The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, December 1, 2024

Notably: The top of the front page of the Sept. 25 edition of Le Temps, the Swiss daily, featured a story about the death by suicide of an unidentified 64-year-old American in the woods outside Schaffhouse near the German border. The American had slipped herself inside the Sarco, closed the lid, and a few minutes later, died. I don’t know why proponents and purveyors of assisted suicide choose such rudimentary means, or terminology, for their wares. Kevorkian and his strange VW bus, and now, The Sarco. The Sarco’s method isn’t the problem, but why call it that? Sarco is short for sarcophagus, a word most people outside of New Orleans or Levantine civilizations have no reason to know.  My idea of a sarcophagus is either the sumptuous Roman tombs of Tyr in Lebanon, or the more cryptic tombs of Christian influencers, like Thomas Moore’s in Canterbury. Maybe the name is not the point. The purpose is nobler than the name: to give an individual the ultimate right. We do not choose to be born. It should absolutely be our right to choose to die. The reasons, I think, are either secondary or none of others’ business: in the choice is the freedom to die without giving accounts. “The Sarco represents the future of dying,” The Last Resort, the organization that, well, birthed the Sarco, states on its website. The Sarco is a “A 3D-printed capsule that gives the user the ultimate control over the timing of her/his death. The Sarco works by lowering the level of oxygen in the capsule to lethal levels. The person inside breathes normally. Consciousness is lost within seconds. Death follows peacefully a few minutes later.” It takes an organization to make it happen (you can’t just buy a sarco, choose a nice spot in the woods and go. Well, you can, but someone has to pick up what remains.) So there is complicity, and therefore legalities. The inspiration for the Sarco was Tony Nicklinson, the Brit who died at 58 after suffering from “locked-in syndrome,” “an incurable condition in which a patient loses all motor functions but remains awake and aware, with all cognitive abilities. He had spent the last seven years paralyzed from the neck down and unable to speak, feed himself or even clean his own teeth, communicating through a system that allowed him to write messages on a computer screen by blinking his eyes,” according to the New York Times. British authorities had denied him the right to end his life. He died six days later. Dr Philip Nitschke got to work on the Sarco. What followed is summed up in a headline in the Independent: “Suicide machine that could be controlled by the blink of an eye sparks euthanasia debate.” Then, “The Last Resort was founded by a small international collective of human rights advocates.” Its director is Dr Florian Willet, who was present at the time of the American’s death in the Swiss woods. The woman was not charged except for the cost of the nitrogen used to kill her. Here’s the issue: Immediately afterward, Swiss authorities arrested Willet, because the Sarco was not lawful, even though assisted suicide is. As one paper describes it: “Switzerland seems to be the only country in which the law limits the circumstances in which assisted suicide is a crime, thereby decriminalising it in other cases, without requiring the involvement of a physician. Consequently, non-physicians have participated in assisted suicide. The law has explicitly separated the issue of whether or not assisting death should be allowed in some circumstances, from that of whether physicians should do it. This separation has not resulted in moral desensitisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia.” Willet has been in prison for 64 days. Allegations have emerged: strangulation marks around the American woman’s neck, though “The woman had skull base osteomyelitis, a rare bone infection that a source close to the Last Resort suggested may have caused the neck marks,” the London Times reported. The Last Resort called the allegation “ridiculous and absurd.” Before her death, the American woman is quoted as saying that her two grown-up children “completely agree that this is my decision — and they are behind me 100 per cent,” and described preparations for her death as a “wonderful” experience that was “easy and less traumatic than I expected.”

—P.T.