A Lover Of Life: It was a brave and deeply ethical thing that Lecretia Seales did. In a society that seems at times positively terrified of thinking seriously about anything, she invited us to shake off our more familiar roles as consumers, viewers, texters and takers of endless selfies, to become, if only for a little while, citizens.
LECRETIA SEALES has delivered into our hands a grim but
important legacy. Though her bid to have assisted death declared legal by a
judge of the High Court of New Zealand has failed; and though her tragic death
has rendered the issues she raised moot; Lecretia has not been defeated.
What she sought, in bringing her case to court, was a clear
statement of the legal principles relevant to assisted death and euthanasia, as
well as a setting forth of all the legal impediments to realising those
objectives. This she has achieved.
Judge Collins’ judgement has, quite correctly, declined
Lecretia’s invitation to legislate from the Bench, and handed over the
responsibility for resolving the stark challenges of euthanasia and medically
assisted dying to the people of New Zealand through their elected
representatives in Parliament.
The New Zealand constitution reserves to Parliament, as the
ultimate distillation of the people’s will, the right to frame and fashion the
laws that govern its citizens. Judge Collins was not about to overturn that
core constitutional convention, and it is likely that Lecretia never seriously
entertained the slightest hope that he would.
What this quiet and reportedly rather self-effacing woman
did understand, however, was that by bringing her case to court she would focus
the attention of the whole of New Zealand society upon her tragic circumstances
and the means she sought to prevent them from obliterating the person that she
was. Win or lose, she knew that her actions would require people to think about
and, hopefully, come to a decision about the rights and wrongs of the legal
changes she was proposing.
It was a brave and deeply ethical thing that Lecretia Seales
did. In a society that seems at times positively terrified of thinking
seriously about anything, she invited us to shake off our more familiar roles
as consumers, viewers, texters and takers of endless selfies, to become, if
only for a little while, citizens.
We have been asked to engage in a serious discussion about
the meaning of life and the experience of death. To test our own feelings about
when it might be acceptable to put aside the great commandment “Thou shalt not
kill”, in favour of the even greater exhortation to “Love thy neighbour as
thyself”.
For that is the calculation that Lecretia was forced, by her
illness, to make. Which self are we being asked to cherish? Is it our healthy
self; the self that showed the world the full extent of what it had to
contribute? Or, are we being asked to cherish with equal care a damaged and
agonised self; a self distorted by disease and pain? A self that presents only a
bitter parody of person it used to be?
If a human-being, in full possession of her faculties, and
facing the truth of her situation rationally and honestly, decides that she
wishes to exercise control over the way she takes leave of this world, who
dares claim the right to prevent her from doing so? In the past, the answer to
that question was, God. It was a sin for anyone other than God to take a human
life – even if that life was their own.
But New Zealanders decided long ago that, when it comes to
persons determined to take their own lives, God’s wishes need not be considered.
Suicide is legal. And, since that is the case, why should it be illegal for a
doctor to facilitate his or her patient’s decision to end their life at a time
of their own choosing?
Such is Lecretia’s legacy: the gift of choice. Either to accept
the duty of formulating a citizen’s judgement on the weighty matter of voluntary
euthanasia; or, to simply turn away and put off all consideration of life’s
meaning until the moment that Death’s dark hand knocks loudly upon our door.
Praying that when this dread summons finally comes, the person he carries off is still
recognisable to both our loved ones and ourselves.
In that, too, Lecretia left us a powerful and enduring
example.
This essay was posted
simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley
Road blogsites on Saturday, 6 June 2015.
