And who knows to what torments are doomed the other kind of aborted fetuses, those who have taken their own life before their time in search of an easy death? The soul, not having completed its earthly journey, tumbles out into the next world just like a dissected abortion, a bloody clot without organs, without eyes, without spiritual vision, like an aborted child cut out from his mother before his time.

 

Isn’t euthanasia just the same thing as abortion, only not during the ingress to life, but the egress from of it?

 

The arguments in defence of life seem preferable not just from the metaphysical, but also the practical point of view. Imagine that the right to an easy death were legalized and doctors could without fear prescribe poison for the incurably sick. Just such a law protecting euthanasia is already being discussed and prepared for ratification in several states. Will the temptation not be too great: having acknowledged the patient as incurable, to avoid an expensive medical departure and instead slip a few pills - the means of the “final decision” - into his palm. Doesn’t this turn medicine that is preoccupied with an easy death into the opposite of what it

 

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should be, into a workshop of murder?

 

On the other hand, medicine preocupied with survival as such risks turning into a torture chamber. Technology, having given man new power, having endowed him with new freedom, has erased the natural boundary between life and death. This is why a whirlwind of ethical problems now twists on this boundary. This is why the American justice system, maximally weighed down as it is, is tortured by indecision while attempting to indulge first the one side, now the other. First it gives a strict warning to a doctor who taught his patient how to disconnect artificial life support. Then it protects another doctor who openly admitted that he prescribed, at a patient’s request, a terminal dose of sleeping pills.

 

For this same reason an abortion clinic in Washington, already built, could not open for several years on end: every time it was supposed to open, the building was surrounded by crowds of women loudly protesting legalized murder and not allowing the medical personel to get to the building. This year the opening, finally, took place - without warning, on the sly, under condition of complete secrecy.

 

With all the indisputable arguments for life it would be horrible to imagine a world doomed to life, sentenced to life as to a dungeon, without the right to select death. Two great values: life and freedom. But from the tragic discord between them grows a third, perhaps the chief value: having the right to death, to choose life freely.

 

Completing this circle of thoughts brings us back to Russia. There the right to death was guaranteed well before birth and throughout life, where the number of abortions

 

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exceeds the number of births and the number of those being killed has, for a long time, exceeded the number of deaths. Moreover, as proclaimed in the Constitution, the right to death was not guaranteed formally, but with the aggregate means and capabilities of the national government, beginning with the freedom of speech and ending with compulsory service in the military. For all of this every citizen had the absolute right to pay with his life. “There, under days clowdy and short, is born a people for whom death is not painful.” Petrarch wrote this about the north and Pushkin applied it to Russia. (1)

 

But specifically in Russia, where death is so easy, so unavoidable, where there is no other reliable anasthesia then the country’s snowy pall - there, specifically, freedom, in its primordial simplicity, means the right to life - the unlikely, desperate attempt to stay alive.

 

(1) From Petrarch’s Canzone XXVIII, and the epigraph to Chapter six of Eugene Onegin. Pushkin omits a line that reads “[a people] naturally hostile to peace.”

                                                     

March 1991

                                                      Transl. Thomas Dolack

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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