Dancing with Mister D - Notes on Life and Death by Bert Keizer (published by Black Swan, 1997, £6-99, ISBN 0 552 99691 2). Reviewed by Nicholas Albery.
People don't tend to imagine themselves dying in a nursing home. In one passage in this gripping book, a best-seller in Holland, Dr Bert Keizer gets angry about this lack of foresight when talking with one of the relatives:
"I can't help saying to her, 'Your father, prominent theosophist or not, has, from his 70th, 75th, 80th, 85th, and 90th year, had ample occasion to come to an increasingly well-founded opinion about the nature of old age. If he didn't want this last bit he should have taken measures earlier on to end his life. I don't mind that he didn't do this, but please stop blaming me for the whole arrangement."
Dr Keizer provides a euthanasia drink or injection of opium and curare to a number of patients, but this particular one had left it too late:
"The cruel thing about old age, especially extreme old age, is that it is like a trap that you wander into completely unawares. When you want to turn round to dash to the exit, the trap has snapped shut, without you noticing. There's no answer to her question: when should you end your life to stay out of that trap? Ten minutes before that fatal stroke which is going to maim you mentally beyond recognition, or a year before you are so demented that you don't know any more what it is you would end. That's to say, when it's too late you know when you should have done it.
"A possible solution is to say when you're 80, 'Party's over, must be on my way,' but most of us are so greedy when it comes to living on that we won't let them take those last five completely horrible years away from us. De Gooyer compares the timing of your last moment to the selling of shares: sell when they're on the up. If you sell when they're going down, you run the risk of a terrible loss. If you hang on until that one last handicap which will make you decide to die, you might get landed with a handicap that precisely cancels your powers for that decision.
"But it always annoys me, that tone of voice in which people say, Uncle would never have wanted this. What they mean is, he's not as stupid as those other 56,000 Dutch people staying in nursing homes who have 'let things go too far'."
Dr Keizer does not believe in God, nor does he have much time for those who prepare for 'conscious dying' with Tibetan 'death exercises' and similar practices:
"People like Mrs Lindeboom, who stay calm and lucid at the very edge of their lives, are exceptional. It's amazing how many people think they can quietly sail into the abyss sitting on a handkerchief in those final desperate hours."
He wonders why people hang on to life so. In Holland, there was a debate as to whether a death pill should be on sale at supermarkets, and he discusses this with a colleague:
"De Gooyer [remarked]: 'Whenever I step into one of those 'homes for the elderly' I think to myself, how do they stand this? This is no life. It's as if they've already been put in urns and placed in niches in the wall. If you ask me, fifty to sixty per cent of people in such institutes would go and get one of those pills right away.'
"I disagree. The strength of a human death wish is not so unequivocally related to the misery people are in. It's certainly not the case that the worse off you are, the stronger your wish to die. In St Ossius there are about three hundred patients. On average it's only a small percentage of the three hundred who really want to die.
"Lidia Ginzburg says something about this: 'A drowning person is willing to struggle, he doesn't struggle with aversion. This fighting of misery with misery explains the insane determination of people who are miserable (overfed people cannot grasp this), and who manage to hold out against loneliness, labour camps, abject poverty, and humiliation, while their fellow creatures living in comfortable villas blow out their brains without any obvious reason.' (From: Surrounded, Notes From a Siege.)
Having recounted humane anecdotes concerning the deaths of several dozen of his patients, he begins to worry that his headache is a sign of a brain tumour:
"My headache persists. It's as if Fate has decided to send me walking in the direction of Death for a while.
"Another smile from above. ' ... maybe good for his book, if he himself dies for a change.'
"Everything I've always said about dying to the dying is now repeated to me with a grin, and all day I hear going through my head, 'Dying is easy, it's like falling asleep, a sort of fainting really. It's not even a transitive verb, so you don't have to do anything, come to think of it. But don't think of it. And anyway, it can't be that difficult, think of the millions of nitwits who managed it before you. Dying mmay be simple, but being dead bbeats everything. Before you were born you were dead for millions of years; that wasn't difficult, was it? Kids' stuff, in fact.' "
As someone who is on balance opposed to active euthanasia, for fear that it may lead societies to treat their elderly as disposable, I was somewhat reassured by the dignity and compassion with which Dr Keizer brings death to his patients. If only all doctors were as concerned for their patients' best interests - but his own dim view of the medical profession leads me to doubt it.
This webpage forms part of the Global Ideas Bank (www.globalideasbank.org).
Book
Orders: To order any of the other Natural Death Centre or Global Ideas Bank books.
";
echo $mb_link;
echo "
";
if ( session_is_registered('navigation')) {
echo " Return to Message Board's last display of selected messages";
}
?>