The Good Funeral Guide

The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition

A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.

It’s out in May 2012!

“The current law exists to protect those who are sick, elderly, depressed, or disabled from feeling obliged to end their lives. It requires every case to be reviewed by the police and the DPP to determine whether a prosecution is appropriate. The present law protects those who have no voice against exploitation and coercion, acts as a powerful deterrent to would-be abusers and gives discretion to judges to temper justice with mercy in hard cases. The current law does not need changing.”

Dr Peter Saunders, Campaign Director of Care Not Killing

The Commission finds that there is a strong case for providing the choice of assisted dying for terminally ill people. Even with skilled end of life care,
the Commission finds that a comparatively small number of people who are terminally ill experience a degree of su+ering towards the end of their life,
which they consider can only be relieved either by the ending of their life, or by the knowledge that they can end their life at a time of their own choosing.

Download (free) the Commission on Assisted Dying report here. 

“All doctors have the knowledge and – usually – the means to end their lives … and quite a few use this privilege, even if it doesn’t appear on their death certificates. Doctors are also more likely to have medical friends and relations prepared to assist if necessary. As a doctor, this is a great comfort to me and I don’t see why enabling the unmedical to share this comfort is wrong in an age when deference and privilege are increasingly unfashionable.”

Dr Colin Brewer in evidence to the Commission on Dying, December 2011

In a very good article which addresses society’s need to address the consequences of technological advances in medicine, Dr Alex Lickerman says this:

The notion that dying is a right seems nonsensical to argue:  death is given to all of us equally without the need of anyone’s sanction.  The right to die well, on the other hand—well, that’s another matter entirely.  A good death is, in many cases, something our fellow human beings have great power to grant or deny, and is therefore, sadly, a right for which we must indeed fight. 

The notion that we’d even need to fight for the right to die well has only come to make sense relatively recently, within the last forty years or so.  Prior to that, our ability to prolong dying—meaning, keep extremely ill people going in hopes that they might overcome whatever health problem threatens even when the likelihood is vanishingly small—was actually fairly limited.  But with the advent of modern intensive care units and all the amazing technology that’s emerged in the last four decades, we can now stretch the quantity of out our last days often to weeks or even months.  Unfortunately, a similar stretching of quality hasn’t yet occurred; if anything, we see the opposite (to be fair, the same technology also stretches some lives to years and even decades, meaning it’s enabled some people to recover from insults that in the past would have undoubtedly killed them).

… … …

Though I’m pledged to prolong life where I can, I’m also pledged to alleviate pointless suffering.  Thus, I very much believe in the right of people to freely choose the method and time of their own demise when they find themselves in circumstances where such a choice has become the only option to relieve their pointless suffering.  We remain profoundly uncomfortable as a society with this position, but our own technological advances will eventually force us to embrace it.  As more and more people die in needless pain and more and more people sit watching, eventually, I believe, we will accumulate enough collective experience to make peace with the notion that what we currently do with our pets is far more humane than what we mostly do with each other.

Read the entire article here. 

This press release was issued this morning by Dignity in Dying following Geraldine McClelland’s death at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland:

08 Dec 2011: My dying wish: please talk about my death
In September I decided to travel abroad to die. Having made the necessary arrangements, in October I contacted Dignity in Dying and asked for their help in making my views on assisted dying public. Below is an open letter to anyone and everyonewho is interested and concerned about the issue. I have asked Dignity in Dying to distribute it to the media on my behalf when I am in Zurich.

My name is Geraldine McClelland and I have chosen to die today.

I am 61 years old and am dying from lung and liver cancer, which metastasised from my breast cancer two years ago. I spent my working life at the BBC, producing programmes such as Watchdog, Food and Drink, Health Check and Crimewatch.

I have chosen to travel abroad to die because I can not have the death I want here in the UK. I would like to be able to choose to take medication to end my life if my suffering becomes unbearable for me, at home, with my family and friends around me. But the law in this country prevents me from doing so. As a result I am travelling abroad to take advantage of Switzerland’s compassionate law. I was worried this option would be taken away from me when the Swiss people were asked to vote on whether British people (and other non-Swiss) should be allowed to continue to have an assisted death there. Thankfully they voted overwhelmingly to continue to let people like me have the death I choose, albeit in a foreign country. I was fortunate to be able to retire ten years ago and have been able to thoroughly enjoy my retirement, travelling the world. The lung cancer is now causing me serious breathing problems, meaning I am largely confined to my flat.

I am not sad that I will die today. I am angry that because of the cowardice of our politicians I can’t die in the country I was born in, in my own home, but I am not sad. I feel sure this is the right decision for me and I am relieved that I won’t be forced to suffer any more. Please don’t feel sad for me either. If you feel anything at all when you read this letter then please turn it into a fight to change the law so that other people don’t have to travel abroad to die, and that those who are unable to because they can’t travel, or can’t afford the fees don’t have to attempt suicide at home or continue to suffer against their will. In that respect I am one of the lucky ones.

I believe that as part of my end of life care, which has otherwise been good, I should have been allowed to choose not to endure the last weeks of my life, and I believe you should have that choice when you are dying too. I don’t believe that my brother and sister should have to break the law so that they can be with me when I die. Your loved ones should not be in that position either. My decision is made, I choose to die on my own terms and with my family around me in Zurich, and it’s too late to change the law for me, but please, if you care about this issue at all please make your voice heard. I appreciate that it is a difficult subject, but when dying cannot be avoided, let us be compassionate enough and tolerant enough to respect choice.

Geraldine McClelland

www.campaignfordignityindying.org.uk

Since a stroke six years ago Tony Nicklinson’s life has been, in his own words, ’dull, miserable, demeaning, undignified and intolerable’. Tony can only move his head and his eyes. He has locked-in syndrome. 

And now he wants to die. 

In fact, he’s demanding the same right to end his life that any able-bodied person has. But because he is physically unable to kill himself, he’s issued proceedings in the High Court asking for a declaration that it is lawful for a doctor to terminate his life, with his consent and with him making the decision with full mental capacity.

Full story here. 

Hat-tip to Kingfisher 

From the review in the Guardian:

Last year Chris Larner took his ex-wife Allyson – with whom he had remained good friends – to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where she ended her life. It was a life that had become unbearable because of the constant pain, indignities and limits imposed upon her by multiple sclerosis, a condition she had lived with for more than 25 years. Allyson decided that enough was enough.

It is its total lack of sentimentality that makes it so moving, and half the audience is in pieces long before the end. That, and because the redoubtable Allyson is so fully present in the show. Planning her own funeral, she declares: “I don’t want any stiff upper lip. I want weeping and wailing and inconsolable.” This was not a woman to go gently into that good night, and this is a show that reminds us that how we die is as important as how we live.

Daily Mail article here.

Dear Supporter

The Daily Mail is running a poll for a limited amount of time asking
‘Was the BBC right to screen an assisted suicide?’

If you do not think that the BBC should have screened an assisted suicide, please
VOTE ‘NO’ NOW
(Scroll down the article, about a quarter of the way down there is a small blue box,
titled ‘Today’s Poll’)

Care Not Killing has published a press release
which warns of the dangers of ‘copycat suicide’ following the screening of the BBC programme.

Thank you for contacting the BBC to express your own views about the programme.

If you have not already done so, please contact the BBC with your personal views. You can either comment online or telephone 03700 100 222 and press 1. (After the beep, you will have only 1 minute to leave your personal opinion.)

Thank you for your continued support and action,

CNK Alliance

I don’t know if you ever visit the Exit euthansia blog, or Exit’s website. Highly recommended. Exit is not Dignity in Dying, which used to be called Exit. Exit is the breakaway, ‘fiercely independent’ Scottish-based group which advocates euthanasia in the UK, has members worldwide, and has just published an updated edition of its guide to self-deliverance, Five Last Acts. I wish I had the money to buy a copy.

The Exit blog is unfailingly thought provoking and well informed. If it’s not on your blogroll, add it.

Yesterday’s post about the Euthanasia Coaster is fascinating. Euthanasia Coaster?

Euthanasia Coaster is a hypothetical euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness and eventually death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in aerospace medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and of course gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster. John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once said that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.” [Source]

If that’s whetted your appetite to find out exactly how the Euthanasia Coaster kills you thrillingly, go visit the blog.