To die when you want

The obsession with death that exists from certain interpretations of religious creeds and now from the so-called ultra-agenda – more or less stale conservatism – is indeed worrying and revealing. According to Christian religion, we would be told that our life does not belong to us, and therefore it is not right to want to die or end it when we sensibly wish. Life is a kind of divine gift, of which we are only custodians, like a wonderful book that is not ours and which we must return more or less intact to the Librarian Above. This may be so, or it could be, but the truth is that we have no certainty that things respond to these parameters. In the end, God does not manifest himself, but priests do. 

We have separated law from faith, the church from the state, and we have done so because we have decided that individual autonomy must go to the extreme of being able to freely decide about one's own body, from abortion to the death that a person wishes to have at the moment they decide it, because they are tired of living or because they consider that the life they can have in a certain mental or physical state does not satisfy them. It is very surprising that economic conservatives, who desire so much freedom to be able to freely decide what they do with their money and businesses – and employees –, then want to interfere in these kinds of decisions, or even these ultras who deny domestic violence now become scandalized by freely decided death. Or perhaps it is that in no case has it been a matter of debating freedom, but rather power. If they defend freedom, it is because it allows them to exercise power without asking for explanations, but when they see that their power can end if the individual can escape this vale of tears, then they feel that their false freedom no longer makes sense, and they rage. 

There has been more scandal because a woman has decided to die freely than for dozens of women murdered by their partners (men), in this country. All of it is a phantasmagoria. Forms of irrationalism that, when they come from Catholic orthodoxy, might perhaps be understood, but not when they claim to derive from a set of ‘liberal’ ideas, or as if fascism were not also a management of death, especially that of others. And yet, there is still no right to die with dignity, but a regulated and limited right to ask for help to die, only when legal conditions are met, and a Guarantee and Evaluation Commission says yes. It would be good to start understanding together that life is just life, a transit, a stage, or even a set of fiscal exercises, and that death is as inevitable as taxes. The history of freedom is the history of individuals to make and unmake their lives above needs, tied as we are, still too often, by unstoppable duties. We should learn to die because it is also learning to live, to manage the time we have, attention, freedom, and pain. Democracy should also be that.