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A sobering story from Europe: It's been announced that the British conductor Sir Edward Downes died last week, alongside his wife, at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Lady Downes was in the final stages of terminal cancer; Sir Edward was ailing ("almost blind and increasingly deaf," according to his son), but his condition wasn't fatal. He just wanted to die with his wife.
Of course, "just" probably isn't a fair word to use in this context; it minimizes the enormity of the decision—not to mention the profound commitment that these two people, married for over five decades, had to one another. But then again, in some ways it feels like precisely the right word: What could be more natural, more simple, than this decision?
I keep thinking of Baucis and Philemon, the elderly couple from Ovid's Metamorphoses who are granted a single wish by the gods. (The story was one of the readings at an old friend's wedding last month, and it's been skulking around in my brain ever since.) In Mary Zimmerman's stage adaptation, the two old folks whisper for a moment, and then Baucis says to Zeus: "Having spent all our lives together, we ask that you allow us to die at the same moment." Philemon adds, "I'd hate to see my wife's grave, or have her weep over mine."
At the end of their lives, the gods grant their wish (in fine Ovidian fashion) by turning them into a pair of trees:
Baucis saw Philomen put out leaves, and old Philemon saw Baucis put out leaves, and as the tops of the trees grew over their two faces, they exchanged words, while they still could, saying, in the same breath: “Farewell, O dear companion”, as, in the same breath, the bark covered them, concealing their mouths. The people of Bithynia still show the neighbouring trees, there, that sprang from their two bodies.
It's the simplicity and directness of this description (taken from another, contemporary prose translation) that's ultimately so affecting. And there's something of that bracing quality to the Times' newspaperly account of the Downes' final moments:
On Friday, the [Downes'] children said, they watched, weeping, as their parents drank “a small quantity of clear liquid” before lying down on adjacent beds, holding hands. “Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain. “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.”
The son goes on to say, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country [Britain] doesn’t allow it.”
I tend to agree, but what do you think? Should the right to assisted suicide—if you even support the notion in the first place—be extended to the longterm partners of the terminally ill? And if so, how strict do we need to be about defining "longterm"? Should the partner have to exhibit some level of illness as well? What about a lifelong friend? Just how slippery would this slope become?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Nina, I too was touched by the quiet, unassuming dignity of Edward Downes’ choice to die clutching the hand of his sick wife. It seems to matter very much to critics whether Downes himself were ill or not, which is interesting given the universal prognosis for 85-year-old men (and, indeed, all of us.) Is there really a significant ethical difference between his choice and that of his cancer-stricken wife? Maybe these are the kind of arbitrary distinctions that make a once-taboo process suddenly conceivable for a liberal, advanced society.
I find the most thoughtful objections to legalized euthanasia to be those that deal with the issues of obligation. There is the suggestion that women are culturally conditioned to avoid being burdensome, and few people are more burdensome than bedridden, terminally ill elderly parents and grandparents. Women might feel disproportionately obligated to end their lives. So too one could imagine the Downes’ decision becoming culturally obligatory for elderly couples; the measure of a loving relationship might be the choice to end it together.
These are the kinds of questions that crop up whenever a situation shifts from the realm of inevitability to that of responsibility. (What would happen if we allowed women to terminate their pregnancies? Adults to divorce? Daughters to live away from home?) And the easy way out—the refusal to wrangle with them by removing death from the process of decision-making—comes at the price of terrible suffering.
Photograph of a hearing on euthanasia in the European Union by Frank Fife/AFP/Getty Images.
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What’s amazing to me about this double assisted suicide story is that it’s never come up before. Assisted suicide, (like medical marijuana and abortion and a whole host of complicated moral dilemmas you allude to, Kerry) feels safe if we talk about it in purely “medical” terms. Cancer patient. The life of the mother. Terminal Illness. But we all understand that these decisions are made also, if not mostly, for complicated emotional reasons. Nina, your friends read the Ovid story at their wedding because death and marriage are ceremonially linked (Until death do us part). Think of Sati, the old Hindu practice of burning widows on the funeral pyre. A song running through my head is the old American Ballad “Barbara Allen” which Sean Wilentz wrote about in Rose & The Briar:
They buried her in the old churchyard
They buried him in the choir
And from his grave grew a red red rose
From her grave a green briar
They grew and grew to the steeple top
Till they could grow no higher
And there they twined in a true love's knot
Red rose around green briar
Photograph by Getty Images.
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While I agree with Nina that the gesture of dying along with his terminally ill wife was insanely romantic, in my book, Sir Edward Downes was also insane. The expensive (Dignitas, the Zurich clinic that administered the deadly barbiturate cocktail charges about $6,570 each) and dramatic assisted suicide pact of the distinguished British orchestra conductor and his wife strikes me as, sorry to say, overkill.
My husband and I both work at home, and there are entire days we speak to nobody but each other. After reading the story this morning of the Downes' decision to die together, I told him that, though I love him dearly, he needn’t come with me when I cross into eternity. “Actually,” I joked, “I’ll need the quiet.”
In truth, I think it would be unusually cruel to our children to lose both parents on the same day. As Kerry points out, death is our universal prognosis, but each in our own time. Until then, when we lose a loved one, we are obligated to mourn, keep our dear ones in our hearts and memories, and soldier on. The Downes' son, Caractacus, and daughter, Boudicca, accompanied the older pair to their Swiss death beds, and though both were named for legendary warriors, presumably the two feel a deep human loss for their parents. I understand the shared devotion of the elderly couple, happily married for 54 years. But no matter how deep our love for one another, allegiance must be to the living.
Photograph of doctor by Getty Images.
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In reading the conversation about the double assisted suicide of Sir Edward and Lady Joan Downes, I'm baffled by the idea that it was either selfish or super-romantic. Old people dying quietly is nicer than old people being crushed by the pain of terminal cancer or old people having their consciousness obliterated by morphine. But romantic?
This is the most basic of quality of life issue. These are old people, one terminally ill, the other wracked with disabilities that diminished his quality of life. Why should anyone think he or she has the right to say, Well, you can't see and you can't hear and you can hardly get yourself from room to room. You're bent double with grief and loneliness but we'd like you to stick around so that when we feel like it, we can visit you at the holidays or pop by with the grandkids for a few hours once a month. Too bad, I'd say. God bless their son, who loved them enough to honor their wishes, bear his loss, and respect that his presence on Earth was not enough to make them wish to stay, much as they loved him. As baby boomers try to prolong our own lives, will we insist that our parents prolong theirs, because we're not ready to be orphans, as if being orphans was not pretty much the natural order after 40 or 50?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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The world's oldest man, 113-year-old Brit Henry Allingham, died on Saturday, which prompted the British media to do a lot of thumb-sucking about old people. Normally, I'm annoyed by this kind of opportunistic opinioneering, but one sublime radio segment redeemed the whole enterprise: The Sunday morning Radio 4 show Broadcasting House included a amazing interview with 103-year-old Hetty Bower and 89-year-old Alison Selford. I encourage everyone to check it out. (You can download the whole show or listen at the show page; the segment begins at 21:56 and ends at 29:43.)
They're both old lefties—Hetty (seen here with Bianca Jagger at a 2008 anti-war protest) reminisced about general strikes, general elections, and her suffragette sister; and Alison was once the TV critic for the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker. They're feisty and smart and still in possession of their mental facilities.
Still, I was reminded of last week's conversation about the Downeses' assisted suicide when the interviewer asked about living without their husbands after long marriages (Alison's lasted more than 50 years and Hetty's almost 70). Hetty told Paddy O'Connell: "I'd much rather have gone when he went, because my vision had already started deteriorating, and Reg used to read to me. We enjoyed the same kind of book, and [I remember] his reading with his arm around me, holding the book, because I could no longer see. That didn't seem to matter then, because his eyes were my eyes."
When O'Connell asked, "Is old age like this a gift?" Hetty answered quickly, "No, I wish I had died when Reg died ... I can't say living since then has been anywhere near as full and real or happy. Of course it hasn't been. I just exist from day to day now."
Photography of Henry Allingham by Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images.
