The Value of Life
During my time in the local hospital in a single room I felt mainly very dead. However, during infrequent moments of awakening I occasionally ventured out onto the corridor in a wheelchair and witnessed other patients. They moved in various degrees of fragility, crawling around with an air of improbability that they would aspire to their predetermined destination, some meters away. I remember thinking that as we veterans meander down the unfamiliar avenues of old age in our vintage bodywork, it’s a feat of nature that we are still bent on clinging to life despite the prevailing obstacles.
Several friends who observed my plight and glum situation, claimed that if they were ever dished up with a similar prognosis, they would refuse the treatment and let nature take its course. But you simply don’t know when your doctor, like mine, serves you up so light-heartedly with your cancer ‘newsflash’ exactly how grim the journey will be, at the outset. I set off on my uncharted route, optimistic that it would all be resolved. I had no illusions about the severity of the process, but I hadn’t entirely thought it through. I had indeed not reckoned with human error on the part of several members of the medical world. Even when embedded deep within the vaults of an appalling setback, where doctors confessed, they were clueless, I kept the faith, simply out of a sense of duty. You don’t throw away the life you have been given, if there’s a spark of hope that you may emerge from this nightmare semi-intact.
I have a neighbour, let’s call him Charlie, who is taking an entirely different route. He was 89 last week, he lives alone since his wife died, several years ago and he has just been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. He has decided to make a short process out of his desolate situation. He accepts that he has little chance of surviving this disease and he sees futility in prolonging this life with all the treatment he should endure. He is resolute that at his age, he can look back on a happy and fulfilled life and now pass on to a better world. So at the end of September, he will voluntarily take his leave of his mortal coil and relieve both himself and his loved-ones of going through a traumatic end to his life. Being a citizen of Switzerland, where euthanasia through personal choice has long been written into law and accepted, we all fully understand Charlie’s decision. In fact, both my son and I have a contract with the same company to call a halt to excruciating pain and a lengthy inevitable death, should the occasion arise.
Having chewed over the subject of death and our efforts to reschedule it at a personal level, it is all the more distressing to realise that we have a group of ultra-rich elites, bent on plunging the world into yet another totally avoidable world war. The question of peace talks or negotiations have become tabu and their well-paid disciples are assembling the building blocks to silence the public and prepare for a full-scale battle. As the infantile Foreign Minister of Germany recently announced publicly, she doesn’t care what her German voters think, she will support Ukraine and the war as long as it takes. It won’t be her or her offspring who will be lining up on the front as cannon fodder. It will be the ordinary man or woman, forced by conscription to ‘do their duty’ and offer themselves up. There is absolutely no reason or need for a war, except to enhance the business model of the industrial war industry, in certain countries. This blatant indifference for other people’s human life is simply unpardonable and yet humanity never learns and politicians who we assumed would work in our interest are so easily bought. So as concerned doctors fight to save our lives, there are others with a perverse thrill of sending young people to their deaths. The meaning and value of life has never been so conflicted.
Photo: Pexels / Kpaukschtit