“Death with dignity” for the past 40 years has meant, for many people, avoiding unwanted medical technology and dying in a hospital.  A “natural” death at home or in a hospice facility has been the goal.   During the last 20 years, physician-assisted suicide has been legalized for terminally ill patients in several states of the United States, and recently “medical assistance in dying,” which also includes active euthanasia, has become legal in Canada.  How should we think about what constitutes a good death now?

There are signs of a cultural shift, in which physician-assisted death is not just a permitted choice by which individuals can control the timing and circumstances of their death but is taken as a model of the good death.  A recent lengthy front page article in the New York Times recounts a case of physician-assisted death in Canada in a way that strongly suggests that a planned, orchestrated death is the ideal way to die.  While I have long supported a legal option of physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, I believe that this cultural shift deserves critical scrutiny.

The print version of the article appears with the title, “The Death and Life of John Shields,” and subhead, “A parting gift.”  A photo of Mr. Shields, who lived in British Columbia, takes up about a quarter of the front page.  The article continues with an additional five full pages of text and photos, including a photo of Dr. Stefanie Green, the physician who performed the euthanasia, walking her dog on the beach. The online version is entitled, “At his own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death.”  While the author, Catherine Porter, keeps herself in the background, the detailed narrative makes it unmistakable that she was present during Shields’s “wake” in the solarium of a hospice facility on Vancouver Island and during the euthanasia act itself in Shields’s hospice bedroom.  The effect is akin to a documentary movie of the planned death of Shields.

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Image: via Flickr  Some rights reserved by LaNotizia

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