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September 18, 2014

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If we relegate death to science, what about one’s soul?

IN Gillian Bennett, I found the dignity of death.

When she decided to die on her own last month, unwilling to burden her family and society, death ceased to be dreadful. How courageous she was!

But was there more than courage? Was there hope in her mind for an eternal soul beyond death? In Peter Singer’s article, which focuses on her “rational and ethical” decision to end her life, I see no answer.

How I wished Gillian Bennett the Courageous had read John Donne’s line: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.” Few articles in memory of the courageous woman give any hint about what she really thought of death except for her secular considerations about no longer burdening others.

Are life and death simply a matter of mathematical calculation of costs and benefits?

Says Peter Singer: “Bennett’s developing dementia deprived her of all of the reasons for wanting to continue to live. That makes it hard to deny that her decision was both rational and ethical. By committing suicide, she was giving up nothing that she wanted, or could reasonably value. ‘All I lose is an indefinite number of years of being a vegetable in a hospital setting, eating up the country’s money but having not the faintest idea of who I am.’ Bennett’s decision was also ethical because, as the reference to ‘the country’s money’ suggests, she was not thinking only of herself.”

I don’t know what was really on her mind, but in Peter Singer’s article, I see a Gillian Bennett lost in “rational and ethical” consideration of costs and benefits. Although her courage to die commands unconditional salute from every soul, her death and our memorial words partake of crude Darwinism: survival of the fittest —­ if you’re no longer “fit” for living, die.

In Bennett’s courageous mind, was there a bit of regret? We are not sure.

To die or not to die, that’s not the question.

The question is how to die: with or without regret?

A Darwinist won’t bother to ask this question, but this is the ultimate question for every living and dying soul.

To a Darwinist, life is reduced only to so-called science, and the meaning of life must be mathematically measurable. But in the great debate between Darwinism and Christianity in America in the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan said: “Man is indefinitely more than science.” In “Summer for the Gods,” a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, author Edward J. Larson wrote: “As Bryan had warned, Darwin’s dreadful law of hate was replacing the Bible’s divine law of love as the origin of humanity.”

There was no hate in Bennett’s case of unassisted suicide, for sure, but Peter Singer’s analysis and other similar analyses offer us no clue as to whether the venerable woman died a death with regret or not.

All we know is that she decided she HAD TO go — be it for herself or for others.

After reading related memorial articles of our beloved Bennett, I cannot but regret her departure.

For all her “rational and ethical” thoughts about ending her life, I feel sorry for the fact that science could not allay her — and our — fears for dementia.




 

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