PETER DORNAUF

Last updated05:00, June 26 2017

Mario Anzuoni

The documentary Autopsy focuses on the sudden and tragic end to Robin Williams' life.

OPINION: Recently I watched a television documentary called Autopsy, about the actor/comedianRobin Williams. It focused on the suddenand tragic end to his life, probing the events of his last days to unpick the reasons behind the man's shocking suicide.

It was revealed that Williams was suffering from Parkinson's disease, but that debilitating illness wasn't the thing which had brought him to the brink and pushed him over. There was something much darker going on deep in his mind which the autopsy finally exposed. He was suffering from early onset Alzheimer's, a humiliating and cruel death sentence for a man whose sharp mind was his identity as well as his bread and butter.

Williams was obviously aware that something was seriously amiss and intuited what it was early in the piece. In someone still with years ahead of him, it must have come as a devastating blow.

But what was most distressing for the viewerwas the re-enactment of what transpired as Robin Williams, the man who had brought so much wit, insight and laughter to the world, attempted to bring his life to a close, alone, without goodbyes, clumsily, painfully, violently.

Afterward, I thought how things could have been so much different in a more civilised society where assisted suicide was legal.

Currently, Parliament is to debate and vote on the issue of euthanasia. We've had to fight tooth and nail just to get some relaxation of the use of medical marijuana for suffering and terminally ill patients, so I can just imagine, in a society of roughneckswhere "suck it up"is the prevailing attitude among some, how difficult any move toward liberalisation is going to be.

Someone made the comment recently that the trouble lies with the fact that many of our rule-makers are religious, our prime minister leading the pack. It was expressed crudely and bluntly by Catholic adherentJohn Collier, who responded to the issue by saying, "Thou shalt not kill, and that's the end of it."

Such closed-mindedness demonstrates both a supreme lack of empathy for suffersas well as a denial of the right to choose for others. But more significantly it is a classic oversimplification of the matter. Reducing complex ethical questions to parroting some rote and formulaic code is lazy moral thinking. It is something the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre would have called"bad faith", a kind of moral sloth that attempts to escape from the burden of ethical responsibility on hard questions.

It also conveniently overlooks the fact that the god who is touted with issuing such a commandordered the wholesale slaughter of communities involving men, women and children. Obviously there is some wiggle room here.

Here in Hamilton, my own family is no stranger to the terrible suffering surrounding dementia and suicide. I cannot bear to think what must have been going through my grandmother's tortured mind as she took herself down to the edge of the Waikato River one morning and threw herself in.

It happened when I was 10 and all of it was rightly kept from us children to be discovered later in life. But how shockingly monstrous for my father, who never spoke of it once - about a mother, forced by the law of the land, to take such desperate measures at the end of her life.

Imagine an alternative in another time and place where she would have been able to tell her children she had had enough of life and they'd all been able to gather in a room and spend the last days together, hugged, kissed, said lovely things and said goodbye, and then quietly, with dignity, she, a doctor in attendance, could have gone to sleep.

But not here. You have to suffer to the bitter end here, albeit drugged to the eyeballs, or alternatively, hang, drown or shoot yourself, alone, forlorn and forsaken.

Some may want to cling on to the last remaining days or painful stupefying minutes of life. That is happily their choice. But others may not. At the moment, these people have other civilised options blocked off to them.

We have many rights, but the most profound one is legally denied us and so people, suffering, tired of life, have to resort to terrible means, by themselves, to terminate it. It seems quite barbarous.

What is legal already in eightcountries around the world should be made so here, surrounded with all the important and necessary safeguards.

A little boy of 10 would not have been able to handle those tragic events so many years ago. But my arms go out to you now, Grandma, wishing for a better place where I could have walked back with you, up and away from that river, holding your hand.

-Stuff

Link:

The time has come for euthanasia | Stuff.co.nz - Waikato Times