Many have blogged about the BBC presenter’s proclamations this week about burdens – when she becomes a burden, she’ll kill herself, and she’s double mad that, after getting her independence and stuff, she’s having to care for aging parents.
In contrast, Mary Kenny writes in the Times in response to the BBC woman’s declarations.
Dear me. How pitiful to have lived for over half a century on this planet and not to have observed that the very core of being human is admitting of dependence upon others. There is such a thing as society, and we are all part of it. Our interdependence is part of our humanity, and indeed, our civilisation. Only an automaton is autonomous. We are all burdens upon each other at various cycles of our lives; but we grow in bearing one another’s burdens and draw enlightenment and wisdom from the experience.
To see a man who was once big and strong and bestrode his world like a colossus now reduced to the frailty of extreme old age; or to see a woman who once ruled her domestic dominion like an empress now sweetly accepting of a second childhood — this is to understand that it is vulnerability that makes human beings heroic, not strength and dominance and power. The poignant heart of humanity is vulnerability: if we don’t understand that, we are indeed as the brute beasts of the fields, with whom the euthanasia lobby so often likes to draw a parellel, calling to be put down like their own domestic animals.
And to care for the sick and old and dying through the last days of their journey through life is the very mark of civilisation itself. Anthropology tells us that undeveloped peoples do not do this. Certain aboriginal peoples abandon the lame and the halt to the elements; in the Arctic tundras, when the elderly could no longer hunt or contribute to the tribe, they were exposed to the cold so they would not take up space or use of food stores. This was functional — what the Darwinists would call a survival strategy — and for the purpose of survival, people take many desperate measures.
But wherever this was practised, tribes failed to develop, intellectually and even emotionally: because development comes through the experience of altruism, and the understanding that there is more to the human spirit than the next meal. Development also requires moral virtues such as courage and fortitude in the face of well-understood trials and difficulties. Problem-solving is advanced by caring rather than elimination. But development comes when, instead, we invent a wheelchair.
Murray duly expresses admiration for carers, and her own father is one such. And we must continually be aware that these questions of life and death are difficult, complex and nuanced. But it still seems to me to be deplorable to signal — especially to the volatile and often reckless young — that “I’ll die when I want to” is an acceptable moral norm.
To be fully alive is to be ready to be surprised by life. To be wise is to accept that not everything in the universe is within your “control”. Those who plan their assisted suicides may yet be greatly surprised by what life events — well beyond their personal control — may yet occur.
And from deep in the archives, a piece by Gilbert Meilander, published in First Things in 1991, "I Want to Burden My Loved Ones." (pdf file)
The first thought that occurred to me in my musings was not, I admit, the noblest: I have sweated in the hot sun teaching four children to catch and hit a ball, to swing a tennis racket and shoot a free throw. I have built blocks and played games I detest with and for my children. I have watched countless basketball games made up largely of bad passes, traveling violations, and shots that missed both rim and backboard. I have sat through years of piano recitals, band concerts, school programs—often on very busy nights or very hot, humid evenings in the late spring. I have stood in a steamy bathroom in the middle of the night with the hot shower running, trying to help a child with croup breathe more easily. I have run beside a bicycle, ready to catch a child who might fall while learning to ride. (This is, by the way, very hard!) I have spent hours finding perfectly decent (cheap) clothing in stores, only to have these choices rejected as somehow not exactly what we had in mind. I have used evenings to type in final form long stories—far longer than necessary—that my children have written in response to school assignments. I have had to fight for the right to eat at Burger King rather than McDonald’s. Why should I not be a bit of a burden to these children in my dying?
This was not, I have already granted, the noblest thought, but it was the first. And, of course, it overlooks a great deal—above all, that I have taken great joy in these children and have not really resented much in the litany of burdens recited above. But still, there is here a serious point to be considered. Is this not in large measure what it means to belong to a family: to burden each other—and to find, almost miraculously, that others are willing, even happy, to carry such burdens? Families would not have the significance they do for us if they did not, in fact, give us a claim upon each other. At least in this sphere of life we do not come together as autonomous individuals freely contracting with each other. We simply find ourselves thrown together and asked to share the burdens of life while learning to care for each other. We may often resent such claims on our time and energies. We did not, after all, consent to them. (Or, at least, if we want to speak of consent, it will have to be something like that old staple of social contract theorists, tacit consent.)
It is, therefore, understandable that we sometimes chafe under these burdens. If, however, we also go on to reject them, we cease to live in the kind of moral community that deserves to be called a family. Here more than in any other sphere of life we are presented with unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans and projects. I do not like such interruptions any more than the next person; indeed, a little less, I rather suspect. But it is still true that morality consists in large part in learning to deal with the unwanted and unexpected interruptions to our plans. I have tried, subject to my limits and weaknesses, to teach that lesson to my children. Perhaps I will teach it best when I am a burden to them in my dying.
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