Written on 02/03/19
-when I forgot to post.--------------------------------
This is a bit heavy but I need to rant a little after a shit day at work.
It's been 3 months since I last wrote... and I think I only forgot to write because I was having such a great time in the country. Well, I resented the fact that I was in the country (I don't think I'll ever be much of a country boy) but my colleagues were lovely and I overall had such a good time.
Now I'm back in the city, where my colleagues are still lovely but the work is actual dogshit. I skip breakfast/lunch/dinner variably somedays and I rely on random bits of chocolate to keep my sugar levels high enough during the day. That's all fine, because I'm young and energetic and I bounce back after a good weekends' sleep.
What I don't really bounce back from is situations which challenge my moral boundaries.
I don't talk about work much at all, to try and protect the privacy of the people I work with. This will sound rather vague, but I'm a huge fan of dying with dignity. Fundamentally I think if people have the choice to live, they have a choice to die. It's all a bit murky when a person is deemed to "lack capacity". Capacity relates to the ability of a person to make decisions, and ultimately it is hinged on the person's ability to understand, to express a preference, being able to retain the information presented, using consequential reasoning (what will happen if I do or don't), and sustain belief in what is being said. When someone tells me they'd rather die, my first response (internally) has always been "oh holy shit".
Expressing a wish of death seems to go against the very core of human nature, where people have done literally anything to survive. It has been coded in our DNA. So something MUST have gone wrong, when a person is either openly or implicitly choosing death. I think pain is a fairly good motivator, but I think many people fail to realise that there are many forms of pain. It seems unfair for us to make judgments on the value of a life, because life is full of endless potential and possibilities, and some people believe that all life are sacred to begin with. Except we make value judgments all the time. It used to be that whether someone lived or died was due to the will of nature, and as difficult as it was to realise, humans have expiry dates. Now we have a range of technologies which can defy the course of nature, and we try to "fix" the problem in front of us without thinking about the implications of what we are doing.
We continue to defy the belief that death is inevitable, and through this we push through.
Sometimes we bring miracles, and we are entertained by the illusion that we are God. That we can now grant life, whereas previously we only learned to take. What we forget sometimes is that death is a gift of its own. Death is the release from pain, from suffering, from torture. When the benefits of living no longer outweigh the benefits of dying, it is very logical to argue for death.
...Even if you gave up logic, you must acknowledge that death is an inevitability, and it is as much of a right as living. Yet we let our egos get to our heads and we keep people alive long after their expiry. We make may excuses. For love, we say. For the law forbids it, we say. For our profressional duties, we say. Against their wishes to die, we keep them alive, not because we should, but because we CAN. The fear of death can be so ingrained into our being that we think it applies to everyone on this planet. What choice do you have, but to keep living, when you are weak and knocking on deaths door, but your "carers" refuse to let you enter? What choice to do you have, but to continue to suffer in life, when the comfort of death is denied?
It was never me who suffered the poverty of choice. It was those whose rights I had inadvertently denied.
