Can you blame them? The housing association where the Swiss assisted suicide organization Dignitas maintains a death apartment, has evicted the group because other residents are sick of the suicide parade.It is a familiar sight for the residents of Zurich’s Getrud Strasse number 84. Three or four times a week, during office hours, an ambulance pulls up in front of the unassuming dirty grey housing block. A body is carried out of the building in a charcoal-coloured sack. Often the tenants meet it propped up vertically in the lift on the way down, or in the narrow corridor, before it is placed in the vehicle and driven away.
What a surrealistic scene—perhaps even more than Kevorkian helping extinguish people in his rusty van.
Yet as awful as that depiction is, the reaction of one of the tenents is, to me, even more disturbing:
Gloria Sonny, 55, who has lived in the building for six years - or, as she calls it, “under the same roof as death”—headed a petition calling for Dignitas to go. “I’m not against assisted suicide,” she said, “but this is a place where people live. It’s the wrong place to help people die. I don’t see why I should pay with the quality of my life because Switzerland deals with the topic in a more liberal way than other countries.”How twisted we have become: Sure, go ahead and help kill them, just don’t make me have to look. For someone my age, who remembers society’s once unequivocal support forShe said the building smelt of death and that she suffered nightmares that she would be forced into one of the “death flats” against her will and made to drink a fatal cocktail.
suicide prevention rather than facilitation, this whole story is almost unimaginable. But the times they are a changing, as Dylan had it, and not necessarily for the better. Unless we reject the terminal nonjudmentalism—illustrated so vividly by Ms. Sonny—that is increasingly permeating society, one day cities might begin issuing zoning permits for euthanasia clinics—think E.G. Robinson going “home” in Soylent Green. After all, it isn’t the killing that is wrong: It is the poor aesthetics. You have a decision to make: double or nothing.
For this week only, a generous supporter has offered to fully match all new and increased donations to First Things up to $60,000.
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So what will it be, dear reader: double, or nothing?
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