Big threat to dignity in living

In recent months a new slew of high profile cases involving “do not resuscitate” notes has made the news. Activist Nikki Kenward, for whom this is a personal matter, gives her take on the debate

Could someone tell me why we seem to do everything the wrong way round? Why black-eyed, bony, gormless, tinted air-heads are seen as beautiful? Why emaciated kids with big bellies and staring eyes are allowed to starve in a world of rotting abundance? And why a court that can make life and death judgments behaves as if it’s presided over by the Queen of Hearts?

I’m talking about the Court of Protection, though who exactly it’s protecting is a moot point: not me, certainly. I look at it and hear the Queen of Heart’s shout of “sentence first, verdict after” ringing down the annals of history, to the sorrow of its victims.

It’s this secretive court that had to decide the fate of a 53-year-old lady, identified only as “M” since even her name is being taken from her, supposedly to protect her.

Despite efforts to oppose what is being done to her, by the time you read this she could well be in the last throes of her life, since she may die from the withdrawal of ANH (artificial nutrition and hydration). As one doctor, said, “I can’t imagine a more painful death.”

If (I’m not) you’re a supporter of the death penalty, you would probably argue that if a person poses a threat to society then their death is a fitting form of retribution.

So here’s the question: why would a lady in a minimally conscious state pose a threat? She has some awareness and may know that she is being put to death; and bear in mind that there are another 6,000 or so like her.

What happens when you or your lifestyle pose a threat? Well, for a start the British Medical Association and the General Medical Council get involved and start arguing over “guidelines” this and “paragraph” that. It’s like Area 51 all over again, except this time the Government is sure the aliens exist; it’s only a matter of finding them.

There are lots of things that “they” have been made to sign, so this time “they” won’t get away, and anyway some of them don’t look like us, so we can see the difference. We can ostracise them, criminalise them and finally euthanize them. We can persecute them, starve them, leave them lying in their own effluent, and use the press to make public examples of them.  

While we’ve been rushing around shouting about rights, along came the sparkling Dignity in Dying with its wizardly, crazed representative telling us “it’s time we learnt to be as good at dying as we are at living.” Straight out of Brave New World, Mr. Pratchett, except you’re nowhere near as good as Huxley. Try “ending’s better than mending,” because if you look at the numbers in the right way, we, the old, the disabled, the “incurables”, are disappearing, right now.

So you’d better get yourself a big fat bell that rings really loud, and hope as the good man Niemöller (the anti-Nazi theologian) said, that there’s someone left to hear that you don’t want to die.

Actually I’d choose Huxley’s, “the more stitches the less riches,” because that’s what it’s really about. It’s about money: keeping it, growing it, spending it, hoarding it. Sadly and tragically, caring costs money and those in charge just don’t want to spend it.

The threat we pose is the threat of caring, of loving, of being there for each other, of not counting the cost, because we really are “worth it”.

So stop talking about rights and start talking about threats and ask with every chance you get: “why am I such a threat to you?”

If we don’t, we really will end up with “sentence first, verdict after” and there’ll be nobody there to hear.