It is easy for me to imagine what I did not see with my own eyes: that my grandmother, not known for her acquiescence in living, displayed no tranquility in dying; that though she was baptized and had received the Eucharist throughout her life, those lifelong graces apparently did not comfort her as death approached. When it became clear to all around her hospital bed that death was coming, that her insistent protestations she would soon return home were illusory and nonsensical, my father said, “Mom, this is the end. Can we spend these moments reaffirming our love for each other and looking forward to a happy reunion in the future?” She refused. She was going home, she said—not to some celestial city but to the suburbs of Philadelphia. There was no commending her spirit into the hands of God or anyone else. Stubborn in life, she was intransigent in death. Death was indifferent to her stubbornness, of course, and took her anyway.
There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his surgeon, beyond all hope and reason, to delve deeper with a scalpel to force more senseless bleeding. That was then. Surely things are better now? Not according to theologian and ethicist Travis Pickell, who argues in his new book that the vast array of modern end-of-life technologies have only ended up providing us with even more ways of shuffling off this mortal coil. What Pickell calls “burdened agency” is a particularly modern condition arising from a combination of two factors. First, because we are presented with more choices than ever before, we are obliged to choose more than ever before. Only a century ago, for example, an ailing person simply met death when it came. Now the ailing person must choose whether to undergo exceedingly invasive medical operations, or perhaps hasten death through physician-assisted suicide. Even if one were to reject both of these routes, that itself is a choice with consequences and moral meanings. Where once an elderly person dwindling slowly to death may have stood as an example of resolution and quiet dignity unto the last, now that person is stubbornly choosing to drain the healthcare coffers and drive up insurance premiums for the rest of us, when they could instead have disqualified themselves from life and saved society the burden.