decline

On my father’s seventieth birthday he joked about not reaching 80. I imagine he hoped to see 80, if his health was good, but I doubt he thought he’d get there. He made it, his health OK—a detached retina, injured wrists from falls, medication to reduce the chance of stroke. He lies down every afternoon for a rest, but he’s fully compos mentis.

My father is now 87 and I am 60. When my son is 60, I’ll be 87.

All my family believes passionately in the right to die as and when we choose. None of us has yet confronted death, but we consider contingencies. We all hope to die in our sleep, or quickly, with dignity.

At the weekend I read an essay by an American author about his 86 year-old mother, trapped in a broken body and demented mind. Although attended around the clock by devoted caregivers, “she stares in mute reprimand. Her bewilderment and resignation don’t mitigate her anger.”

A doctor fully informs his mother before operating on her heart that the surgery could exacerbate her dementia, but now “she can live for years.” Her son is gobsmacked: “You fully informed my demented mum?”

Dementia, he says, is not absence, not a non-state; it’s a condition of more, not less, feeling, and without clarity or logic, a living nightmare. It reduces the quality of life for the sufferer and their family to zilch. But politicians and half the medical profession lack both the wit and courage to allow the painless and dignified departures we accord our pets.

I blame the church, of course, the Catholic church most of all; the sanctified and sanctimonious from whom there is no sanctuary. And those emotional and spiritual troglodytes calling themselves right-to-lifers.

My father is declining, but not yet in the words of one doctor, a dwindler, devoid of real life but somehow still breathing. He might or might not make 90. His father and both brothers carked it in their sixties, so he’s done well.

For myself, I hope I’ve a long way to go. I’d like to see my son reach 60, my grand-daughter nearly 30. I’m hoping to have some say in my departure from this place. If legislation does not enshrine that right, I hope I have the wits to organise to go quickly in the middle of a pleasant dream.

Rock on.