The Polite Tyranny of the Living
The Polite Tyranny of the Living - 5min read
By Dawid van der Merwe - Somerset West
We, the living, do so love our etiquette. We queue, we apologise, we sign consent forms, and accept cookies, terms, and conditions. We believe in progress, in civility, in keeping up appearances. And so, when faced with the prospect of someone wishing to end their suffering with a little dignity and grace, we cast our eyes up to the heavens and declare, “Oh no, that simply won’t do.” We wrap our fear in morality, our control in compassion, and call it virtue. Yet beneath the pious chatter of “sanctity” and “hope,” there lurks something less noble, like a night-terror, a fear of autonomy, a refusal to admit that death, too, might have its rightful place at the table.
Ah, the grand betrayal, not by a lover, nor a friend, nor even the capricious gods, but by the very body you’ve carried about for decades, that familiar old companion now suddenly moonlighting as your assassin. One might almost admire its efficiency if one weren’t so personally inconvenienced by the whole affair.
The cells, once as loyal as Labradors, you’ve so graciously hydrated with Castle and Coke, and fed gluten, protein, trans-fats, and sugar all these years, have now decided to thank you with a small mutiny. They begin their revolt against your autonomy, quite without permission, multiplying with the vigour of first-year university students discovering Nietzsche and flat whites. You can almost hear them whisper: “We’ve had enough of your carefree living and your Oreo smoothies; it’s time for chaos.” And so your body, that once benign republic of organs, becomes a tyranny. The heart, liver, and lungs, once your hardworking civil servants, are now ruled by a despot who refuses to relinquish power until the whole regime collapses.
And yet, just when you might wish to negotiate your own ceasefire, to step aside with a little dignity, perhaps even humour, the world around you clutches its pearls in choreographed indignation, and with all its institutions and committees and forms in triplicate, rushes in like a sanctimonious aunt, crying, “My fok Marelise, not so fast, life hasn’t finished teaching you grace yet.”
There’s something almost Shakespearean in it, really. The loyal courtier turned usurper, the benevolent monarch overthrown by the madness within. “Et Tu, Pancreas?” you might whisper as the betrayal unfolds.
Religion waves its finger, law brandishes its wig, and the medicine men insist that breath, no matter how laboured, is life, and suddenly demand that prolonging agony is its highest moral calling, quoting Viktor Frankl: “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.” You, meanwhile, are left to die in installments, like a subscription service to your own extinction, forced to play the part of the grateful patient, applauding the very system that keeps you tethered to torment.
It’s a curious hypocrisy, and grotesque irony, is it not? We celebrate “freedom” as the crowning jewel of modern civilisation. We are free to vote ourselves into totalitarian dystopias, to drink ourselves into oblivious ruin, to love recklessly, and to choose between seventeen different types of toxic breakfast cereal, but to choose the moment of one’s leaving? That, apparently, is indecent. Society would rather you shuffle off in indignity, gasping for breath, and apologising for the mess, than allow you a final act of authorship.
To be terminally ill is to be forced into a philosophical wrestling match with your own biology while spectators - doctors, priests, parliamentarians, social influencers, friends, and family - argue about what’s best for you. It is not life they revere, you see, but the appearance of it. They fear that to grant us sovereignty over our deaths would expose the fragility of their own illusions, that control is theirs, that morality is absolute, that compassion has limits defined by legislation. And so they dress up their fear as virtue and call it civilisation. You become a battleground between compassion and control. The absurdity is pure Kafka, only with more morphine and fewer metaphors.
There comes, I think, a point in every person’s life when the question ceases to be how long we can live, and becomes how well we can leave. To say, without hysteria or despair, this far and no further. To claim one’s final act not as tragedy, but as authorship. After all, if all the world is a stage, and life is the play, should not death be the curtain call we direct ourselves?
In the words of the ever-eloquent Stephen Fry: “It’s not that one despises life, quite the opposite, it’s that one loves it so fiercely one wishes to leave before it becomes unrecognisable.”
Voetsek, Viktor Frankl, hi there, Lennon and McCartney: “Let it be.”
Watch this space for the epilogue: The Gospel of Suffering
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