The Gray Area of Life

When the highlight of a terminally ill patients day is a lull in the suffering, death is a salvation. However, today we refuse to give patients experiencing unimaginable amounts of pain, suffering, and loss of dignity the right to end their lives. Stephen Hawking addressed the topic saying, “We don’t let animals suffer, so why humans?” If we as a society feel so strongly about putting animals out of their misery, why not our loved ones? It could be said that animals, in this regard, are treated with more compassion than humans.

A counter-intuitive way to think about life is closeness to death. Usually we think life as the length someone has been alive, but what about how near somebody is to dying. A healthy ninety-year-old man, in this scenario, is younger than a thirty-year -old man with stage four lung cancer. The ninety-year-old man, given his health, and coherence at this age, is going to live for perhaps another decade. The thirty-year-old only has a month or two to live, so he is closer to death in theory. The ninety-year-old lived a longer life, but his life is not going to die within the foreseeable future, the thirty-year-old has no chance. By this token, why are we more willing to allow an elderly person fitting the conventional definition of old age die without being kept alive by machines than a younger individual who is on his death bed as well? It is not exactly a deliberate attempt to make someone suffer, rather than it is a way of keeping someone in this world, at least in body, not so much in mind or emotion.

If a patient lies in a hospital bed completely unresponsive regardless of age, he isn’t alive, he’s just there. An image of the man he was before, the man who lies in that bed was once able to feel joy, sorrow, fear, and any other emotion conceivable. The man who could also share memories of family gatherings, his eldest son’s wedding, the birth of his first grandchild, and the man who could smile, embrace his loved ones, and crack jokes. Having the capacity to feel, touch, experience, that is what life is. Imagine life without these things, what is it then? It’s not anything worth being a part of.  Our loved one laying on that bed isn’t who he was before he fell into this condition, he’s just there to fool our eyes into believing he is still capable of our naive determination of life.

Usually if a person is left to die of their terminal disease, it ends in them being in a vegetative state, or a state where very limited brain activity is present. Those in vegetative states cannot open their eyes, speak, move, respond, or eat by themselves. According to Merck “a vegetative state is suggested by characteristic findings (eg, no purposeful activity or comprehension) plus signs of an intact reticular formation.” This means the person is not aware of anything that is happening. It is absurd to let someone suffer until they are put in that kind of state. That is not life.

Works Cited

“Stephen Hawking Backs Assisted Suicide For The Terminally Ill.” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 04 May 2015. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/17/223475856/steven-hawking-backs-assisted-suicide-for-the-terminally-ill&gt>

“Vegetative State and Minimally Conscious State.” – Coma and Impaired Consciousness. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2015. <http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/neurologic-disorders/coma-and-impaired-consciousness/vegetative-state-and-minimally-conscious-state&gt>