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LATE on Tuesday night, in the green room at Sky News, I looked into the eyes of a dying man as he drank the poison that would kill him. Even though it was only a newspaper picture, I will not forget the look in those eyes: a sort of apprehension, a wondering what lay ahead, on what the man's widow called his "journey".
But that picture, in The Independent, showed Craig Ewert, the person undergoing "assisted suicide", without one crucial accessory that he had in many of the other photos yesterday. It did show the pink straw through which he sucked the lethal dose of barbiturates, a dose which ended his life within 30 minutes.
It did show the cumbersome apparatus which this motor neurone disease sufferer has been forced to wear all the time in order simply to breathe. It did, on an inside page, show him switching off that oxygen supply (with his teeth - the disease has left him paralysed, unable to use his hands). But the one thing it didn't show was his microphone, attached for part of the time so all the TV viewers watching could be quite sure of catching his last gurgles, if any.
For we were permitted the undeniably fascinating sight of Craig Ewert's death in our newspapers only because the whole thing was being filmed for prime-time TV broadcast, coincidentally on another outlet of the same Sky empire for whom I was reviewing the papers on Tuesday night.
Yesterday evening, on a channel called Sky Real Lives, a life became no longer real; I think the first time for many years, and possibly the first time ever outside news coverage of wars, that the moment of death has been shown on television, a kind of true snuff movie.
It was greeted, inevitably, by a chorus of outrage: John Beyer, of something called Mediawatch UK, said his worry was that the programme would (horrors!) "influence public opinion". Dr Peter Saunders, of the group Care Not Killing, said it "glorified" assisted dying and made it like "reality TV". Even Gordon Brown called for the issue to be dealt with "sensitively and without sensationalism".
Having now watched the film, it is clear that the likes of Dr Saunders have committed the usual crime of condemning something they haven't actually seen. It seemed to me that it handled the death with all the sensitivity and lack of sensationalism you could want. It is set fully in the context of Ewert's life with contributions from him, his widow and his daughter explaining eloquently why they took the decisions they did: "You can watch only so much of yourself drain away before you look at what is left and say, 'This is an empty shell'," he said.
When half the channels on TV offer a constant parade of people being fictionally shot, stabbed, blown up, run over and drowned, it seems bizarre to complain about a single broadcast of a peaceful, consenting real death. And when British forces are waging a war that includes the regular aerial bombing of defenceless civilians, perhaps if we saw anything of those deaths on our TV screens, we might put a stop to them.
The very British debate about whether an assisted suicide should be shown in front of the children (that is, the public) is obscuring the rather more important issue: whether assisted suicide should be legal. There was a fascinating move on that, this week, too: the Director of Public Prosecutions ruled that despite the existence of a clear case against the parents of another Dignitas client, 23-year-old Daniel James, for helping him die, no charges would be brought.
I believe that assisting suicide should not be legal. It's not taking your own life, it's taking someone else's. However many safeguards you instal, it carries the clear risk of abuse. One of the other things we learned this week was that the number of British pensioners has, for the first time, exceeded the number of British children.
With growing numbers of people living longer and needing more care, it is not just possible, but likely, that some families would attempt to use an assisted dying law to pressure bothersome elderly relatives into taking their own lives, especially when they stand to profit from the death.
Yet there is clearly something perverse in the state trying to prevent someone who is soon to die in great pain from choosing to die slightly earlier and in much less pain. Enforcing a few more months of misery-wracked existence is not a cause comparable in moral force to, say, the relief of poverty. And do we not have rights over our own bodies and lives?
As we have become less frightened of gay people, black people, and extra-marital sex, we have found new taboos: we have become more frightened of death. We go to ever more ludicrous lengths to protect our children from the faint possibility of harm, doing the vast majority of kids far more harm in the process. At the same time, some in other cultures have gone to the opposite extreme - yet another death story this week was the 9/11 bombers at Guantanamo who want to die to make their point.
We must steer between these two poles: cherish life and the principle of living but not to the point where it becomes unbearable. We must recognise that just as a life without some risk is not worth living, a life of indignity and pain may indeed be worse than death. We should not treat death as absolutely always the worst thing in the world.
There is a tendency in politics, and among some campaigners on this issue, to want rules to be hard and fast, but assisted suicide is simply too complicated, too grey, for that. It needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The classic British fudge we have ended up with - where assisting a suicide is illegal, but is not very often prosecuted - is almost certainly the right approach. There's a lot to be said for fudge.
Reader views (8)
Assuming, as a logical person would, that there's nothing beyond life except nonexistence, why would anyone want to let go? Even if you are just an empty shell, you are alive and that's better than being dead.
And on the off chance we do go on somehow after this, wouldn't you feel better in your new existence knowing that you did everything you could to maximize the effectiveness of the previous one? I'm sure there'd be some reward for that.
- Steven, US, 24/02/2009 14:28
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Yes there are worse things than dying, as any inmate of Guantanamo could tell you.
My life belongs to me, not the state, not the Queen, not the church and not even to Gordon Brown and his nulaber stooges, and if I decide it's time to call it a day then that is my decision alone. The problem would come if I was not able to achieve the exit I wished, and that's where it gets complicated.
- Mrdavies, UK, 13/12/2008 10:42
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"There are times when dying is not the worst thing in the world" - the only way these words can have any meaning is if they are prefaced 'In my personal experience!'
- Paul, London, 12/12/2008 10:39
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"I will not forget the look in those eyes: a sort of apprehension, a wondering what lay ahead .."
You can wonder all you like at the last moment but it won't change the fact that you never tried doing any homework beforehand.
Back in divinity school I was taught that under these conditions you'd go to hell. Naturally I was deliberately being fed lies.
- Richard Warwick, Croydon, 12/12/2008 01:21
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The new frontier of human righs is the right to die - I think the Ewarts were a dignified example of how assisted suicide makes for a peaceful and spiritual exit.
- Derek, London, 11/12/2008 16:03
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You're playing with words, Mr Gilligan when you say that assisted suicide is taking someone else's life. You might as well say - and I would- that it is an act of compassion in assisting someone who cannot do so but wants to do so to take his or her life. I cannot see the fairness or the justice of a system that sees it as as a woman's right to take a new life in the name of abortion, but denies the ill and desperate to take a way out of their suffering. Sometime Fudge is just that - an illogical and hypocritical cop out.
- Margaret, London England, 11/12/2008 15:35
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I can't think for one minute why anybody would want to watch this. This poor man was obviously suffering and was at the end of his tether. Why not just let him go peacefully without the intrusion of cameras etc. I would fully support somebody if this is what they wanted. Everybody has the right to die with dignity.
- Terry Ballard, Hornchurch, Essex, 11/12/2008 14:58
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Death has already been shown of the series "Human Body" presented by Robert Winston. Of course that wasn't a suicide so presumably it cost a bit more to film. Its a bit cheaper if you know exactly when the cameras have to be rolling!
- Jd, copenhagen, 11/12/2008 12:20
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