Recently, I had the great joy of being invited to speak on a panel in New York City as part of the annual New York Encounter event. This year, this beautiful cultural event was themed, “Tearing Open the Sleeping Soul.”
My fellow panelist was Dulce Cruz-Oliver, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and our panel was moderated by John Zucchi, a history professor at McGill University.
During the panel, I was asked, “Why not euthanasia, in the name of autonomy?”
To this, I answered:
When we scrutinize the legitimate longings of a person who might ask for euthanasia or assisted suicide, we can see that there is a good intuition—that the dying person deserves not to be abandoned when suffering and dying. Hence, those who advocate for this in the name of autonomy insist that a doctor or nurse be present and so it’s not autonomous; suicide is purely autonomous. And so, why not suicide in the name of autonomy? There’s an intuition that the dying person deserves to be accompanied. But again, it betrays an insecurity—the insecurity that no one will keep vigil for me, and that they don’t have any patience for me. And so, you schedule the vigil and everyone flies in. There’s a Dying with Dignity video of a woman whose calendar is empty until she schedules her death date and then everyone comes to see her.
Once we recognize the natural insecurity that someone who is suffering and dying experiences, we may be sufficiently moved to actually give this person our attention.
The New York Encounter also included an exhibit on one of my favourite thinkers and writers, Simone Weil, who had this to say about such attention:
The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. […] The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
Can we train our attention in this way, so to cultivate the capacity to keep vigil?
And, can a certain gaze pierce through a person’s insecurity so profoundly that it tears open their sleeping soul and rehabilitates them in the most ultimate sense?
I warmly invite you to watch and share the full conversation from the Encounter, here: