Do It Yourself, Pussy
A Rage Fueled Rant on Assisted Suicide
Shanti De Corte A 23 year old French Woman has died via assisted suicide. She was 17 when she survived a suicide attack in Rome… despite suffering no physical injury she developed PTSD and 6 years later was given the fatal injections after a panel of doctors signed off on it.
This is not an isolated incident. I hear stories almost every month of young to middle aged people with decades left to live, often with some physical ailment not even catastrophically disabling (loss of sight in one eye, chronic pain, disability of a limb… things vastly less than paraplegia)… and many that are effectively assisted suicides on mental health grounds alone… I can no longer find the story, but was explicitly assisted suicide for chronic depression.
Now there have been many pieces about the slippery slope of assisted suicide and moral arguments… and of course there are going to some progressives or ardent libertarians who insist this is all a perfectly fine choice for a consenting adult to make… but I don’t really care about all of that…
The overwhelming sentiment I have to all of this is crude but simple:
DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY
The idea someone with less than full locked-in syndrome should get medically assisted suicide is not only insane… its aesthetically revolting.
If you can't summon the will to do it yourself even with full use of your physical faculties (of which suicide only requires one functional finger), then clearly you aren't emotionally competent to assign the task to someone else, and are quite frankly beneath such a grandiose gesture.
I've read multiple books by men who committed sepuku. One was a westerner who was paralyzed from the chest down (and didn't feel a thing)... another was a Japanese writer who, for a myriad of psychological and philosophical reasons, choose to do so in all its pain despite being in fine (actually peak) physical shape, Both of these I found eminently respectable. Whether one agreed with either man, the courage and will involved in either act revealed a beauty of spirit and rendered their logic something that had to be engaged with....
For adults (allegedly physically and mentally competent according to the state that accepts their signature) to choose not just death, but death in the hands of some bureaucrat/matriarch appointed by the state and medical establishment... to seek the return to the womb, and infantilizing comfort of some schoolmarm telling them "everything will be ok", of the disgusting toxic surrender to the surrogate mothering of a "Death Doula"…
This deserves not our pity or concern but our contempt and hatred.
.
Say what you will about school shooters or suicide bombers... of the columbine shooters or 9/11 hijackers...Their rejection of this life and the world had the grandiosity and horror such a choice deserved. In their pain, rage, hate, and nihilism they at least had the dignity to let out a primal scream in their rejection of life.
At the hour and venue of their choosing they made their statements, and expressed everything they felt was a summation of their lives without even a thought to compromise... what statement are these assisted suicides making!?
To decide, out of all places on earth, you want to die in a hospital surrounded by the beeps and stench of piss covered by industrial cleaner? To choose for the hour of your demise the half hour slot the office clerk could find on the schedule? To choose as your last confessor the obese nurse some state bureaucrat selected out of the set who were working that day?
This is contemptable. The final farce of the cradle to grave welfare and biomedical security state.
I imagine these depressive but physically fine adults hoping that maybe this extreme expression, this final most extreme plea for help will extract from the uncaring state the love and affection their teachers promised but never delivered. That they might finally receive the love all the utilitarian and progressive rhetoric promised them... that the institutions they've come to see as father, mother, and lover will react to their pleas with all the affection and benevolence they've been taught to expect from neither parent, priest, or partner...
maybe as the bored RN tells them "Its alright, just a little sleep" they'll delude themselves into thinking that's what they've received... the matriarchy's most intimate soothing coo...
.
These people and institutions deserve our hate not for taking life but for the ritualistic mockery they make doing it... The Aztec heart cutters at least had a style and didn't lie about their knives... and the sun god was vastly more appeased than whatever "Comfort and dignity" is supposed to be assuaged by the syringes, hypocrisies, and economical hospital decoration.
The final sublimation of that most extreme, personal, and human of choices into the banal indifference of the bureaucratic state.
.
If someone is to reject life and all bonds of the living, then let them lead the police on a high speed chase before crashing into a wall… let them go to Vegas and drink themselves to death… let them wander off into the pale white of an ice-flow or chart their boat into the eye of the hurricane... let them blast their brains out on the floor of the state senate, or commit seppuku in the magic kingdom under the unblinking gaze of mickey's plastic mask... let them crash planes and bulldozers into buildings, or their bodies into the surf or concrete after defiant jumps...
And if one lacks the will and resolve to express their death with all the violence and horror a choice to take one’s life deserves… then clearly they also lack the seriousness to surrender their life to another.
Let them prove they truly lived at least a minute before they died. Let out a primal scream before disappearing beyond the vanishing point.
> I've read multiple books by men who committed sepuku. One was a westerner who was paralyzed from the chest down...
A man who spent his last months on earth writing a manifesto, pleading that his readers support the legalization of suicide. Who wanted desperately to die in bed, surrounded by his loved ones, after bidding them good-bye. Who instead died alone, having concealed his intentions and true feelings from them for months for fear they would put him into protective custody and close his last avenue of escape.
Clayton would have gladly taken the ugly compromise of assisted suicide over the horror he had to endure.
Good article, and ultimately where I land. This issue is personal for me. In 2012, my father had a massive mental breakdown. Lots of backstory that I won’t dredge up here. He was going to be hospitalized, and decided he didn’t want to go down that road.
His last words to my mother before he ran off into the mountains he loved were, “I’m done.” His remains were found three months later. My mother couldn’t bring herself to call it a suicide, but I always get that was what my father intended. He saw what the future held for him, and he felt a death in the mountains he loved was preferable.
Do I like his choice? Hell no! But do I respect it? Yes. He went out on his own terms.