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Euthanasia: Mrs Pratchett doesn't want him to do it
Novelist’s film was provocative and very moving - but his wife wants to care for him to the end
NOVELIST Terry Pratchett's BBC documentary about assisted suicide, Choosing To Die, in which 71-year-old Peter Smedley was shown ending his life at the Dignitas euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, was finally aired last night. After all the pre-broadcast furore, how did the critics respond?
It was an emotional journey. Pratchett is considering assisted suicide himself, after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's three years ago, and Arifa Akbar in the Independent felt the film could not have failed to leave viewers unmoved or unprovoked.
"His tone was personal and inquisitive, and there was enough doubt to give his outlook psychological texture and moral complexity: 'I know a time will come when words will fail me, when I can't write my books. I'm not sure I will want to go on living. Is it possible for someone like me and you to arrange for themselves a death that they want?'
"The question was clearly a wrenching task for Pratchett, who wiped away tears on numerous occasions and asked himself what he would want when it came to the crunch."
The end is painful. Catherine Gee in the Daily Telegraph was similarly moved by Pratchett's reaction to what he learnt at Dignitas, especially in the scene where Smedley, suffering from motor neurone disease, passed away.
"He [Pratchett] tried to remain stony-faced but the camera saw his rising emotion. Smedley's stoic wife, Christine, similarly held back her tears until he was gone.
"We saw Smedley sit on the sofa, politely thank those around him and shake Pratchett's hand. He drank the poison and made some gasping noises before falling deeply asleep. Then we saw him dead. We did not see his last breath."
Gee was not the only reviewer to remark on the Smedley's 'last gasp' or 'death rattle'.
Alex Hardy in the Times wrote: "Pratchett... saw this as a 'happy event' as a man with motor neurone disease passed away 'more or less' peacefully in the arms of his wife, Christine. Others with whom I watched found the contrary: smarting, instead, at the abrasiveness of Peter's last rasp."
Sam Wollaston of the Guardian wrote: "There's a moment, when the poison takes its grip, when it's very hard to watch. For a very short time Peter's not calm, he's uncomfortable and in pain, he wants but doesn't get water. It lasts only a few seconds, then he's asleep, but it's not nice. That would frighten me, I think..."
Can anyone agree? That said, Wollaston was won over by Pratchett's film. "Everything about this moving but not over-sentimental film really makes me think assisted death for the terminally ill is not just a good idea but a human right (more importantly Pratchett feels the same and the news at the weekend was that he's signed up)."
Yet, Pratchett's own wife is not in agreement, noted Catherine Gee in the Telegraph: she did not want appear in her husband's film and does not want him to take his own life. She would prefer to look after him until the very end.
"He [Pratchett] also met a former taxi driver who had motor neurone disease and, after considering Dignitas, had chosen to live out his days in a hospice. But Pratchett knows he wants to make that choice himself. 'I know the time will come when words will fail me,' he said. 'Then, I don't want to go on living.' " ·
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Motor neurone disease is a totally different issue from Alzheimers. With the former disease the individual is likely to become totally locked inside their body and unable to do anything, with great difficulty communicating. But at least they are still "there" - in terms of their imagination and reason. Of course it is a mistake to think that the course of the disease is always implacable. So it is very hard in advance to know at what point one might safely conclude one would prefer non-existence to existence. With Alzheimers, it might seem easy to state - as my sister sometimes does - "I'd rather be dead". In my sister's case at 74, having begun her Alzheimers decline at around 67, she now has virtually no recent memory function at all and can do nothing coherent for herself in any reliable way, though she can still sometimes find the way from her house round the corner to our home, and she can still enjoy eating some food. When picked up by the police she is extremely muddled about everything: she is as dependent as a toddler would be. With her insight carefully prompted by me, she can become very distressed for a time. After all Alzheimers is arguably worse than losing both one's sight and one's hearing. But there are many things she can genuinely enjoy, especially cultural and social encounters in the continuing present. My sister can get over her tears of frustration and distress and understand that her life now, so different from the constant service to others to which she was committed throughout her active years, has still value: that she is loved by her son and her brothers, and that there are many sources of enjoyment for her, not least in the warmth of the sun, the witness of growth in her garden, the relish of food and drink, the enjoyment of company even when she has no reliable inkling whom she has in front of her. Memory is fundamental to our competence, but there are aspects of memory that are physical or contextual, which work surreptitiously. Life is more than meets the eye or the reason. Hence, I have come to think that, though it may well be appropriate for suicide to be no longer illegal, actual suicides rarely have, or cannot reliably be assumed to have, a safe philosophical basis - in that chosing non-existence for oneself on the grounds that existence would be worse has all sorts of extremely worrying implications for the value of any and all life. To write oneself off is as bad and dangerous as to be written off: it is the slippery slope to Eugenic monstrosity, Nazi-style. Just as the diagnosis of Alzheimers can only be reliably made post-hoc, so, equally, it is very hard to believe that it can ever be presumed (or deduced reliably at the time) that to choose to kill onself is rational. Who can be sure that they are the least contented of living creatures, and that somebody else more disabled would not be grateful to have as little disability as they in fact do? And are levels of discontent a reliable guide in a finite existence within time? Suicide is the act of a moment. It denies all others the benefit of your existence, and who can be sure that their existence is not beneficial to some others as yet unknown or unseen. Suicide is therefore a fundamentally egotistical act, however arguably justifiable. But existence is essentially social. The sense of worth (and of values) which might lead us to suppose our life worthless cannot reliably be based on others on whom we may depend, and the privilege of life remains a privilege until we are snuffed out. We are alone in forming our conclusion. But we can never know in advance that it is right for us to cease being, since we cannot foretell who may need us more than we do not need ourselves.