For A Dignified Death
By Lila Rajiva
17 April, 2004
Countercurrents.orgWe called him apple grandpa because when we were children and he came to visit, he always came with those hard, swollen red apples that were far too
expensive in the south of India and tales that we listened to, mouths open,
only half believing - about his days as a British army recruiter under Lord
Mountbatten and how, when he was a shikari, he had shot tigers - yes, even a
man-eater, once - and thrown poisoned meatballs to the crocodiles. Later he
became a game warden, a poultry farmer, and even an officer of the SPCA,
churning out slender pamphlets on the heinousness of cruelty to animals.
But then again, to be truthful, I remember the hens screeching and
scrambling frantically around the yard before he caught then and broke their
necks with his bare hands.My mother told me he had passed away last week. After a cheerful
morning, he lay down and died in his sleep. It was not unexpected and in
fact I was a bit relieved. 102 is a good long life and it stretched almost
into three centuries. A life of drawing buckets from the well and chopping
down monsoon-battered trees. It had kept him healthy and for the last twenty
years he had been living with my uncle, a surgeon, spending his days feeding
the geese in their pond and pottering around the pomegranate trees in the
back garden. Harder of hearing with every year, and with glaucoma of course.
But then last year, uncle, a devotee of Reader's Digest and the clinician's
gospel of Health, Science, and Progress who had turned his hobby fish-farm
into Little America, complete with ceramic-tiled efficiency, decided that
laser surgery would uncloud grandpa's eyes. Grandpa himself was less than
convinced and, really, when it was all done, it seemed to have done nothing
much except weaken and disorient him. And now, hardly a year later, he was
dead. I think he must have been wanting to go for some time. After a certain
number of shocks, the body has a right to feel exhausted, a right to lie
down and say - no more, although, among the teeming, struggling masses of
India, still clamoring for the privilege to live, a right to die sounds
obscene.Life is precious, intones the Church; life is dirt cheap, hiss the funeral pyres, the mutilated beggars dying in refuse dumps, the gutters with abandoned babies.
"If you don't want them, give them to me," said Mother once. She doesn't
need a name in India where Mother is the title for any number of Hindu
goddesses and demi-goddesses - and even for foreigners like Mirra Alfassa,
the Frenchwoman in Auroville, the yoga center on the east coast. Just last
October, while grandpa was dying, the Pope with unprecedented swiftness
beatified Mother T and placed her on the fast track to sanctification. John
Paul II, devotee of the Virgin, nemesis of communism, and champion of the
suffering Iraqis is making clear once again his conservative stand on
birth, death, and sexuality by elevating Teresa, Sister Agnes Bojaxhiu
for, through out her work she aligned herself staunchly against any attempt
to cut off life either through contraception, abortion, or euthanasia.
Harsh, ugly words, but I wonder if the reality behind them is as ugly as the
Church would have us believe.There is of course no laser surgery in any of the houses run
by the sisters of charity, in India or abroad. The sisters refuse treatment
beyond the minimal - even for patients who might recover quite easily with
them. They don't press analgesics on the patients believing that their
intense suffering is a gift to humanity. Money is not misused, but it lies
around unused; the sisters refuse to redirect funds earmarked, say for
Africa, because it's not their mission. And large amounts do go back to the
Catholic Church for the building of nunneries and monasteries and to support
the work of conversion.Still, the criticisms made by Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ali in "Hells
Angel" and later "The Missionary Position" seem peculiarly blind: Roman
Catholic nuns cannot be faulted for being what they are, missionaries and
spiritual practitioners, rather than social workers. The Sisters of Charity
are adepts in love, not social change; they are, and wish to be, more
concerned with a shared experience with the poor (which is why there can be
no preferential treatment) than with improving social conditions. It is the
Franciscan not the Marxist paradise of the poor. The minimalist facade -
metal cots, shaved heads, loose garments with no underwear, which strikes
many as humiliating, also possesses a spare grandeur appropriate to the
extremity of the physical suffering. It seems to grant these fragile,
suffering bodies a peace and autonomy that invasive surgery denies. By
contrast, whatever the merits of her case prove to be, Terri Schiavi, brain
damaged and switched on and off life support since 1998, the center of a
furore over the right to die, has become a rag doll tossed back and forth by
the law, medicine, and loved ones.Mother T's work gives meaning to suffering and has inspired followers
across India: in my own home town, the sisters run a flourishing orphanage.
But there is a troubling side.Those who prefer to die with their physical and rational faculties intact,
in circumstances they have chosen, with some comfort, beauty and dignity
rather than ravaged by disease, assaulted by medicine, and humiliated by
dependency are implicitly denigrated as materialists although beauty,
rationality, and dignity are surely spiritual qualities. A man or woman who
uses contraception is painted as selfishly "using" his partner - so, in a
logic that could only have been conceived immaculately by celibates,
contraception is blamed for spontaneously generating abortion, which in
turn, allegedly, breeds war and oppression. Reality of course contradicts
this at once: Bush has simultaneously restricted abortions, pushed to
nationalize capital punishment, and adopted a foreign policy of perpetual
and unprovoked war against Islamic states and, by extension, a religion
which actually agrees with him in his pro-life stance.Nevertheless, in this country the pro-life movement pontificates endlessly
about the "culture of death" that surrounds the practices of abortion and
euthanasia until we are tempted to ask why we should refuse this label - why
not wear it proudly?The voluntary acceptance of death for our own selves and - within obvious
limits - the outgrowth of our bodies is not violent, for the essence of
violence is coercion. A culture of voluntary death is not and can never be a
culture of violence against others. The martyr who immolates himself for a
cause, the suicide who expunges dishonor with the blade, the samurai who
atones for failure with disembowelment are the diametrical opposite of those
who use force to coerce others, whether that force is that of the law or the
gun. If the asceticism of the sisters of charity is spiritual, then those
who choose the ultimate renunciation of the body must also be spiritual.There is a sanctity to death as surely there is to its counterpart, life
and that sanctity is violated when the body is forced to live in painful,
humiliating weakness and dependency. Mother T would have said that such
suffering does good for humanity. But surely it is up to the sufferer to
decide how long he wishes to do this good for humanity, for how long he
wishes to provide such an example? If it is wrong to use others for
pleasure, as she argued in her attack on contraception, it must be at least
as wrong to use others for pain, to prolong life against their wishes so
that we can vicariously experience suffer with them for our spiritual
edification, What are we - voyeurs of suffering? If we cannot improve the
lot of the poor, let us at least turn away our eyes and stop prattling about
them.The focus on Mother T by the western media in a way, really, that she never
wanted, and to the exclusion of thousands of other Indian Christians and
non-Christians doing as much and more, allows the reactionary to reduce
gigantic socio-economic problems that require institutional and structural
changes to questions of personal morality. Personal charity becomes the
solution. But is it?A little individual material greed has its uses in a country like India
where religious dogma casts a debilitating spell over every attempt to live
a rational life: a commodity futures market that was transparent and
legally sound would take care of the huge waste of commodities like sugar
and rice sooner and more efficiently than appeals to selflessness. As
another instance, the 3000 lives saved from abortion by the sisters in 1994
must be balanced against the numbers of unwanted children born into
extremity because of the Church's opposition to contraception. To claim that
the impoverished peasant and lower caste women who would receive the
greatest benefit from it are selfish to use it is to laughably misconstrue
the problem. Childbirth in village India is the result of drunken
irresponsible spouses, social pressure to prove one's manhood through
progeny, a need for an extra pair of hands to work or to support one in old
age; in many cases, it is also the result of the rape of Dalit and
untouchable women by upper caste males. Contraception protects laboring
women from slipping further into destitution and sex workers (many of whom
are children themselves) from at least a part of the hazards of their
occupation.Only God can take life, said a conservative and religious student of mine
who opposes all three - contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. But,
whoever it is that takes life also presumably gives it without our say so,
yet no one would question that we have, so far at least, needed a man and a
woman as well. The fact that man intervenes to prolong or curtail a life
does not diminish anything of God's role. If God factors into everything,
then she can be factored out altogether when it comes to human policy-
making.Truthfully, it is human beings who everywhere, through their interventions,
also create, destroy, beautify, and maim life. If we refuse to acknowledge
this, it is because we prefer not to look death in the eye and see how and
why it arrives.Andre Gide once said that all art is a meditation on death, which is only
another way of saying that death forces us to abandon a life lived in the
unreflecting sensuality of Camus' Meursault. It is death which gives
birth to the reflective life.Strangely, Teresa's Home for the Destitute Dying in Calcutta (Kali-Ghat) is
in a building belonging to the temple of Kali - the black mother-goddess who
wears human skulls around her neck and dances naked in cemeteries. Black,
because embracing all colors, she represents an ultimate reality in which
sexuality and death play their inviolable and sacred parts. She is a
terrible goddess, much different from the Virgin, but perhaps no less
feminine, no less maternal, a goddess whose time may yet return some day
when we are not terrorized by dogma out of autonomy over our own bodiesThere are seasons for everything, for living and for dying, and to choose
accordingly when we will plant and when we will harvest is the simplest
wisdom of our mother earth. Apple grandpa, I think, would have said so.