If death becomes yet another commodity we'll die spiritually intestate

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/08/death-commodity-spiritually-intestate

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'He just doesn't want to be a burden", Elizabeth pleaded at the post-bingo teatime in the community centre.

We had been discussing Percy, who is in obvious decline. Percy is estranged from his family as a result of obsessive fault-finding and a preoccupation with past wrongs. So, for Percy, being a burden would be an unwelcome experience.

As it is for everyone. But is it therefore something we should seek to avoid? That certainly appears to be what drives the increasing demand to be allowed to manage one's own death.

After all, we started as burdens; simply in biological terms, the process of dying is just life in reverse, as the competencies, which in adult life announced our qualification to be human, disintegrate. The final act is a repetition of birth, an exit as awkward and painful as had been our entry. And dependent.

"It's time they invented a pill," Elizabeth continued.

"And who would prescribe it?" Cecil's intervention was a challenge, not a question.

"I know, I know," Elizabeth mollified. "It's just that we are going on too long."

Growing old has never been easy. Moribundity is demoralising as senses decline and bodies disintegrate. However, it's in our minds that the true angst occurs, aggravated by a change in the moral agenda in those cultures where the new longevity is most apparent.

In the past, when we died on time, the process had a purpose. It was one of preparation, a time for amendment of life, to make our peace with "God"; all faiths offered a dimension beyond the material world and access to it was universally seen as being achieved through the abandonment of that sense of self which had hitherto been expressed in biological capacity. This conviction comforted the elderly by providing a meaning to their loss of that capacity.

Such holy paraphernalia has been replaced by a mantra about dying with dignity. It claims to remove the sting from death by encouraging the right of the dying to choose their moment of departure. However, it contains an uncomfortable subtext, which commends it as our civic duty to pre-empt the biological problems associated with departing this earthly coil. In other words, to die conveniently.

But surely death is the final, and proper, inconvenience? Unless we are extremely fortunate to cease upon the midnight with no pain, we are going to spend our final months, or even years, as an undignified inconvenience.

Surely that very inconvenience is its purpose, the indignity its meaning? In life, the truest expressions of dignity are evident in situations of greatest inconvenience, when courage, forbearance, hope and honesty are on display. It seems to me that the true dignity of dying exists precisely in its indignity.

Dying offers Percy the opportunity to repair old wounds rather than pay back old scores by accepting dependence gracefully and all the inconvenience which goes with it. Those final yards may be hard, but they offer the opportunity to make restoration with our human family, instead of the traditional priority of making our peace with God.

To this elderly heart and mind, therefore, the preoccupation for pimping death is misguided. We are a connected species. If we allow the marketplace to convert dying into another commodity of convenience, then we will have surrendered our genius of sociality and will die spiritually intestate.