Andrew Sullivan notes that his Dish website is “biased as a dog blog,” and, indeed, the masthead features what looks like a snooty beagle:
But Sullivan took a break this week with a post called “Your moment of cat.” It features touching stories and photos of his readers’ cats, with nearly every tale recounting a heartbreaking moment when the cats, terminally ill, were euthanized.
One reader draws a lesson from the assisted dying of his/her cat Roscoe:
Fortunately, I also take comfort from the fact that when my moment arrives, it’ll likely happen fast, and I probably won’t even see it coming. You know the phrase, “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.”? You can apply that to our entire existence.
That is, life is short: a lesson often emphasized (and then quickly forgotten) when one survives a serious illness or witnesses the death of a loved one.
But Sullivan doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion from all of these stories: sometimes life is too long, and terminally ill people want a dignified exit at a time of their choosing. Sullivan’s readers were grateful that they could be there to say goodbye to their cat and relieve its suffering. But Sullivan’s own Catholic church vehemently opposes assisted dying for humans. I’m surprised that, given the content of most of the stories, Sullivan doesn’t comment.
h/t: Greg Mayer
If you want to go, even if you don’t have a terminal illness, than you should be allowed a painless, dignified (and certain) exit. It is only the religious preventing this from happening, and I loathe them for it.
*then
Dying sucks, for us and for our masters. But it’s going to happen, like it or not…so why not muster up as much dignity as possible when the time should come?
Tamar got a whole-day bellyrub on her last day. Then, as she settled down on a comforter spread on the kitchen table, a strange but gentle man administered a surgical anesthetic; she fell asleep in my arms, as she so often did. After she was sound asleep, another jab kept her from ever waking up again.
I can only hope that I and my loved ones have as graceful an exit.
b&
I’ve always found it so confounding that people will give their animals a good death (it’s what euthanize means after all) but they deny the same to their loved ones.
I know. I just hope that we as a society get it figured out before it’s something I have to personally deal with with my parents. But my sister lives in Washington, so it might just be a matter of arranging for a cross-country visit.
But hopefully not at least for another decade or two.
b&
I figure I’ll just off myself. I won’t have anyone to help me out (I plan on outliving my friends) & the state is a jerk! Even if we have helpful robots, they’ll probably be all 3 laws safe & won’t kill us (which BTW was a huge plot flaw in the movie, Bicentennial Man).
You’ll want to find a sympathetic physician, or at least research and prepare suitably well in advance. Many methods are either unreliable or distinctly unpleasant.
If all else fails, just refuse food and water, and make sure the directive says no feeding tubes, etc.
Must admit I haven’t seen Bicentennial Man…but you do know that the whole point of the Three Laws was so that Asimov could tweak or otherwise break one of them in each of the stories and see how it would play out, right? A US Robotics Robot that actually really did follow all three laws would be quite the anomaly in that universe, at least from the perspective of the typical omniscient third-party observer….
b&
Yeah, in Bicentennial Man, it was just a mistake in the movie. The novel didn’t go that way.
I already had to deal with with my mother. She gave up, went quickly and (I think) painlessly. My in-laws are 96 and 88, so more to deal with.
My dad used to refer to the odd feeling of being “on deck”. I’m now in that position.
I’m an only child. I don’t think I was really ever off deck.
According to my dad’s definition, you aren’t on deck until your parents have finished batting.
There have been a lot of close calls, especially with my dad’s cancer & having to look after both of them.
“Snooty Beagle.” Wow, you really DO have it in for d*gs! Funny.
Good point about Sullivan’s Catholic Church. It’s possible that Sullivan might be more open on this point. Then again I wouldn’t be surprised if assisted suicide (we need a better term) is simply verboten for all Catholics of whatever stripe. I don’t know.
For an allegedly devout Catholic, Sullivan is very open minded to opinions that contradict Catholic dogma. He frequently airs extended debates on things like abortion, euthanasia, etc.
He tends to go the fallacious “no true Scotsman” route with most Christian social conservatives, and label them “Christianists”. I’ve considered emailing him in the past, to call him out on this.
I sent him email a couple of times. But it is a bit like sending messages into a black hole. The fact that you can’t comment on his site (or does he have a bl*g?) means I rarely visit anymore.
Well the beagle *does* look snooty. 🙂
It does. 😀 Cute, though, too. (Oops, did I say that?)
FYI, the beagle in his title image is Sullivan’s old pet (sadly deceased – I believe just this past year).
As for his Catholicism, Sullivan tends to be one of those religious folks for whom “official dogma” doesn’t have much meaning if it strongly contradicts his own opinions. He has never really answered to the cognitive dissonance created by specifically calling yourself a “Catholic”, yet not really agreeing with large swaths of official Catholic dogma.
Sullivan’s blog is a daily read for me, mostly for his writing on social issues and politics, but there’s no doubt that religion is his one big, dumb blind spot. Many of his readers joke about how they “avoid his site on Sundays”, which is when his posting is almost exclusively religious.
You should read his full debate with Sam Harris from several years ago, for an example of how incoherent Sully can be on religion:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/debate-with-andrew-sullivan-part-two
I wish I wasn’t so familiar with this topic, but I’m old, and can’t avoid it. I wound up having so many old animals relinquished to my care, then having to take them to the vet for the last time, that I gave up on keeping a pet. I didn’t need the heartbreak.
Peter Singer has written that we’re kinder to pets than we are to each other, but that does seem to be changing when it comes to end of life care. In fact doctors and nurses can get downright aggressive about quality of life issues: where’s your pink POLST form (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment)? My mother’s doctor, a family friend, more or less demanded that I check the “Do Not Resuscitate” box; at some point it does more harm than good to try to keep someone alive.
I decreed that my mother was welcome to live as long as she enjoyed ice cream, as miserable as the rest of her condition might be, but one day she didn’t wake up, and a day or so later she stopped breathing. I still can’t get rid of the thought that I should have done more to keep her alive, even though there was nothing I could do, even though her existence was miserable and her death imminent.
On one level, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Go up one level, and acknowledge that the death of a loved one is a miserable experience for anyone intimately involved.
On another level, my enormous family assembled itself for the memorial service and back at the homestead the great-grandkids ran riot, just like the grandkids used to do, and then we did it all over again at Christmas, after the scattering of ashes. Atheism makes some difficult things less fraught, even joyful. We are stardust!
True words, those.
Speaking of “Do Not Resuscitate”… my mom had a DNR bracelet. It irritated her wrist so we removed it and hung it on a chain around her neck. Three weeks before she died she had a stroke. The fire crew Captain that arrived when I called 911 told me that some EMR teams don’t respect the DNR tag if it isn’t on a person’s wrist. (This crew was great and had no problem with it.) I wonder if there is some “letter of the law” thing involved here that personnel who are religiously opposed to DNR instructions use to avoid respecting the intent of the victim.
The reality is that DNR’s are hard – and quite frankly they should be. It should be difficult to be blaise and withhold treatment from someone dying in front of you. The problem is that from our side of things, you are much more likely to get sued and have trouble for NOT resuscitating someone (even WITH a valid DNR) than you are for resuscitating someone (even WITH a valid DNR).
So the easy thing to do is hedge on the side of resuscitation. Whether you do that unconsciously, out of fear of litigation, or because of your ideology doesn’t matter – the point is that if a doubt flickers through your mind for even a brief moment, many of us (even us physicians) will often just go for it anyways. It can always be post hoc rationalized for myriad reasons and a court proceeding will have a hard time convicting you of anything for “trying to save someone’s life.”
I have seen one physician in the ER stand up and argue with the daughter of a woman who had no hope of recovery. She insisted that she wanted “everything done” and the physician responded by saying “this isn’t about YOU it is about your mother.” She finally let us stop. But in the meantime we had to keep working and if she had her heart beat return in the meantime, even for just a short time, it would have meant staying in the ICU until she died.
I would not suspect religious bias when fear of being sued explains that response perfectly adequately. They’re probably not going to let anyone die unless it is extremely clear and legally unimpeachable that that person was DNR. If there’s any legal question at all, they’re going to resusitate.
I’m having trouble imagining a legal defense that runs: “We ignored the person’s directive because the tag was around her neck, not around her wrist.”
As a physician planning on pursuing a career in the ICU and spending a very large portion of my time there already, I can agree that sometimes life is indeed too long. In my commencement speech for my graduating class I included a line saying that there are things in life worse than death and as physicians we are in a unique position to inflict that upon people. We need to make it OK for patients to let go when appropriate which means we ourselves need to be OK with death as an inevitability of life. Because if we ourselves can’t handle it, how can we expect our patients and their families to?
That’s a good line. When I took a biomedical ethics course back in the day when I was in school, I remember the prof quoted a stat that doctors fear death the most. This is understandable but it also makes it difficult to exact wishes to die peacefully.
Yesterday I said goodbye to one of my cats. Beluga had reached the end stage of chronic lung disease and was struggling for breath. He was dying by the time I got him to the clinic, but the process would have been much longer and more painful without the vet’s assistance. When it was over, the vet offered a spontaneous, eloquent, and courageous explanation of why he thought euthanasia should be available for humans.
I think human medical doctors should be required to work as orderlies in a veterinarian’s office for a couple of months as part of their training.
For the last few months I’ve been working on a picture book about Beluga. The manuscript is done and I’m slowly finishing the illustrations. But I’ll put it aside for awhile to adjust to the absence of the extraordinary loving creature whose care occupied several hours of each day, and who slept beside me each night for six years.
I’m so sorry. I…well, I know from personal experience that no mere words I nor anybody else could offer are adequate nor, really all that meaningful.
Do please get your book to Professor Ceiling Cat when you’re done, so we may all vicariously enjoy Beluga’s legacy.
b&
So sorry to hear about Beluga’s final trip to the vet but I’m glad you were with him right to the end & he had the care of vet to help him feel more comfortable.
Thank you, Diana and Ben. The vet rescued Beluga as a kitten (nearly twelve years ago) and was a familiar and comforting presence in his life at the shelter and after I adopted him. The tech who assisted yesterday had also known Beluga for many years.