If you love me, kill me. Today in South Africa, the greatest act of love, the greatest act of mercy, by one loved one for another loved one would be to murder her. How much better if this act of love could be lawful killing instead of murder. In England right now, this is exactly what the House of Commons is debating for the people of England and Wales. (Scotland has a separate and different law system).
The “Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill”, introduced by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, deals with assisted dying, proposing a law that will allow a doctor to kill an adult of sound mind if she or he is suffering irreparable pain, disability, and humiliation and if he or she requests the doctor to end his or her life. The most important limitation in this bill is that the patient in question must be expected to have only six months left to live. I’m writing this column on Friday and so have only heard parts of the Commons debate which is going on now.
Some of it was intelligent and well-reasoned. Some not. But nothing I heard rose to the level of experience, insight, cool-headedness and passion of a South African hero, whose book, The Price of Mercy: A fight for the right to die with dignity, I read when it came out in 2022. In it he describes how he had helped his mother and some dear friends to die. The book had a profound effect on me. I wanted immediately to write about it, and perhaps phone him to ask him about it, but with my normal feebleness I kept putting it off. Now is a good time to try to make amends.
Consider an extreme case. Suppose you were living in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. A dear friend had been wrongfully charged with treason against Rome and sentenced to death by crucifixion. Crucifixion is a long and horrible death. If you are nailed to the cross, a nail might puncture a major blood vessel and you will die in a relatively short time. If you are tied to the cross, it might take three days for you to die, in the most dreadful torment.
You manage to get into your friend’s cell the night before the execution. He asks you to kill him. You stab him in the heart and he dies in seconds. You have undoubtedly committed murder; you have shortened his life. But have you sinned? Have you done the wrong thing? I’d say you have done the right thing, and committed a brave and loving act of mercy. Equivalent acts of mercy today require far less brutal methods than a stab in the heart; they can be performed easily and painlessly with some pills.
Hero
I have met Doctor Sean Davison, the hero of this column, on two occasions, at the house of a friend of a friend in Cape Town. He won’t remember me, and at the time I was not aware of what he had done, which was probably just as well since it stopped my asking him stupid questions he has probably been asked a thousand times before. I am no judge of character but he struck me then exactly as he strikes me in photographs, as gentle, sensitive, highly intelligent, rather gaunt and worried. He was born in New Zealand, got a PhD in microbiology there, moved to South Africa, studied further at UCT, and then set up a molecular virology and DNA forensics laboratory at the University of the Western Cape.
In 2006, in New Zealand, Davison helped his mother to die. She was a doctor, 85 years old, suffering agonies from incurable, debilitating cancer and just wanting to die. She tried starving to death but this only resulted in wasted flesh and even more pain. She gave her son a bottle of morphine pills and told him to put a lethal dose into a glass of water and crush them up in it. He did so and handed it to her. She drank it and died.
The case became famous in New Zealand when his sister Mary, five years older than him, reported him to the police for murdering his mother and tried to stop publication of his book, Before We Say Goodbye, about her death. Davison was arrested for murder in 2010. The New Zealand authorities had no choice but to prosecute Davison since by his own admission had caused her death. At the trial, speaking strongly for Davison, was our own Archbishop Tutu, whose testimony obviously influenced the judge in Davison’s favour. He was found guilty but sentenced to only five months’ house arrest, the slightest punishment possible.
Tutu’s intervention was highly significant since religion plays a huge part in considerations of life and death. I am now an atheist but was brought up as a Catholic. I think Christianity is on balance a force for good, and think that Western Civilisation, the greatest there has ever been, could not have happened without the organisational structure of the Christian Church (the Catholic Church for the first 1,500 years). But the Church has some horrible doctrines (or had; maybe they’ve changed since my upbringing). One of them was that suicide was a mortal sin. If you died after committing mortal sin but before you confessed, you went to eternal damnation. Since you could hardly go to confession after you committed suicide, suicide meant that you would burn for all eternity. Tutu obviously thought differently, and good for him.
Neuropathic pain
In South Africa, Davison killed some dear friends, some very young. Dr Anrich Burger was a successful and kindly doctor living near Paarl with his fiancée Jill. Everything was going well in his life. Then, at the age of 34, his car veered off a dirt road in Botswana and overturned at slow speed. Burger cracked two little bones in his neck, which turned him into a quadriplegic. He lost all control of his arms, legs, bowels and bladder. Davison and he had long chats on the meaning of life. He described how in social gatherings with Jill and close friends, his bowels would open, he would pass wind loudly and defecate in front of everybody with a terrible stench. And all the while he was racked with horrible, neuropathic pain, for which he could find no cure. All the time he just wanted to die. So would I.
In all these matters, I always turn to this selfish question: what would I want for myself? And every time my answer is death. Death holds no horrors for me. I regard it as the Big Sleep, the most complete form of oblivion, just nothingness. My reasons for wanting to die if I were suffering terminal pain, disability, and humiliation would be mainly selfish: I’d rather die than suffer like that. But I’d also like to leave the young loved ones in my will more money for their healthy lives.
Burger pleaded for Davison to kill him and he did so in 2013. The two of them, Burger in a wheelchair, booked into a luxury hotel at the Cape Town Waterfront, overlooking the harbour. It was to be death with a view. Davidson crushed up a deadly dose of 100 tablets of a well-known sedative in a glass of water (Davison gives the names of all the sedatives he used in his mercy killing in his book, which you can buy in any bookshop; for some reason I feel a bit squeamish about naming them here.)
Burger spoke the famous words of Ramon Sampedro, also a quadriplegic, who had also died this way, “I will renounce the most humiliating form of slavery – to be a living head tied to a dead body”. He looked out to sea. Davison handed him the lethal glass with a straw, which was all he could manage. He sucked the glass empty and died.
Davison had videoed Burger’s death and gave the video to his carer, who passed it on to Jill. Jill was furious and drove straight to the Sea Point Police station to charge him with murder.
Another tragic case
Another tragic case was a man of philosophical bent called Liebhard. In 2006, he and his wife and daughter were driving to Cape Town airport. The traffic lights were green and they drove through them only to be struck with main force by a car driven through the red lights by a drunken woman. Their car overturned. His wife and daughter were unscathed but Liebhard’s neck was broken and he was a quadriplegic for the rest of his life.
He experienced the same humiliations as Burger, inflicting the same burdens and embarrassments on his wife and daughter. Nonetheless, Liebhard told Davison he just could not let go of his life, wretched though it was. Nine months later, his wife told him she was taking her daughter on a holiday to Germany. Soon after, he received a message from her saying they were never coming back.
In 2018, Davison was arrested in Cape Town and charged with the premeditated murder of Burger and a few others. He had admitted to every detail in their killing and there was widespread public sympathy for him. He chose to go in for plea-bargaining but was horrified to discover that the presiding judge would be Judge President John Hlope (now having a new career in MK), who had previously referred to Davison’s lawyer as “a piece of white shit who is not fit to walk in the corridors of the High Court”. On Wednesday 19 June 2019, Davison was told to stand up and listen to Hlope’s verdict and sentence: “I find the defendant guilty of three counts of murder. You are sentenced to three year’s house arrest.”
That was it. A mercifully light sentence, obviously recognising the justice of Davison’s “crimes”.
My own view is that as a first step, it should be legal for an adult patient of sound mind suffering irrecoverable pain, disability, or humiliation to instruct a doctor to kill him regardless of how long he might be expected to live. Of course there should be strict safeguards since, given human nature, and especially the nature of human families, there might be all sorts of parasites persuading a rich, sick man with a juicy will to take his own life. Such safeguards would surely be fairly simple to implement. That would be my first step for assisted suicide. It might also be my last.
What about an adult not of sound mind? Let me give an extreme example of what most of us have seen among aged loved ones. Consider a proud, kind, dignified woman of high virtue, for whom appearance and personal behaviour is all important. She cares profoundly what other people think of her. She has children and grandchildren and many younger friends, all of whom love her and admire her. Then, very late in life she goes mad, suffering from histrionic dementia. She takes to running naked in public places, cackling with laughter. She defecates by squatting on a public pavement.
People who had not known her before mock her and laugh at her. Her family and friends are devastated. She at her prime would be horrified at what she has become. She would rather be dead than that. But the demented person she has become is perfectly happy. What matters more: what she was then or what she has become now? What should be done? She is not of sound mind and so cannot decide for herself under the law being proposed. But even if she could decide, she would not decide on death. What’s to be done in cases like hers? I haven’t a clue. I can offer no advice whatsoever.
During the Common’s debate, I heard some owl of an MP, against the proposed bill, saying it would give doctors power of life and death. Doctors would be able to kill people. Oh please!
Thousands of years
Doctors have been killing people for thousands of years, quite rightly in most cases. An old, terminally ill man of 95 is on the only life-support machine in a hospital. In comes a seriously injured young man of 25 who will live a long and healthy life if he can be put on the machine long enough for intricate surgery. The doctors don’t hesitate; they kill the old man by taking him off the machine and they save the young man’s life by putting him on the machine.
Many a son or daughter has been asked this question by a doctor about a dying parent, suffering great pain: “Would you like us to prolong the treatment (causing him a longer, more painful, more miserable life) or just make him comfortable (kill him in a dreamy, happy, painless way by filling him with morphine)?” This is very similar to the matter being put before the Commons now.
Wonderful news! My girl friend has just walked into my room and told me that the House of Commons has just voted 330 to 275 in favour of the bill. This is the best thing that bunch of bums – sorry, that august assembly of duly elected representatives of the mother of parliaments – has done for years. As I say, the worst limitation of this bill is that it restricts assisted suicide to patients with only six months to live.
Anrich Burger might have lived another 30 years – 30 years of hell on Earth. But it is a very important first step towards towards the kindness and mercy for which Sean Davison has been campaigning more passionately, vividly, compellingly, and rationally before them.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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