I am 59, enjoy robust good health, live alone and have no children... but here's why I felt cold fear when MSPs voted for assisted suicide
When word came on Tuesday that the Scottish parliament had voted – and by an unexpectedly large margin – to legalise ‘assisted dying’, my reaction was not one of bewilderment or shock.
Rather, a cold wriggle in my guts, and of fear.
I am in my sixtieth year. I live alone. I am childless. So far I enjoy a vigorous life, a clear mind and robust good health.
But, two or three decades down the pike, how might matters stand then, in a Scotland where a decisive moral line has now been crossed?
The Holyrood vote was in some regards unexpected. Previous bids to legalise euthanasia had fallen at an early stage.
But MSPs the other day backed Liam McArthur’s Bill, on its first reading, by 70 votes to 56.
There are other hurdles it must yet leap, but the odds of eight MSPs changing their minds are slight.
All the preening Greens voted for death. Some decisions – on an unwhipped measure left to individual conscience – did startle.
You can normally rely on Angela Constance, Humza Yousaf and Nicola Sturgeon to be wrong on any given subject, but they cast their votes against the Bill.
Opponents of assisted dying demonstrate outside the Scottish parliament
The Bill was Introduced by Liam McArthur
In that regard they were in a minority of Nationalists. All the Liberal Democrats backed their Orcadian colleague, save Beatrice Wishart.
So did an alarming number of Conservatives. But, of the 22 Labour MSPS, 15 bravely voted against.
There was, afterwards, the inevitable crowing. ‘Success! Scottish Assisted Dying Bill passes first vote,’ screeched the website of Humanists UK.
‘Today is a landmark moment for compassion, dignity, and choice in Scotland,’ yipped Emma Cooper, convener of Friends at the End. ‘A monumental step forward for human rights,’ glowed Claire Macdonald, director of My Death, My Decision.
Oh, that bastardised phrase, ‘assisted dying’. This is legislation for assisted suicide – bluntly, a massive change in Scots law so that, henceforth, anyone helping Mum into eternity is no longer in the frame for murder.
It’s actually assisted killing. Assisted dying, in truth, is something we have been doing for as long as there have been people – tending and cradling those on the last mile of life, scampering to await upon their expressed or obvious needs, holding a hand in the face of the advancing last enemy: those eyes of fire that search out all.
Not two years ago, I was doing it, as my 82-year-old father – for decades so strong, and till almost the last so bossy – disintegrated, in the final seven months, like a sandcastle in the pitiless tide.
End-of-life care ain’t for cissies. It is running up and down flights of stairs.
Measuring out pills. The mobile going off, at four in the morning, because he needs a little spooned morphine.
Swilling and sterilising urinals; whipping up bland pappy meals and thanking Heaven if he manages three swallows.
You know the end is near, but it is marvellous how you blind yourself to things, even in the final days when Marie Curie carers are in attendance and the parent’s life is reduced to a hospital-cot, their double-bed of decades is out and in bits on the landing, and sinister little devices – for the subcutaneous dosing of this and that – click and beep.
You have, round the clock, but three duties. Is he safe? Is he clean? And is he comfortable? ‘It’s like having a baby in the house,’ murmurs your exhausted mother.
And you? When all is done, the remains removed – when you pick out the last raiment and stop off at the nearest chemist to hand over enough opiates to kill a horse – well, you feel nothing as much as unemployed.
But never for a moment did it occur to any of you to stick Daddy into some facility or demand his hospitalisation.
Yes, having a dying parent in the house is seriously inconvenient. But it’s odds-on – back when he was young and lithe, in the days of Beatlemania and the family Morris Minor, and when his dark hair glowed red as the sun caught it – that you were a heck of an inconvenient baby.
Central to Holyrood’s calamitous Tuesday decision was fear: the widespread belief that dying is extremely unpleasant, and often agonising; on top of our curious modern culture where death is almost as taboo a topic as was sex for our Victorian forebears.
And central to that fear is ignorance. I am no doubt unusual, given my Hebridean background, in that I have seen several people die, viewed many dead bodies, closed the odd coffin, helped to fill in graves – two in the past month alone – and, on occasion, even helped to dig one.
But most, today, have never seen a corpse. Would be appalled at the very notion of an open coffin at home; inviting folk around for a chat and refreshments as they view the remains.
Yet, not eighty years ago, dying at home was the norm; most of us knew the stages and processes involved – and it is not that long since, among the many skills expected of a housewife, the reverent washing and laying-out of your dead was one of them. Indeed, my late grandmother – born in 1912 – was so good at it she was routinely summoned by neighbours when there was a death in the village.
The most startling thing (and it is certainly not the impression you would get from movies, TV dramas and hospital soaps) is how atraumatic dying is. Even anticlimactic.
When Dr Douglas Glass stepped into her Balmoral chamber, at the last, in September 2022, no one at the bedside had even noticed Her Majesty had stopped breathing.
Pain, says Dr Christopher Kerr – renowned American palliative-care physician – is exaggerated as a death-bed issue. ‘Way overstated. Far and away, I’d say it’s confusional states, psychogenic distress, the consequences of impaired sleep, or changing sleep architecture – those become more prominent.
‘People need to be reassured what dying looks like. It’s actually quite hard to die in a sufferable state. Because, to die, you need to sleep, and to sleep you need to be comfortable, not only physically but psychologically. So, gradually, that comes over you.’
But, given the breadth of inexperience today, and especially when oh-woe-is-me celebrities get involved, reason seems to fly out the door.
In Ireland, a decade ago, one young woman campaigned vocally for the legalisation of assisted suicide after her cancer diagnosis – though insisted on treatment when Death loomed momentarily at her window rather sooner than she had planned.
It was, concluded Dr Seamus O’Mahony – leading Irish gastroenterologist and author of The Way We Die Now – all about control.
‘Mary Fleming became famous. An Irish heroine. The media coverage was almost unanimously supportive and she was described as brave, courageous, clear-minded and an inspiration.
‘But, as I suspect the various judges who ruled on her case surmised, the law is also there to protect the cowardly, the stupid, the unloved and the uninspiring.’
A far greater scandal – and one MSPs could readily redress – is the inordinate delay now entangling far too many grieving Scottish families, and all the worse since Covid.
It took a full eight days before I could register my father’s death in May 2023.
Backers of assisted dying outside the Scottish parliament
Cremation-slots are a mean twenty minutes, and in many cases – and especially around the festive season – the funeral may be delayed by four weeks more.
No one can take a month off work and, as any funeral director will tell you, and for all their skill, a wait that long decrees a closed coffin.
But there has been another huge cultural shift in Scotland: surging godlessness.
It is hard for a younger generation to credit, but into the 1980s the school day at most Scottish primaries began with a collective act of Christian worship.
Even into the Nineties, the Scottish Press Awards luncheon always began with a minister saying grace and, late at night, Late Call (on STV) and Reflections (on Grampian) granted some clergyman five minutes, unfiltered and without interruption, to talk of spiritual and eternal things.
‘Church of Scotland membership peaked at 1.32million in 1956,’ journalist Iain Macwhirter reflected in a thoughtful book about Scotland just before the independence referendum, ‘when attendance was high as it has ever been in the previous hundred years.
‘Then, suddenly, it collapsed in one of the most dramatic secularisations experienced by any country in the world. The Kirk lost 65 per cent of its communicants within twenty years. The divorce rate in Scotland increased by 400 per cent between 1960 and 1974.’
The Kirk lost 65 per cent of its communicants within twenty years. The divorce rate in Scotland increased by 400 per cent between 1960 and 1974.’
We were once so devout and Bible-centred a land that folk called us the People of the Book. ‘Scotland has had a history of intense militant Christianity from the Covenanters to the Disruption,’ Macwhirter concludes, ‘and had an education system largely shaped by the Kirk.
‘It is hard to believe that all this could disappear, in historical terms, overnight. And yet it did.’
Researching the history of my old Glasgow school in 2018, I was startled to find a petition signed by a rake of local clergy when, in the late Sixties, the government of the day had threatened its closure. The surprise was not
that most of these ministers were now dead; but that most of their congregations – Scotstoun West Kirk, Victoria Park, Whiteinch Methodist, Drumchapel Free Church and Partick United Free – have long gone.
The ultimate tenets of the Christian faith – the ‘Four Last Things’ – are death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. In a social order where they are still widely believed, the very notion of euthanasia is repugnant.
In the Scotland of today, when most do not even know who God is, we have become less a people who believe in nothing than a bunch of spiritual illiterates who believe in anything.
There are two inconvenient truths widely overlooked in the assisted suicide debate.
The first is the degree to which the campaign has been driven by people who hate organised religion in general and the Christian faith in particular. ‘So much of [the opposition to it] is all bloody Christians,’ brayed Dr Henry Marsh – eminent brain-surgeon and author of Do No Harm – to the Sunday Times in 2017. ‘They argue that grannies will be made to commit suicide. Even if a few grannies get bullied into it, isn’t that a price worth paying for all the people who could die with dignity?’
In their broader assault on marriage, on family and to some degree even language itself, they have now brought us to the pass where sanitised murder is about to be enshrined in law by a bunch of career politicians who, for the most part, cannot even tell you what a woman is.
An order where the elderly, the failing, the disabled and the inarticulate will start to question their own value. Where the doctor, and even your own avaricious children, will become people to fear.
But darker still is the roots of the euthanasia campaign in the pre-war eugenics movement. Dignity in Dying was actually founded by a member of the Eugenics Society and, in my youth, called itself EXIT – the Campaign for Voluntary Euthanasia.
It was in the name of progress that the likes of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bertrand Russell and Marie Stopes called for the sterilisation of the disabled and the sick.
George Bernard Shaw, no less, pressed for ‘the socialisation of the selective breeding of man’. Even, chillingly, proposing the euthanasia of the mentally ill and other members of the ‘unfit’ classes via ‘extensive use of the lethal chamber’.
I mentioned two funerals. On April 18 we buried a venerated 96-year-old aunt. Ten days later, I attended the obsequies for a man I knew but slightly, a chap from the heart of Ireland who had spent his last years on the west side of Lewis.
One was Free Presbyterian; one was Roman Catholic. One was seen off with sprinkling and incense; one was not. Yet the readings, prayers and praise were much the same; each was briefly, afterwards, processed through the streets of Stornoway.
And, at each graveside, the attendant men jostled amiably for their turn to wield a shovel, once the cleric was done.
Padding back to my car after the last, through damp grass and by the graves of my people, two lines struck me from Runrig’s Calum MacDonald.
In surely the only elegy ever written for a Free Church minister by a gifted rock musician. ‘The poppy scatters lazy through the corn – we turn for home, to wrestle with our years.’
