heroic measures whilst dying. Unfortunately, he actually died entering the local ER, so they did what they should have done, and brought him back, and filled him with tubes and IVs and all the life-saving things.
~ CANADA IS about to join the ranks of tax-funded medical murderers. The slope has never been more slippery, and now it’s being greased up even more.
The 20th century witnessed an unprecedented intrusion and invasion of the state into more and more areas of basic human existence– conception, birth, youth, education, speech, thought, marriage, reproduction & child-rearing, middle age, doctoring, sickness, old age, and death. Progressives have short-sightedly celebrated their ‘victories’ over the older moral, legal, and religious consensus, at the same time as a giant shadow grows higher behind them: the all-powerful dehumanizing über-state.
As a former parish pastor, I’ve attended hundreds of deathbeds, done hundreds of funerals, counseled and comforted the dying, their families, friends, and loved ones. Death can be scary– so is suffering, and uncertainty, and the fear of dying alone, or in great pain, or uncomforted, or being kept alive by machines just because machines can do it. Believe me, I really do get it.
My own father was a doctor, researcher, and pathologist. He’d made it clear he wanted no heroic measures whilst dying. Unfortunately, he actually died entering the local ER, so they did what they should have done, and brought him back, and filled him with tubes and IVs and all the life-saving things.
Once revived, he made clear by weakly tugging on the tubes what his wishes were. After some long-distance talk amongst his sons, there was a meeting with the doctors as to his express wishes. He’d had a chain of strokes. His body was weak, and massively infected. The special drugs he needed for lung enzymes were barely working anymore. He’d already died once– this was his time to return to God.
Out came the tubes. He’d lost his speech with the last stroke, but his relief was evident in smiles and glad looks. He had a chance to hold hands with everybody who could be there. My little brother shaved him up, put him in one of his beloved famous Hawai’ian shirts (his mother was born & raised there), and in his glory, he had his happy farewell, with love and prayers all around him.
The lung enzyme medication was gradually withdrawn, and he fell into a deepening sleep, then into death. RIP.
He’d always said to me that for modern medicine, death was seen as a failure, as something defeating medical powers, so extreme measures were often not about the person, but about the medico-technological imperative to fight death as if it was a disease, as if people should never die, and medicine was the answer to that age-old and abiding question-mark hovering over death. Now, we’re hastening towards forcing death hand. What, progress?
Humans are flawed beings, with great powers, mixed motives, and a nearly comical blindness for results and consequences. If we let healthcare bean-counters and committees of the well meaning– or ill meaning– in Canada gang up with people who just want to be rid of themselves or of people who are nuisances, then we will surely and tragically follow the inhuman path of the medical murderers in Belgium, Holland, and many of our own Canadian hospitals– only it will be official, and, increasingly, taken out of the hands of the patient, or their family. ITYS.
Playing God never ends well, even if we think the law of regrettable and ‘unseen’ consequences won’t apply to us, not this time, only all those other times. The many many dead and silenced victims of euthanasia in Europe over the last 40+ years have fulfilled Hitler’s dream that only the strong (and medically inexpensive) deserve life. The rest are useless eaters, and untermenschen— or in the case of Chinese medical totalitarianism, a rather profitable source of fresh organs.
Even more tragically, every new case of medical suicide/ murder in the news by someone trying to ease their pain or death plays right into the hands of (a) the managers, who want death to be as easy as modern abortion, and (b) those who want to think that death is a final end, that there is no God– or, that he forgives anything, even unrepented suicide or medical murder, because He’s a nice old dude. Kill away! Killy kill killy kill kill!
No worries– it’s all good. We know better. We’re so very smart, and powerful. We will fix all the problems, and, quite frankly, God and his merciful rules and whiny followers be damned.
You well-meaners and bean-counters and death-dealers and lawyers and medical murderers promoting “Good Death” are worse than the totalitarians and compromised medical people of the Third Reich or The Glorious Soviet Revolution– or of Belgium and Holland over the last generation and a half. Only this– we already have their horrible example documented & set plainly before us, and yet we have chosen evil: to ignore all limits and warnings and dangerous precedents, to follow that dark path of mercilessness and slaughter and innocents silenced.
For the dark gods of ‘progress’ will demand ever more sacrifices.. even you, or your friends & family. Watch for it.
So: all you cripples, feebs, gimps, cretins, geezers, disabled, depressoids, expensively ill, retards, comatoids, disgruntled, end-stage illness, politically awkward, too-slowly-dying: they’ll have a little list. Alongside the Boomers making a hash out of choosing ‘good’ deaths as much as they’ve made a mess out of life and everything else over the last 70+ years. Thus, we who live with chronic health problems, disability or the weaknesses of old age may well end up as living sacrifices to our bold new world of managing everything, handy organ harvesting, big state everywhere, and playing God– even though we are not divine, or good, or infallible, and yet think we can exercise coercive and death-dealing powers over the weak and innocent and dying.
It used to be said that the true measure of any society was how it treated the most vulnerable; the Bible enjoined mercy and charity towards the widows and fatherless and hungry, and the stranger in the land. It was easy to be kind when the world economy was booming– but how much more important now that our world financial bust threatens everything– including our over-burdened health-care, and the aging Baby-Boomer wave now approaching it.
Suicide via medical murder puts all the immortal souls involved at risk of mortal sin and eternal consequences not to be imagined. Suffering, uncertainty, need, and fear– even death itself– are not the worst things possible, after all.
Medical suicide/ medical murder is ultimately our crisis of faith in a God who redeems life, suffering, and death, through his divine Son. Suffering in love and patience and prayer is a lesson we need very much to relearn, in the reconversion to God which our rotting society needs, lest the lights go down in the West in unbelief and death and ignorance.
As for me? Dear Euthanasiacs: Mind Your Own Damned Business, and hands off with your deadly and bloodthirsty and false ‘compassion’. You bastards.
Don’t even try to tell me that my life– or that of any suffering or sick person– is just not worth living, that our quality of life is too low, or that I’ve lived a good long life, or that some illnesses are rather costly, or that you can’t imagine how terribly miserable I might be, and you’d not want to suffer any of it. Go Wah yourself somewhere else.
I was born and will live and die a free man of the West, and my God-given life and destined God-given death are between me and my suffering and Risen Lord, and my loved ones and friends. How about you? ~
Saith Teh
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