Euthanasia

Friday, September 2nd

As I entered the Civic Hospital, an old man with a wheeled walker asked for my help. There was a ramp, and he was worried he would fall. Could I lend a hand?

“Sure thing,” I said.

“I don’t mean to be an inconvenience,” he apologized.

“Not at all. I booked the day off work. I have all the time in the world.”

I positioned myself in front of him, putting a hand on his walker, so it wouldn’t wheel away. He then began to walk. He’d take two baby steps, stop for a break, and then take two more steps.

“If euthanasia were legal, I would be dead right now,” he told me, casually.

I laughed a little nervously.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I talked to my Member of Parliament about it. I said, ‘If you walked like me, like a dog, you’d want to be dead too.’ He just laughed.”

And he scowled at the memory.

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. All I could think was that I walked to the hospital – an hour walk in the hot sun. I’d enjoyed it, reading a book as I walked. How long would it have taken this man to make the same walk? Days?

“I’m here to visit my sister,” he told me. “She’s my only living relative. We only have each other.”

We took a few more steps.

“I’m sorry I’m so slow,” he said. “I’m in constant pain. My neck. My back.”

“This ramp seems to go on forever,” I said, smiling.

There were four small steps. The ramp, on the other hand, twisted and turned endlessly, like a cruel, simple-minded maze.

When we reached the end of the ramp, the man thanked me. Our journey had taken maybe three minutes.

It was only then that I noticed someone was waiting for access to the ramp, going in the opposite direction. He looked like an orderly, or possibly an ambulance driver, and was smiling in a way meant to indicate endless patience, which revealed just how impatient he was feeling. This orderly had a massive cart next to him, and perched on top, in a reclining position, was a little old lady. She was tiny, eyes closed, either drugged, deep asleep, or dead.

Was he taking her out for some sun? Or taking her to an ambulance to be carted to another hospital? Or maybe to a funeral home?

Distracted by the little old lady, I lost track of the old man with the walker. He baby stepped past me, looking for elevator B, which would take him to his sister.

For the rest of the day, my thoughts kept coming back to the old man who wanted to die. What should I have said? Should I have offered more help? Maybe we could have spent the day together.

When I described this meeting on twitter, someone replied:

“You must not know a lot of old people. They all talk about how they want to die.”

Purple Legs

While on a coffee break outside, my coworker Craig and I saw this strange looking fat man with one of those walkers with wheels on it. The man was sitting on the platform of his walker, smoking a cigarette, parked in a spot where many people had to go by him. He ogled all the women walking past, without exception. Young, old, fat, thin – it didn’t seem to matter.

The man was comical and sad, if you looked at him in a cruel way. Bald, maybe in his late 40s, he had a troll-like shape. If you put him in a furry loin cloth and gave him a club, made him ten feet tall, he’d fit right in on the cover of some fantasy novel.

When he got up, and started walking towards us, I noticed his lower legs were dark purple and his feet were turning white. It looked like his legs were rotting, gangrenous, possibly from diabetes. Craig and I were horrified.

“I thought he was wearing socks,” Craig said, “when we were seeing him from a distance.”

I’d noticed scabs on his legs, but the discoloration wasn’t obvious until he got close up.

You hear about these things. Doctors tell their patients, “You need to change your diet and stop smoking or you’re going to suffer terrible complications from your diabetes.”

And the patient says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and doesn’t do anything different. They go blind. They lose fingers. They have their feet amputated. They slowly rot away to nothing as all their veins clog up with sugar crystals.

Here was a man in the midst of all that. His legs were literally dying out from under him. And he just continued doing the same old things he had always done. It strikes me as a slow-motion form of suicide. He doesn’t really want to live, but he doesn’t really want to die. If eating the same crappy diet and smoking the same amount of cigarettes kills him, then, oh well. Everybody has to die some time. That’s life.

There’s some sort of powerful denial at work – even as he sees his own legs change colour and he loses all sensation down there.

“This isn’t happening.”

Then, later, “This is happening, but it’s no big deal.”

Maybe brief flashes of horror and understanding. “I’m doing this to myself. I’m weak. I’m a loser.”

He beats himself up until he can’t handle it any more. Until he’s numb. Back into weakly denying reality.

Even after he has to have his legs amputated, and he wakes up from the surgery, he’ll probably think to himself:

“Now I’m a cripple. This is terrible. Why do these things happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

He never owns his life. He never takes responsibility for it. It wasn’t his diet. It wasn’t refusing to change. It’s always bad luck, life, just the way it is, God punishing him. Some external force, attacking.

He never understands his real situation. Never understands that it was always an internal force, deep within him, that could never wake up, take charge, make changes.

Or maybe none of this is true. It’s quite possible he didn’t have diabetes and his medical condition was something else entirely. Who knows?