‘The flight to Zurich sounds like the worst mini-break

We should be able to die at home, and before we lose our minds to dementia, the writer argues

When the distinguished Belgian writer Hugo Claus was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he emailed his friends to say that when the disease had advanced to the point that he would be soon unable to make decisions, he would end his life. Accordingly, in March 2008, he died at a legal Belgian facility. The Catholic church naturally condemned his action. Whereas the former prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, not always a man for the striking phrase, said that the onset of Alzheimer’s must have been “an inevitable and unbearable torture”, and went on: “I can live with the fact that he decided thus, because he left us as a great glowing star, right on time, just before he collapsed into a stellar black hole.” Claus’s actions struck me, and still do, as rational, exemplary, and in a quiet way, heroic.

The religious generally argue that God has given us life, and so it is not ours to dispose of as and when we see fit. The non-religious, who guess that we have arrived by some piece of cosmic chance, are more inclined to think that as autonomous beings, it is our right and duty to live according to our own lights and, in extreme circumstances, to control the manner of our own death. With increasing longevity, plus medical advances that keep us alive well beyond the point where in previous centuries we would have died, complex problems arise for individuals, doctors and society at large.