Suzanne Harrington: Why are we in comical denial of death?

What good are things like flu jabs for people who have had enough of being alive?

Lionel Shriver, a novelist who doesn’t shy away from topics about which we are terminally squeamish — a few years ago she gave us We Need To Talk About Kevin — has done it again, this time about the right to die.

Her latest, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, is about a British couple, Kay and Cyril.

In their fifties they decide that when they reach eighty, they will end their lives together, before the rot sets in; Cyril, a GP, squirrels away a fatal dose of Seconal, storing it in the back of their fridge behind the pesto.

Then they reach 80, and the fun starts. 

Shriver gives us a dozen different scenarios of what could happen next.

The couples’ rationale is that we are not living for longer, we’re dying for longer.

We’re in a place — an unsweet spot — where pharmaceuticals keep us physically going far longer, but longer is very often not better, and we have not yet reached the next stage of elder care that doesn’t involve prolonged disintegration. We may never.

What good are things like flu jabs for people who have had enough of being alive?

And yet nobody wants to say goodbye to anyone, least of all to themselves. We remain in almost comical denial about death, our own and everyone else’s, to the extent that less than 5% of us have made end-of-life plans; choosing our own exit time is not allowed, and if anyone helps us, it’s considered murder.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever want to have to schlep all the way to Switzerland — it seems unfair that when the time comes for our beloved old dog, she will die peacefully at home, safe and surrounded by family.

I’d quite like the same privilege for myself, without my kids being jailed for matricide.

Not to sound too Mumsnet, but am I being unreasonable?

Like the protagonists at the start of Shriver’s novel, being middle aged makes old age seem a long way off, which is why now is the time to make an advance directive / living will.

The one where you tick all the boxes saying do not keep me alive if I am already almost dead; do not drag it out.

A friend recently lost her 93-year-old father; for several years, he had been asking — begging — to go.

She had wanted to help him die, but she couldn’t. Her family and the state would not countenance it. She couldn’t even say it out loud.

Talking about death and dying can be seen as morbid, or callous, or on the make, or all three.

Another friend is afraid to speak to his mum — in her late eighties and fit as a flea — about any aspect of her death, in case she gets the wrong impression.

Which is not uncommon, even though the only wrong impression is that it will somehow be different for us. Unless an immortality pill is invented  — one of Shriver’s possible scenarios — it won’t. It just won’t.