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A time to live and a time to die

By Clark Nida

An old couple have been found dead at their home in Northampton. The house was unheated. The man had died from hypothermia (although he had lung cancer) and his wife from a heart attack. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-11056870

Now, one sick old person found dead is happenstance. Two together is redolent of neglect: it suggests that someone was in need of help and didn’t get it. The local authority and various social services had a big heart searching about it – and exonerated themselves. They had done all they could for the old couple, who had refused professional assistance.

My attitude to stories like this has changed with passage of time. In the days when I had aged parents to keep an eye on, who lacked a proper appreciation of what was good for them (which was to live their lives for the greatest convenience of those who were going to have to come and pick them off the floor), I would have thrown up my hands in exasperation at the behaviour of the said couple. They had not co-operated with people who wanted to help them. They were their own worst enemies. People should be defended from themselves, not allowed to proceed blithely towards inevitable shipwreck, with its consequent disgrace on all those folk statutorily obliged to keep an eye on their welfare. And so on, and so on.

Nowadays I am more set in my ways and feel I know what’s best for myself. There’s a time to live, says the preacher, and a time to die. I have seen independent old people dragged off to concentration camps – pardon, care-homes – for no better reason than they couldn’t smell gas any more and in consequence were at hazard of leaving the gas-stove turned on and unlit.

Nowadays there are low-price gas-detectors available, and all sorts of alternative ways of producing hot tasty food, so that doesn’t work any more as an excuse for keeping a tidy town by carting off a shabby old soul. It is my greatest dread that one day I’ll fall into the hands of some jobsworth who doesn’t know how I live – doesn’t know anything about my needs and aspirations – which won’t stop them having cut-and-dried opinions about such things. They will take away my license to live in independence and drop me in a granny-bin, thereby ensuring I have a miserable death and not a reasonably congenial one (as congenial, at least, as I can contrive in the circumstances).

It is one of the achievements of my parents’ generation to have come up with the notion of inalienable human rights, to replace the Nazi notion that your life and possessions are simply granted to you on an ongoing basis by the society in which you live – and can be withdrawn if you don’t behave. The right to life is one such inalienable right.

However there is no corresponding right to die. It would have to be phrased very carefully so that it didn’t turn into a duty to die. How about if we said that people should be left to die provided they can do it tidily – and not leave their smelly bodies cluttering-up an abandoned house with unmade beds and a sink full of washing-up?