suicide isn't painless
Death guru Stephen Levine wants to legalize
assisted suicide -- but only for physical reasons. In other situations, taking
one's life is just impatient, sloppy, a "shortcut."
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BY FRED BRANFMAN
| stephen levine is known as a pioneer in the field of death and dying. His books, including "Who Dies?" have sold nearly a million copies. His latest, "One Year to Live," reports on an experiment he and his wife, Ondrea, conducted in living 1995 as if it were their last year on earth. Early students of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Ram Dass and co-directors for three years of a telephone hot line counseling the dying and bereaved, Stephen and Ondrea Levine live in a remote area of New Mexico.
People who commit suicide seem to fall into two categories. There are people who get severely depressed, like the writer Michael Dorris, Adm. Michael Boorda or Vince Foster. And there are those, like the Heaven's Gate folks, who commit suicide for what they feel is a higher purpose. When do you feel suicide is appropriate, and when isn't it?
Almost no one kills themselves because they don't want to live. Most people kill themselves because they want to live so much, and this intention is thwarted by some exterior means -- whether it's an untreatable illness, or an illness that has gone to its limit in the treatment, and one is left with just the vague outline of what a life would be. I mean, there's still sensation and still consciousness, but the sensations are filled with pain, and the consciousness is filled with fatigue and dismay and depression.
My sense is that to kill yourself for mental reasons -- for depression -- is impatience. I mean, we all know if we just wait a minute, the mind will change. It changes just like the weather. The clouds part and the sun comes out, unexpectedly.
There are alternatives, and as long as there are alternatives, to kill yourself means really jumping the gun. You know, if you gave a bottle of blue pills to everyone that had a terminal diagnosis, and you said, "Any time you want, you can take these pills," they'd live longer and more people would even heal. Because if they knew they could get out at any time, they might just say at 4 in the morning, "I can make it just one more day, because I always have this out."
Now, we're talking about mental pain for which people feel only death will suffice. Certainly depression can be medicated. But there are certain levels of physical pain, physical degeneration, where there are no other options -- like in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis -- Lou Gehrig's disease), in advanced illnesses like AIDS, say. And unless you've lain in their bed for 30 days, you really can't judge. You're laying in a bed from which you cannot move, you may not be able to speak, you may not be able to think clearly. You may have no one around to support or advise you, or even hold your hand, even in silence, when you're going through tough times.
I understand these people taking their life because the physical vehicle no longer can be maintained in a way that life is even recognizable from within. And I think it's very tricky for anyone to say they shouldn't do that.
Let's see how those people who judge suicide do when it's them laying in that sweaty bed, incontinent, unable to think or speak clearly, in enormous physical distress.
As you know, the question of assisted suicide is before the Supreme Court now. Do you favor laws that permit assisted suicide?
Yes, but they're very tricky.
But only for physical reasons, not emotional or mental?
Right, right ... and it's very tricky, case by case. I've been with people who've gone through it. I've seen people who thought they had to die, and I've seen them do rituals that allowed it to be a conscious death. How many people know the moment that they're going to die? Only people who are killed by the state, or people who commit suicide.
And also, it should be noted that the taking of one's life volitionally, although we call that suicide, is honored in every culture -- if it's done on the battlefield, if it's done in the protection of another human being. As one of the great Zen masters, Dzogchen, said, you do not create karma by committing suicide. You create karma from the way you commit suicide. We know that all reactions, all karma, all momentum, whatever you want to call it, comes from the intention behind the act.
A Buddhist monk sits down in the streets of Vietnam and immolates himself with gasoline, and all of a sudden we're aware that 100,000 children are burning, covered with napalm, in the jungles of Vietnam. Or there's the 87-year-old fellow who kills himself rather than take the fourth regime of chemotherapy, which will leave his wife a bag lady when he dies.
NEXT PAGE: What's right for a monk may not be right for you
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