Exit Scratching Head

The mystery of modern day death merchants continues to confound me. On the front page of yesterday’s National Post we find featured Australian right-to-die doctor, Philip Nitschke, who is in Toronto holding seminars on proper protocols for wrapping a plastic bag around your head for a truly effective suicide. Additional information is available from Dr. Nitschke on the precise combination of pills to take to make your self-administered death a piece of cake.

Now, this is conundrum number one. Dr. Nitschke calls his do-it-to-yourself instructional sessions Safe Exit workshops. His most successful clients end up dead. So how, exactly, are the dead safe? Are they safely dead? Or deadly safe? How can one be dead and safe at the same time given that when one is dead, one is no longer around to be safe?

And so to head-scratcher number two. What is this aspiration in the death retail sector for fastidious neatness at the time of expiration? What is this fetish for putting yourself in a plastic bag first before the coroner comes to put you in a rubber case? Put another way, why do Dr. Nitschke and his kind not give equal advisory time on how to acquire an illegal handgun prior to blowing the back of your head off or, if etiquette remains the main concern, how to properly grip a snub-nosed .38 between your teeth in a manner that would meet Emily Post's approval?

The third, and the most compelling mystery of all, is how we as a culture have come to swallow whole the sanitized, death-merchant lie that death itself can be somehow made dignified. When you die, you crap your pants. Your bladder empties of its own accord. Some poor schlub has to come and cart your bag of guts, as well as your dainty little plastic bag, away.

Humans throughout our existence as a species have always known that death, when it comes, is messy. There's no escape hatch, no safe exit, from that reality. It is just one of the myriad of reasons we have always sought to engage in the mystery of life for as long as we possibly can.