Dying - Cory Taylor

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in at the first opportunity. In my experience, our meeting to discuss suicide does not imply that we’re all firmly committed to ending our own lives. It is more that we wish to contemplate what it would be like if that option was available to us within the same type of regulatory framework that exists in countries where assisted dying is legal. But this is not to say that anyone I’ve talked to about choosing to end one’s own life takes the matter lightly. We talk about this in the car driving home from our coffee-and-chat meeting. Even if they had the means, Andrew and Colin doubt they could ever go through with it.

      ‘It’s too selfish,’ says Andrew, and I agree, thinking of the lonely hotel room and the traumatised housemaid. ‘It’s like you’re just saying “fuck you” to all your family and friends.’

      Which is why my drug remains unused, because of some moral qualm I share with Andrew about the harm one can inadvertently do to others, by going rogue and acting alone.

      °

      It surprises me that I have any qualms at all, since I have never thought of myself as a person of particularly high moral standards, and I have no formal religious background on which to hang a moral framework. And yet one cannot face death without reflecting on questions of religious faith, or the lack of it, and on matters of morality, or its absence. For instance, I wonder whether doctors here are discouraged from talking about death with their patients by the strictly scientific and secular nature of the way our medicine is taught and practised. It could be that other, older medical traditions might understand and embrace grief and loss better than we do. And I wonder about the morality of the government subsidising expensive experimental cancer drugs, when other worthy areas of research go begging. As an example, the last melanoma drug I took, between 2014 and 2015, was priced at $8500 a dose, to be administered every three weeks, for an indefinite period. I was the beneficiary of a free compassionate release of the drug, but it was very soon listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and attracted government subsidy, despite its limited efficacy. Lastly, I question the religious motive driving opposition to assisted dying for terminally ill patients such as myself. Could it be that we, whether or not we have religious beliefs, are being obstructed in our desire to die well by people who believe that God frowns on individual choice in the manner of dying? Or worse still, that God intends us to suffer? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I think they’re worth debating.

      So many people ask about your religious beliefs when you’re dying. I remember my general practitioner asking if I was religious, after I told him I was running out of treatment options. He had just written me a referral to a palliative care unit, which happened to be based at a Catholic hospital.

      ‘Are you a church-goer?’ he said.

      ‘No.’

      ‘That’s good.’

      I asked him why and he told me that in his experience people with religious beliefs have a harder time dying than non-believers like me.

      ‘I can’t be certain why this is,’ he said, ‘but it probably has to with attitudes to pain, and whether a person believes it serves a purpose.’

      I told him that I was up for any and all forms of pain relief. ‘Or better still, just shoot me.’

      ‘I’ll make a note,’ he said.

      I duly showed up for my appointment with the palliative care specialist at the Catholic hospital. I wasn’t predisposed to like the hospital after what my family doctor had said. And it didn’t help that my mother’s nursing home, also a Catholic institution, happened to be part of the same complex. So some of the despair I’d always felt visiting my mother shadowed me as I made my way up to the consulting rooms on the fifth floor. As soon as the lift doors opened there was the same smell as the nursing home next door, stale urine masked with something artificially floral, the two scents fusing into a cloying fug. A corridor led me past the chapel, the entrance to which was festooned with sombre paintings and photographs of deceased nuns. Naturally enough, there were crosses everywhere, and images of Christ, intended to provide comfort to the faithful. But the iconography put me off balance, as if I was about to sit a test for which I’d done no preparation.

      My meeting with the doctor was less reassuring than I’d hoped, even though he was softly spoken and sympathetic enough. Sitting in on the meeting was an older woman, a nurse, who, like the doctor, rarely smiled. If this had been a school I was assessing, to see if it was suitable for my children, I would have decided against it instantly, but I was going through a far more bizarre exercise, trying to form a judgment about the place where I might soon have to die, and finding it disappointing, even frightening. I thought of my drug. If it came down to a choice between dying in this place, and dying by my own hand, I knew which I’d prefer. It was only common sense.

      Thankfully I have since found a palliative care specialist I like, and he has referred me to a home-nursing service run by Buddhists. The nurses aren’t Buddhists but the organisation was established by, and is supported by, monks and nuns who have trained in Tibetan Buddhism. I have had a couple of visits from one of the nuns, not formal counselling sessions, but conversations about how I’m dealing with my situation. The question of religion has, of course, come up in these chats, but mainly because I’m curious to hear from the nun how she came by her faith. I gather it was a gradual process of realising what was right for her, and of studying and meditating for years before she was allowed to commence her formal training. What I am most curious to know is how she views death. I have already told her that I don’t believe in an afterlife, but she begs to differ.

      She describes to me how the body closes down at the end, leaving nothing behind but an essential spirit. Sometime after the body breathes its last, the spirit is released into the ether.

      ‘I’ve been there,’ she tells me. ‘I’ve seen it over and over again.’

      ‘What happens next?’ I ask.

      ‘The spirit searches for its next physical embodiment.’

      ‘Why does it do that?’

      ‘Desire.’

      I know enough about Buddhism to understand that desire is seen as a curse, and when the nun starts to describe the endless cycle of reincarnation that is the fate of the average soul, I can see why one might want to be rid of it. That is not the part of her story that interests me, however. It is her proposition that our essence is perceptible. She has seen a lot of people die. If she says she has witnessed the body give up the ghost, then who am I, a complete novice in the field, to argue? And if she’s right, I want to know whether it makes a difference how we die—fast or slow, violently or peacefully, by accident or by our own hand?

      ‘What do you think of assisted dying?’ I ask.

      ‘I’m against it,’ she says. I had a feeling she might be. I have yet to come across anyone involved in palliative care who isn’t against it. But I like the nun, so I am not about to argue with her. I like how serene she is, and how she looks directly at me when she speaks. I have even decided to invite her to say a prayer at my funeral, one she has picked out from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It strikes me that this might provide an element of ritual to the occasion that might otherwise be missing.

      For this is one of the most lamentable consequences of our reluctance to talk about death. We have lost our common rituals and our common language for dying, and must either improvise, or fall back on traditions about which we feel deeply ambivalent. I am talking especially about people like me, who have no religious faith. For us it seems that dying exposes the limitations of secularism like nothing else. I felt this most acutely when I turned to psychology for some advice. My family doctor had mentioned that I was eligible to receive free psychological help from the Cancer Council if I needed it.

      ‘Six hour-long sessions, with more available if required.’

      ‘Why not?’ I said.

      He brought up a referral form on his computer.

      ‘We just have to decide what to call your problem,’ he said.

      ‘Dying,’ I said.

      ‘Insufficient.’

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