I DISLIKE THE description “deeply offensive”: in a free society, open debate is bound to “deeply offend” someone, but we must still affirm our commitment to such open discourse. Yet the nationwide adverts for Jenni Murray’s recent TV polemic on assisted suicide came pretty near to the deplorable, if not the offensive. “I’ll die when I want to,” the words proclaimed, in giant letters.

A lacerating insult, in my view, to those who have lost family members or close friends through the grief of suicide. And a dreadful signal to the young, who we know are the most responsive to suggestions of suicide — the suicide rate among young men in Britain and Ireland has risen almost fivefold over the past two decades. God forfend that that catchphrase “I’ll die when I want to” should enter into the common language and aspirations of the culture.

To be sure, Murray’s intent was not aimed at promulgating a neutral attitude to suicidal choice among the depressed young: it is just that these flip catchphrases can easily enter the currency of accepted ideas. Her purpose was something quite different. By their mid-fifties, individuals have begun to experience the death of parents, family elders and even contemporaries, and it dawns upon the consciousness that departing from this world can be a painful and even undignified business.

Murray was particularly affected by the case of the writer Jill Tweedie, who was afflicted with motor neuron disease, which can assuredly be described as an absolute stinker of an illness. Who knows how any of us would react if given a prognosis of a long, slow, crippling and undignified death?

This is not a subject that can be addressed with an easy yes-or-no, black-and-white answer — another reason why “I’ll die when I want to” is so superficial. Even those of us whose religious affiliations direct us to sustain life as a divine gift cannot be sure what course we might take in extremis. And even those committed to bone-dry atheism may not quite know, either, what might occur at the last or how they may feel, for themselves or their families. That is the whole point of life: it is full of surprises.

But Murray’s “suicide pact” with two other friends — they pledge to assist each other to die if the circumstances arise — also involves another agenda. It is the mentality of a feminist generation who, “having fought so hard to become liberated and independent . . . are now being trapped into caring for dependent parents”, we are told. I’ll-die-when-I-want-to isn’t just about being spared terminal pain. It is also about being independent, “autonomous”, “liberated”, free from ever being a “burden” on anyone else: it is about being in control of one’s destiny at all times and in all ways.

Dear me. How pitiful to have lived for over half a century on this planet and not to have observed that the very core of being human is admitting of dependence upon others. There is such a thing as society, and we are all part of it. Our interdependence is part of our humanity, and indeed, our civilisation. Only an automaton is autonomous. We are all burdens upon each other at various cycles of our lives; but we grow in bearing one another’s burdens and draw enlightenment and wisdom from the experience.

To see a man who was once big and strong and bestrode his world like a colossus now reduced to the frailty of extreme old age; or to see a woman who once ruled her domestic dominion like an empress now sweetly accepting of a second childhood — this is to understand that it is vulnerability that makes human beings heroic, not strength and dominance and power. The poignant heart of humanity is vulnerability: if we don’t understand that, we are indeed as the brute beasts of the fields, with whom the euthanasia lobby so often likes to draw a parellel, calling to be put down like their own domestic animals.

And to care for the sick and old and dying through the last days of their journey through life is the very mark of civilisation itself. Anthropology tells us that undeveloped peoples do not do this. Certain aboriginal peoples abandon the lame and the halt to the elements; in the Arctic tundras, when the elderly could no longer hunt or contribute to the tribe, they were exposed to the cold so they would not take up space or use of food stores. This was functional — what the Darwinists would call a survival strategy — and for the purpose of survival, people take many desperate measures.

But wherever this was practised, tribes failed to develop, intellectually and even emotionally: because development comes through the experience of altruism, and the understanding that there is more to the human spirit than the next meal. Development also requires moral virtues such as courage and fortitude in the face of well-understood trials and difficulties. Problem-solving is advanced by caring rather than elimination. But development comes when, instead, we invent a wheelchair.

Murray duly expresses admiration for carers, and her own father is one such. And we must continually be aware that these questions of life and death are difficult, complex and nuanced. But it still seems to me to be deplorable to signal — especially to the volatile and often reckless young — that “I’ll die when I want to” is an acceptable moral norm.

To be fully alive is to be ready to be surprised by life. To be wise is to accept that not everything in the universe is within your “control”. Those who plan their assisted suicides may yet be greatly surprised by what life events — well beyond their personal control — may yet occur.

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