What is in Kelvin's Head?

End of Life (aka Death)

29/05/2015

I was pleased this week that the vote in the Scottish Parliament to change the law on so-called assisted dying didn’t manage to make any further progress. Parliamentarians have now had a number of chances to think about this and vote on it and it still failed comprehensively to get anywhere near a majority of parliamentarians supporting it.

Yet in survey after survey we are told that people support it.

What’s going on?

It seems to me that any of us would be frightened of finding ourselves in a situation where we were left alone and in pain. People do die bad deaths alone and in pain in Scotland. Somehow many people then manage to make a jump in their heads to saying that the law should be changed to allow people to request help to end their lives.

I can’t make that jump myself. The current situation seems to me to be the right one. I have no problem with the idea that a doctor might give a treatment that improved the quality of someone’s life whilst knowing that the life itself might be shortened by doing so. I do have a problem with a drug being given or withheld where the very purpose is to hasten life.

To put it bluntly, if people are frightened of the idea of individuals dying alone and in pain then there are things we can do about that that fall a long way short of killing people off.

I don’t want to see the law changed but I do want to see a lot of things surrounding death to be changed.

I want hospices to be better funded.
I want more palliative care consultants to be trained.
I want money to be put into pain clinics.
I want more research to be put into pain relief.
And I want us to talk a bit more honestly about who should be with the dying if we don’t want dying people to die alone. Who would actually benefit from lives being shortened at will? The patient is not the only person affected by a death, nor the only possible person to derive any “benefit” from life being cut short.

These are so sensitive things to talk about and there are far more issues involved in decisions about end of life care than could ever be resolved in a bill in parliament.

It is good that people are talking about this more. The “death cafe” movement seems to me to be a good thing. Allowing people who are living to talk about the business of dying has to be positive. Sometimes we get into those kind of issues when I’m doing my “Plan your own funeral” workshop – which I’ve just been asked to do in other parts of the diocese too.

I recently conducted the funeral of someone who had had that kind of conversation about his funeral just a couple of weeks before he actually died. It was the most profound thing to have happened, and in the end one of the most profound and beautiful funerals that left me completely in awe of the person who had died and the plans he had made.

Parliamentarians have difficult decisions to make here. We all do. But the priority must be to protect the vulnerable. My judgement is different to the judgement of many and even maybe the majority. I don’t think the vulnerable would be best served by changing the law.

Doctors need to be able to make informed decisions and help others to make informed decisions but we are in an area where sometimes decisions will be tested hard. I’m not alone in thinking that things have become harder for many doctors since Harold Shipman’s crimes were revealed. No doctor wants to be accused to acting too swiftly. No health authority wants to risk harbouring someone who simply wants to kill. But we must be wary of restrictions on care that might prevent doctors taking action which relieves pain where that might be possible.

If I were dying and in terrible pain, would I not want my life to be ended more quickly and more intentionally and more humanely? Well maybe I would. But I’m not the only person in the world and that description of someone dying doesn’t come close to the complexity of what really happens when someone’s life is drawing to a close. There are far more people to think about – not just relatives but those who will die after we do.

So yes, I want pain to be relieved. Yes, I can imagine situations where I’d prefer to die than to live. But no, for the good of those who are vulnerable, for the good of those whose deaths would be a relief to others, for the good of those who are vulnerable and often least able to make autonomous choices, for all their sakes, I don’t think that the law should be changed.

death, death cafe, dying, end of life, funeral

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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