I commented two weeks ago on Terry Pratchett's appalling programme on assisted suicide on BBC TV. I'm sorry that I only just got round to reading the Rev Michael Wenham's comment on the programme in the Guardian's Comment is free.Michael lives in Oxfordshire. He has motor neurone disease. You might think he would be a candidate for assisted suicide. But no. He doesn't want to die; he wants to live. ("Why is the universe so beautiful?" he says on his blog.) His comments on the programme are worth reading.
When he wrote them, he'd just had a visit from old friends Jill and her husband Dan. Jill, a keen horsewoman, was left a paraplegic after a motor cycle accident 52 years ago. Dan was given six months to live because of leukaemia more than 20 years ago and is still here. Both are living a full life and full of fun.
"They actually enrich you in knowing them. I expect that they would say that, having determined to live, their experiences have enriched them. It might have been so different."
And the programme? Pratchett's comment about one of the men who opted for suicide - "I've been in the presence of the bravest man I've ever met" - "left a bitter taste in my mouth," says Michael, "as if we'd been served a cocktail of death disguised as an elixir of life."
The candidates for suicide on the programme might have wanted to spare their families the pain of caring for them, but that didn't seem to be their motive.
"The repeated refrain. . . was 'It's my choice,' 'It's his choice'. . . My individual choice is sovereign. I want my kingdom. And the rest doesn't matter. The individual is the ace, trumping all else.
"Well, that's a pretty impoverished world. In fact, interdependence is the secret of society. We are dependent on each other, and that's something for celebrating, not fearing, for embracing, not avoiding. Perhaps the city is an image of heaven because community is the heart of human existence. The best thing in life is to experience the extraordinary depth with which one can be loved. It's to discover the utter disinteredness of those who love you, to find out when you can give nothing back, literally nothing but distasteful work and pain, they still want to look after you; they still care for you; yes, they still love you.
"The tragedy of Peter Smedley and Andrew Colgan [the men in the programme who chose assisted suicide], it seems to me, is that they didn't trust themselves to the journey their loved ones wanted to travel with them - because if they had, the road might well have been rough, but they would have discovered, hand in hand with them, beauties of the human spirit few of us ever glimpse."
Read the whole thing. To see it, click here.
