Assisted Dying as Intimate Care

Abstract

How does asking loved ones to help you die, to help you commit suicide, bend the limits of our relationships and perhaps of care itself? This paper traces the aesthetic and affective considerations of those deciding to die resist against depersonalizing experiences of medical care. Focusing on ethnographic interviews with members of the British right-to die group My Death My Decision, I explore how individuals recruit loved ones and doctors to actively participate in their death through “assistance”. This paper will specifically focus on what this assistance looks, or perhaps more accurately, feels like. It will question if the desire for an assisted death in which bodies, actions, and decisions touch and are touched by one another is a demand which exceeds the boundaries of “care”. My Death My Decision is campaigning to legalize assisted suicide based on a belief that the individual knows when it’s their time to die, regardless of a terminal diagnosis. One member, Pat, has decided that when the time comes, she will travel from London to a euthanasia center in Switzerland where, surrounded by loved ones, she can receive a “kind death” from doctors that care. Unlike colloquial uses of care, here, Pat references a relationship which is not defined by medical interventions to elongate life. This paper argues that presence and touch – both physical and emotional – can produce communal practices and ethics of care which challenge traditional expectations of biomedicine.