Ben Blushi writes about the suicide of an acquaintance with cancer: Every vice is legalized here, why not euthanasia

By Ben Blushi

A man I have known for 30 years killed himself. A few months ago, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After many efforts, writhing tortures, and sleepless nights, he decided to attack the tumor with tubes and knives, make an intervention that added to his suffering, and finally take away his hope.

When he came off the anesthesia, the doctors told him he probably had no more than two weeks to live. They brought him home crippled, halved, bruised, weak, undone, and so helpless that his wife and daughter fed, washed, lifted and rocked him like a baby every time they cleaned him. As soon as he realized that this disgusting service process would continue until the last day of his life, he took the pistol and killed himself. He had been a policeman.

He ran away, protecting his dignity and sparing his wife and children a pain they will never get over. Stripped of vital functions, he had only one thing left in his hand: not to be dispossessed. By killing himself, he freed himself from the clutches and iron fists of metastases and saved the people he loved from a breathing skeleton as he had been catapulted.

I admire this man. He found the strength to end his life when it became an atrocity.

Before he left, he paid all his debts and his funeral bill. He went daily to the grave, which he had been preparing for months. He watered it, beautified it, fixed it, organized it, planted it with flowers, and rubbed the white plate with his name on it. In the cemetery, he probably had time to get to know the neighbors with whom he will now spend the rest of his death and befriended his gravediggers by drinking a coffee without sugar and perhaps leaving a tip to give him a good burial.

When I imagine how he took the gun and saw the sun for the last time, I try to get into the head of a man who knows he is dying. What thoughts can someone have who leaves home every day and goes to his grave just like he goes to work? There, he talks to himself, cries, laments, hates, pity, remembers, forgets, forgives, and gets upset about the things he couldn't do without being happy about what he did and how he does today.

The reason why I am writing these lines is not the pain for the one who is gone but for those like him who are still alive. Terminal patients sent to hospitals are turned into biological waste that neither feels, tastes, nor moves but vegetates. These people who have no fault for their situation, apart from living in hell, are also the hell of those who love and love them. Nothing is worse than when those who love you only want to get rid of you. Here, death has won its first great victory. It took their compassion before partially taking the body, mind, and soul.

Most of these patients pray every day to die. But they don't know how. If they had the chance and the courage, they would have killed themselves just like my friend, but unfortunately, they have neither the courage nor the chance. Lying in beds from which they no longer get up, they cannot go into the street to buy a gun and kill themselves. Then who saves them from life? Who ends their lives senselessly?

Countries that have separated from church traditions, according to which life can only be taken by the one who gave it, i.e., God, are solving this dilemma in favor of man. They think more about man's pain than God's. They have approved euthanasia or assisted dying, which allows hopeless patients to choose to die when they want to die because they can no longer because science can no longer.

The state allows and helps you to die. You don't need to look for a gun, jump out of the window, cut your veins, or get ugly and deformed by violating your dignity. You can die with permission and with the help of the state. A syringe filled with liquid is enough to put you to sleep and never wake up again. A group of doctors approves the procedure prescribed by law, and your life is ended peacefully. Between you and death, there is compromise. There is understanding.

Since Albania is gradually turning into an Ultraliberal Republic, which allows by law most human vices, including smoking, betting, and gambling, without talking about the vices it tolerates without law, then why not also allow sweet death? Should hopeless patients have the right to ask the state to kill them when they can no longer? Why should people kill themselves when they can ask for this service from the state, to which they pay taxes to live better and die better?

Should euthanasia be legalized?

How sweet and life-saving euthanasia would be for my policeman friend and his family, who today are probably traumatized by the gun that took his father's life. In the provinces of Albania, as everywhere else, suicide is unfortunately prejudiced and called a low act, an anomaly. Of course, suicide is a surrender, but in my friend's case, it is a compulsion. A rescue. It is a dignified solution that he had nowhere else to look for. Nature, science, the state, and God abandoned him. They left him alone. They betrayed him. Therefore, he found the solution as a robust, rational, and intelligent being. Of course, he wouldn't if the state helped him die through euthanasia. Through the sweet death, many people look forward to and certainly long deserve.