MAiD dreams and rituals

Night and day in death and dignity

Dreams

It’s closing on three years since a MAiD physician killed my father. I sleep better now than I did in the first couple of years, but I still go through bouts where I wake in the night from some dream or surfacing thoughts about the event and its lingering fallout. The nature of the dreams has changed.

The first dreams were dark. Corpses. Abandoned houses in the forest with misaligned rooms and random stairways to walls. Flooding sailboats on dark and windy nights with lapping waves, and the sense of helplessness and foreboding for my father insisting he fries bacon whilst the vessel rocks and floods and slowly sinks to drown him. My father lived in squalor on a sailboat for the last ten years of his life before moving into assisted living for a few days before someone killed him. Nightmares of what was.

Lately, my dreams have changed. The other night, I woke from one where I had arrived at a house and knocked on the door. The house turned out to be a care home. I entered to see my other family members gathered around my father in a wheelchair in a sunlit room with a wooden floor with people and soft chatter in the background. The sense in the dream was that he was older and frailer than he was when he died, requiring a chair, and was in his last days. He was gently fussing, petting and smiling over two friendly retrievers with rich red-brown coats while he talked and listened to us. He liked dogs and cats and would be very affectionate toward them. Dreams of what might have been.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to work out the allegory. The early dreams left me re-experiencing helpless horror and confusion onlookers and loved ones like me sometimes experience in the face of MAiD’s inertia, where every off-ramp seems senselessly blocked or bypassed. And my father, facing a crisis, at his self-absorbed, unkind, bloody-minded worst that left him blind to the danger he was putting himself and others in. Death.

The more recent dreams are of Dad with the things that made him happiest and might have if his remaining days had dwindled softly. Family, light, animals, people, and love brought out the best in him. Dignity.

MAiD, with its brutal and puerile you’re-not-the-boss-of-me view of autonomy and easy weaponisation, may readily entertain a person’s fear, distress, and malice. Its implicit ‘death before disability’ and explicit ‘death is dignity’ mantras are seductive in a certain light to a certain person at a certain time.

With Dad, MAiD’s magic mirror flattered the very worst of him, from his suicidal responses to life changes and his short-sighted and self-harming frustration, petty and narcissistic traits, and lingering resentment toward the family member on whose birthday he chose to have a doctor kill him. MAiD saw his disabilities, age, crisis, and suicidal ideation as reasons for death. It told him homicide is suicide, suicide is dignity, and dignity is autonomy, resurrecting his old Gollum.

MAiD failed to ease his transition to new housing and living. It was unable to speak to or work with his family and friends, social services, and other healthcare providers who could help him accommodate this change and see him through to the other side of his old pattern of suicide and belligerence in his times of need and crisis. It did not engage palliative care, which he had asked for, nor suicide prevention, which he accessed before MAiD. Nor did it seem to want to hear or care for his history of trauma, alcohol, and mental illness. MAiD could not see his better self, the man who grinned with pride at his children’s accomplishments and worried about our wellbeing. It failed the man who enjoyed his wooden flutes and kept a supply to give to the children and parents who stopped to listen when he busked on Victoria’s streets - before Covid shutdowns ended this simple source of joy and meaning. It failed the man who wanted haircuts and family visits in his new home to watch films, share a pint, and hear his many stories. It failed the man who wrote thoughtful poems and aphorisms and never forgot a birthday. He would weep if he read this.

Despite its name, Dying with Dignity Canada’s founder Marilynne Seguin pointed out many years ago that ‘Dying with Dignity cannot presume to ensure a dignified death’ (Toronto Star, 16 December 1988, A24). This is demonstrably true, but for some reason, they don’t say that part out loud anymore.

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Rituals

I’ve recently watched the series Shōgun, a new and beautifully shot adaptation of the novel by James Clavell inspired by the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate of mediaeval Japan. Death is a major theme, and some of the characters die by seppuku, where their end, per the historical norm, results from beheading by a chosen swordsman after terminally disabling themselves through disembowelment. They die for treachery and failure, honour, as their lord orders, and because their death will further a larger political goal or individual to which they are loyal or indebted. It is a ritual, and the doomed, if they are samurai or nobles, write death poems - ‘dignified’ in the context. Centuries later, the desperate leaders of the failing Empire of Japan mobilised those ancient themes to inspire and compel its young men and boys to fly planes into Allied ships.

I can’t help but think about this when I’m angry and saddened by the frequent reports of MAiD sought out of desperation by disabled people due to negligent care and callous eugenicist arguments for MAID as a social duty.

I am alarmed by the classist emerging ritualisation of lethal injection for ‘distinguished Canadians’ and the comparisons to ‘crusades’, ‘liberation’, and ‘German’ goddesses some MAiD providers and their promoters invoke to celebrate their active role and pleasure in killing. And deride others prejudicially suspected of ‘religious’ objections to their actions.

We aren’t guiding our youth into missiles against some foreign enemy, but we have indeed begun to sanctify killing our own…

Corporal Yukio Araki in flying gear with a puppy, 26 May 1945, age 17, the day before he flew a warplane into the USS Braine, killing himself and 66 American sailors. (Photo: Wikipedia)