‘They killed her last night’

Could euthanasia make a useful companion to elder abuse?

Paul Russell | May 30 2017 | comment

I imagine that our headline grabbed your attention - as it did mine when playwright, Michael Griffiths phoned me with this news the morning after opening night in the Melbourne season of his play: The Magnolia Tree.

The promotional statement for the play says it all:

This gripping play has two endings, and at the completion of Act 2, the audience vote for the one they think is appropriate.
A family has come together to choose a nursing home for their mother. She has Alzheimer’s. Jack wants them to let her go, tonight, and he has brought the means to do it. Jack will be so convincing that you may find yourself not only being persuaded into thinking that his way is right, but wondering whether this is a new morality struggling to evolve. On the other hand you may feel that this is just good old evil, hidden in the sheepskin of logic.
Let her go? Place her in a home? You decide.

And so I went to see the play with some trepidation, expecting to be challenged and wondering at the dark nature of the plot and the three characters whom the audience directs either to a sinister or benign outcome.

Let's be clear at this point. While this is about euthanasia, it is not about euthanasia as we commonly understand it. After all, there was no possibility of consent. Euthanasia, as discussed in the media and in legislation, suggests that 'voluntariness' is intrinsic to the definition; it is not. The characteristic that separates euthanasia from murder is that the act was committed for 'compassionate reasons', usually implying that the deceased had a significant illness. So-called 'voluntary euthanasia' is actually a sub-category.

The play opens with a discussion between the three siblings about placing their demented mother in a nursing home. As the dialogue develops we learn bit-by-bit about the dark past of each of the characters. The discussion soon turns to the inevitable subject: money. To be precise, the cost of the nursing home and the consequent decimation of the inheritance.

We learn something about the two sisters. One is in serious financial difficulties and dreams of a way out; the other wants a new life, leaving behind 11 years of caring for her mother. Both, we learn, see benefits from the mother's estate as the means to their own ends; an estate that would be eaten up almost entirely by the nursing home.

The son seems far more cool and calculating. We are left to wonder at his motivation. Is he being honest when he says he wants to be rid of him mother for her sake and for the sake of his sisters, or is there something else going on?

The brilliant script by Griffiths in exploring the intersection between extant and 'emerging' morality, as he puts it, sees each character, at various moments, seemingly holding the moral high ground. Yet, in each, we see serious dysfunction. We wonder at its origins and see glimpses of it in the unfolding history of the poor choices and habits of the sisters.

I was never going to put my hand up for the murder of the mother. Yet I did gain a worthwhile insight into how difficult decisions about nursing home care can become a major family feud. It is understandable that emotions will run high and also understandable that the 'filthy lucre' elephant-in-the-room will always be lurking somewhere nearby.

More than that, I think Griffiths' work here explodes the idea that euthanasia and assisted suicide decisions are somehow made with clinically managed, hermetically sealed purity, free from the nuance of dysfunction and hidden agendas that exist in every family. Certainly, the mother in this play was not able to consent; but I wonder, even if she had been lucid enough to say 'yes' to her own demise, whether the influences of her three children could have coloured her 'choice'. Would she have had the strength and clarity given the intensity of these 'competing interests' to say 'no'?

June 15 is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. Elder abuse is often about the money. Last night I saw a graphic representation of the ultimate in elder abuse.

To be fair, as Michael Griffiths explained, 'life' came out on top in the majority of audiences over the last week or so of the play's run at La Mama Theatre in Melbourne. Some audiences laughed a lot through the 70-minute presentation while others, including the night I saw it, were stunned at the intensity and gravity of the subject.

But there's a mirror here to the way our society treats our elders generally. Nursing homes are continually in the press for mistreatment, poor standards, low staffing levels and actual abuse of their charges. Tight government budgets and shareholder demands for returns put more and more pressure on the bottom line. No wonder that the question of 'being a burden' is so acutely felt by many of our elders as seen graphically in the use of the 'burden' meme as a negative purchase impulse in TV advertisements for funeral insurance.

Griffiths asks whether this phenomenon is a new and emerging morality. I doubt it. While elder abuse or 'inheritance impatience' as it is often called, is a growing and worrisome phenomenon, such questions will have been around since ever anyone owned property. What concerns me deeply is that the passage of a euthanasia or assisted suicide law would only increase the sense of being a burden felt by our vulnerable elders while also providing an opportunity for subtle and not-so-subtle suggestion and pressure in the knowledge that there exists a new, legal and lethal solution.

Paul Russell is director of HOPE: preventing euthanasia & assisted suicide, which is based in Australia. This article has been edited and republished with permission.

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May 30, 2017

Somebody has to stand up for Tiger Woods. No one else has, so I will.

He was arrested last night and charged with driving under the influence. A mug shot of the golf legend appeared in newspapers and website across the globe: his eyes puffy, his hairline receding, his face unshaven, his expression glum. Sports journalists are eager to chip in with personal advice: “Tiger Woods needs to focus on his life, not golf” etc.

I’m not going to psychoanalyse Tiger. He wrecked his career with the revelation of serial infidelity and his marriage break-up in 2009. Then came ill-health, operations, prescription drugs, a dying career. But it’s not true that he has only himself to blame.

Celebrities like Tiger Woods hold up a mirror to society. Real investigative journalists would ask not only how to whip Tiger into shape, but how to heal the society in which he lives.

His life derailed when his marriage failed. But what chance did he have of combining the life of a happy husband and dad and a career as a celebrity if the culture around him is toxic to the very idea of traditional marriage? He had been taught how to be a celebrity, but not how to be a responsible family man.

Now that he is divorced and separated from his kids, Tiger is reprising the life of many divorced men: slovenly, miserable, unhappy and unhealthy. He just happens to have a lot more money than they could ever dream of.

We ought to feel sorry for this shattered idol. Sure, he is the captain of his fate, but he has been sailing with a faulty compass and falsified charts. No wonder his life is close to being shipwrecked.