The ‘Good Death’ versus ‘Euthanasia”

Extract

We pray for a good death and a perfect end in every service of Compline. When is death (thanatos) good (eu-) ? Every man must answer this according to his definition of goodness. Does goodness depend merely on the absence of pain in the sufferer or of grief in the spectators? Death is such a negative subject that to make it good one must see some positive content of love, compassion, even bravery and perhaps immortality set around it, within it and beyond it. Only then is death euthanatos (the good death).

Dictionaries define euthanasia as ‘gentle easy death’, but euthanasia is a euphemism which like a shroud hides the reality. When the sprightly old lady died in her sleep no one would call it euthanasia, but it is. If a man had a stroke and sank slowly and gently without pain to death in a couple of days and the doctor gave only one brandy, no one would accuse him of assisting euthanasia.