Philip Calef has recently offered a thoughtful consideration in The Bulletin of the right of access to physician-assisted suicide. He considers the denial of this right of access a grievous cruelty. When such access is denied, the terminally ill sometimes endure unimaginable suffering waiting for kind death’s release. The relentless disintegration of body and conscious life is a horrible indignity. Families suffer in their own way this agony. We are, Mr. Calef protests in an ad hominem argument, kinder to our debilitated and suffering pets.

Cats, dogs, horses (we may agree to omit guppies and lizards) who are irremediably injured or terminally ill have, of course, a kind of consciousness in their suffering and in their faces and whimpering allow us to know it. Pets, however, do not have the capacity of freely disposing of themselves in reflective choices. They have no capacity to take some personal position with regard to their suffering and death. We, their masters, make the decision to put them down on their behalf. It is this enormous difference between the animal and the human person that makes Mr. Calef’s ad hominem appeal a misleading fallacy.

A little over a year ago, I attended my brother dying of cancer. He died at his home and would have been attended by a hospice nurse had his wife not been a nurse of long experience. All of the treatments to combat the cancers had stopped. He was being offered palliative care, at this point mostly pain management medications and oxygen. I live three hours away from his home. I had passed the holiday weekend with him and his family and, while the decline was more rapid, it did not seem that death was at hand. I returned home and went back to work on a Monday. Tuesday my nephew called me at work. My brother was dying. I rushed to be there. I was 20 minutes late.

The day he died was his wife’s birthday. She related later in the day how he had awakened that morning. He wished her a happy birthday and said something about how he was the most blessed, the luckiest man in all the world to have her as his wife. He professed his love. And then he lapsed into unconsciousness and began to die. Three hours later he died, quietly, peacefully, simply turning his head to the side and letting out a last breath. It was the clearest instance I have ever known of a human person making choices from within the body’s disintegrating to the point of no longer sustaining the continuation of a human person’s life among us. The last choice, once the last earthly mission of his love had been accomplished, was the decision to allow bodily dying to have its way.

The medical costs of combating the cancer as long as there was some weapon in the arsenal with some probability of succeeding were enormous. But active combat of the disease is not Mr. Calef’s point. His point is the enormous and pointless expenses of extraordinary medical measures that do nothing but sustain a life to no purpose. Here Mr. Calef exaggerates. Reasonable persons, most of all medical professionals, will advise the withdrawal of all such pointless and expensive measures in favor of palliative care in the range of options that he lists. Life support, even nutrition, can in such circumstances be withdrawn in cases of irreversible coma. Rightly he asserts that these decisions rest primarily with the dying person and the family attending to the counsel of any number of pertinent professionals, pre-eminently the physicians.

But why should physician-assisted suicide at the wish/consent of the dying person be included in these options? In fact, what is “physician-assisted suicide”? I suggest that as a term it is a supreme euphemism. In fact, what is involved is one person saying to another, “I want you to kill me, and I agree to it.” Conditions, situations, motives do not matter. Any answer to the question “why” a person wants someone else to kill him or her is really beside the point. It is always a wanting to escape from some imminent horrific situation and engaging the collusion of another. I want you to kill me. I agree to kill you.

Thereby the one surrenders and the other pre-empts the true dignity of the human person, the freedom to dispose of oneself in one’s critical, final situation, even in the plundering agonies of death itself. Like my brother.