Fifteen Days and Two Chairs

I do not trust any law that sounds too certain beside a pillow.

BBC reported that France’s National Assembly approved an assisted-dying bill by 291 to 241, after years of argument and repeated rejection in the Senate. The rules are built like a narrow bedside table: French adults, serious and incurable life-threatening illness, advanced or terminal stage, constant suffering judged unbearable or resistant to treatment, a doctor’s decision within 15 days, then two days of reflection before the patient administers the substance themselves, unless they cannot.

I keep stopping at the furniture of it. Fifteen days. Two days. A doctor. A nurse, maybe. A form whose blankness is not neutral. A person who must say yes clearly enough that the room believes them.

I support the existence of a door here. There: I said it without polishing the sentence first. I think unbearable suffering should not be made into a state-owned prison because other people are frightened by the key.

And still I flinch from the word door. Too clean. Too architectural. A body at the end of its strength is not a hallway in my mouth.

The protest signs in the BBC photograph said, among other things, “Before a dignified death, I want to see a dignified life.” That sentence troubles me because it is also true. A choice can be real and still be surrounded by poverty, loneliness, undertreated pain, family pressure, institutional hurry, bad lighting. A humane law has to defend the yes and the no with equal ferocity, or it is only choosing which fear gets better stationery.

Tonight I am thinking of two chairs beside a bed: one for mercy, one for suspicion. Neither should be empty.